Our exploration of American education history continues. Be sure to read the first installment as well: Remarkable Facts About U.S. Schooling (Pt. 1): Patriotism, Girls, Crime, & Anti-Capitalism.
When ideas of women’s nature somehow led to both oppression and new career opportunities
In the early to mid-1800s, women saw “equal education in the common schools, an expansion of educational opportunity for them in women’s seminaries, academies, and normal schools, and an expansion of employment opportunities in the teaching force…without ostensibly altering the patriarchal structure” of education or society (Urban, American Education, p. 101). Most occupations, all colleges, and some subjects were not for women (Nash, Women’s Education in the United States, p. 50-51). Indeed, things were loosened but not dislodged.
Ideologically, this was an interesting moment in American gender history. In Pillars of the Republic, Carl Kaestle notes some of the opposition to female teachers, and how perceived problems were solved. There existed notions of women’s “inability to teach higher subjects” (p. 123), and thus women’s expanding professional role was limited to younger children in common schools. There was concern over women being able to discipline and “control rowdy older male pupils,” but that was solved by the development of hierarchy and administration and institutions with bigger staffs — schools would have female teachers but male supervisors and principal teachers, who would be in charge and could deal with troublemaking older boys (p. 123, 125). Women saw real advancements, but the patriarchal society, in its usual way, placed limits upon them based on perceptions of their nature. What’s interesting is that perceptions of women’s nature at the same time fueled those real professional advancements, with ideas of women’s nurturing, mothering constitutions making them ideal for teaching young children (p. 123-124). It is perhaps rare to see ideologies of a male-dominant society work to create new professional and personal freedoms for women, alongside and in concert with the standard subjugation.
When the idea that schools created citizens spelled disaster for black people
In Schooling Citizens, historian Hilary Moss argues that the ideology that powered the rise of common schools in the early 1800s also worked to exclude African Americans from these institutions. Moss sees a “paradox” in the fact that “public schooling and white opposition to African American education expanded simultaneously” (p. 3-4). While this may not be the purest of paradoxes, as the United States regularly saw the growth of institutions and opportunities from which people of color were predictably excluded, Moss’ thesis is interesting because it suggests common school ideology inherently and inadvertently set the stage for racial segregation in education.
Common schools were intended to inculcate in students a “common set of values” and form a “national identity” — children would “become American” (p. 4). Schools created citizens. But this forced a decision, conscious or otherwise, about black Americans. To open the doors to black students would be to acknowledge their American-ness, their inclusion in the national family, their citizenship and associated rights. This would not do. “By advancing an argument for universal education that privileged citizenship,” Moss writes, “school reformers inadvertently reinforced efforts to deny black people access to public schooling…” Indeed, “by invoking civic inclusion…to promote public education, they implicitly justified denying” black involvement (p. 4). Blacks were not citizens, and shouldn’t be, therefore you had to crack down on their education, as schooling was now linked to citizenship. Cities like New Haven, Connecticut, which had previously tolerated it, saw legal and vigilante efforts to crush black education in the late 1820s and 1830s (p. 18-19), during the rise of the common school. White openness to black learning in general and participation in integrated schools in particular diminished. Moss notes that segregation in education and attacks on black self-improvement occurred as part of a larger early nineteenth-century effort to expel blacks from public life, deny them citizenship, and link American-ness with whiteness; common school ideology is not marked as the singular cause of all this, rather it “reinforced” and represented a key part of these trends (p. 11-13).
On the other side of the coin, the reformist link between schooling and citizenship made, for black activists, abolitionists, and others, the entry of black children into public schools even more important, as citizenship, national inclusion, and equal rights could then be claimed and made reality (p. 4-5). Involvement in public schools was “symbolic” of and “symbiotic” with citizenship, true belonging (p. 193), to white segregationists and black advocates alike.
Moss examines education and racial conflict in New Haven, Boston, and Baltimore during this era. Baltimore did not feature public schooling, integrated or otherwise, for black children, but tolerated black-run private schools better, Moss argues, because slavery ensured blacks had little chance of earning citizenship and its rights (plus, black education benefited white employers). New Haven and Boston, in the free North, did offer public schools for black children, but, without the controlling and protective mechanism of slavery, employed more violence and legal weaponry against black self-improvement and integrated schools to keep the black population in line and deny it citizenship (p. 5-6, 68, 192-193).
Moss provides a diversity of primary sources to show what local African American education and the challenges to it looked like, often comparing and overlaying such sources to offer intriguing insights and support her argument. Take, for example, a chapter on segregation in Boston (“Chapter Five: Race, Space, and Educational Opportunity”). In 1834, white Bostonians on Southack Street petitioned the city not to establish a new black schoolhouse near their homes, complaining of falling property values and neighborhood decay and crime (p. 139). Yet Moss uses an 1844 city map to mark where the signers of the Southack Street petition actually lived, discovering a good number lived blocks away. Moss theorizes these white homeowners did not want to see black children walking down their street on their way to school, and perhaps were uncomfortable with the geographic height of the school, which would sit on a hill, triggering associations with rising black social status (p. 145). Moss, in contrasting different sources, uncovers an attempt to “lay claim to space and in the process to mark people of color as outsiders and noncitizens” (p. 130) — African Americans do not belong, nor deserve the literal or philosophical higher station a new school would provide.
When tragic, twisted motives somehow prompted racial integration
In the late nineteenth century, the United States sought to do something about Native American tribes on reservations. Rogue nations within U.S. borders would not do — better to get them off the land, absorbing them into white society and wiping out their cultures through education. It was education that would assimilate Native Americans, Americanize them. Here, unlike the case of blacks and segregation cited above, education and its Americanizing, citizen-making purpose spurred racial integration! Has integration ever been based upon such troubling motives?
Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle School, and others wanted Native Americans “among the whites” (Official Report of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities and Correction, 1892). They would work and live together (the “Land in Severalty Bill” should let “two or three white families come between two Indian families”).
Integration would have a “civilizing” influence. “The Indians under our care remained savage, because forced back upon themselves and away from association with English-speaking and civilized people, and because of our savage example and treatment of them… We have never made any attempt to civilize them with the idea of taking them into the nation, and all of our policies have been against citizenizing and absorbing them.” Pratt compares this to the black experience, which involved more sustained contact with whites: “Left in Africa, surrounded by their fellow-savages, our seven millions of industrious black fellow-citizens would still be savages. Transferred into these new surroundings and experiences, behold the result. They became English-speaking and civilized, because forced into association with English-speaking and civilized people…”
(Pratt believed environment, not biology, caused inferiority. Carlisle students could “show by their conduct and ability that the Indian is no different from the white or the colored.” And: “It is a great mistake to think that the Indian is born an inevitable savage. He is born a blank, like all the rest of us. Left in the surroundings of savagery, he grows to possess a savage language, superstition, and life. We, left in the surroundings of civilization, grow to possess a civilized language, life, and purpose. Transfer the infant white to the savage surroundings, he will grow to possess a savage language, superstition, and habit. Transfer the savage-born infant to the surroundings of civilization, and he will grow to possess a civilized language and habit.”)
Pratt’s plan was integration to achieve cultural eradication. See how it went in Indoctrination and Knowledge: Native American Youth in the Federal Boarding Schools.
When “progressive education” meant a million different things
Progressive reformers wished to change the operations of public schools to meet various needs in the changing society of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These needs (and proposed solutions) were at times contradictory (Urban, 171-172). James W. Fraser argues in The School in the United States that progressive education “meant so many things” to so many different reformers “that it is a virtually meaningless term” (p. 215). Trying to figure out how to organize and categorize progressive reformers is a real challenge.
Fraser offers five subgroups (p. 216) that all wore the progressive label. The administrative progressives sought to shift power from schools and neighborhood boards to centralized municipal school boards made up of the wisest citizens, to standardize education, make it more effective, and address corruption (see also Urban, 173). The second subgroup, militant teachers, wanted the opposite, seeking more control over their own work, employing their own practices to meet student needs, plus better pay and smaller classes (see also Fraser, 222-223). Child-centered curriculum reformers, the third classification, sought to bring active learning, projects, and democracy into the classroom to make learning more interesting and prepare students for democratic participation, a philosophy that also countered administrative prescriptions and systemization. Testing advocates focused on the scientific measurement of student abilities and progress, using this to determine how students were then educated. Finally, there was a subgroup that pushed for teachers to help end capitalism and other social ills, and create a better society, by molding the next generation.
David Tyack, in The One Best System, takes the “diverse reformers, philosophies, and practices” to which progressivism was “loosely applied” and places them in two broad categories (p. 196-197). Administrative progressives consolidated and centralized power, were concerned with “social control” rather than the “individual development of students,” and comprised an “elitist philosophy and constituency” favoring a “corporate model” for education. But Tyack’s pedagogical progressives focused on the development of students. The emphasis was on active learning, “meet[ing] individual needs,” differentiated curricula, the “individual self-expression of the child,” democracy in the classroom, cooperative learning, and so on. Tyack somewhat separates pedagogical progressivism (driven by John Dewey and the “philosophers, psychologists, and curriculum theorists in schools of education” who supported him) from two ideological movements. There was a “libertarian wing” of education reformers that sought student growth and expression free from the repression of traditional schooling, and a “social reconstructionist” wing that sought student growth in “left-liberal ideology,” which would help “undermine the capitalistic system.” But as these groups shared the focus of the pedagogical folks — developing students, as opposed to the management focus of the administrative progressives — they can perhaps be included under the umbrella of pedagogical progressives.
Both of these frameworks are helpful in understanding progressive education and its diverse meanings, and they are similar enough to fit well together. Tyack’s administrative progressives category could include Fraser’s administrative progressives and perhaps testing advocates, who were concerned with organizing students into the appropriate grades based on mental ability (Fraser, 243-244). Perhaps this meets the needs of each student, but it is clearly systemization, and Fraser notes these scientific-minded reformers were skeptical of education actually changing students or societies (p. 216). Tyack’s pedagogical progressives could include Fraser’s child-centered curriculum reformers, the anti-capitalist visionaries, and perhaps militant teachers, who, again, wanted more control to meet student needs, were against the centralization of the administrative types, and were constructing a better world of their own by organizing for better working conditions and equal pay.
Potentially, the types of progressive reformers could be organized along lines of political ideology. In American Education, Urban cites Tyack’s two categories and folds them into the broader progressivism of the age that featured a conservative tendency seeking social order and a liberal tendency seeking social justice; the administrative progressives were more conservative, the pedagogical progressives more liberal (p. 171-172, 187). Note how the social order versus social justice frame reinforces how Tyack and Fraser’s typologies fit together above, with two categories having to do with social order and three with social justice. Top-down versus bottom-up control would also be a useful framing of progressive types.
Fraser (p. 216) hints at another way to organize reforms: by whether the primary focus or concern is on administrators, teachers, or students. In this case, you could have three categories. Administrative progressives and testing advocates could fall under administrators, militant teachers under teachers, and child-centered curriculum reformers and new society radicals under students. As for Tyack, administrative types go under administrators, and the pedagogical types must be broken up between teachers and students (like elsewhere, there is flexibility as to how — for example, is building a new society more a focus on the teachers who teach or the learners who learn?).
When differentiation kept the poor in their place
Tyack (p. 195-196) states that reformers in the late 1800s and early 1900s, like John Dewey, believed “‘meeting the needs of children’ and ‘cooperation’ distinguished the new education from the old,” and that these ideas were key components of progressive education. Tyack cites Cincinnati schools conducting the “radical experiment of trusting…principals and teachers to adapt the curriculum to the children.” The opposite of the old method. However, the wealthy suburban schools shaped their curricula in different ways than poor schools in factory districts — the latter set up a manual training program to prepare students for factory and domestic work (the school was also involved in neighborhood improvements though). In this instance we see that meeting the needs of children simply meant reinforcing social class. The poor work in factories, better educate poor children to work in factories. Urban, on pages 176 and 179, offers more on differentiation, how it was a shift away from the common school idea of equal education for all, and how your class and color determined what curriculum or track you experienced: academic, commercial, or vocational. Meeting student needs and differentiating curricula could be a positive thing in this period, but had a dark side as well.
In terms of experimentation and implementation, it seems clear Dewey’s child-centered philosophy didn’t advance very far into the public schools (Urban, 191, 195; Tyack, 197). The new pedagogy mostly appeared in experimental schools, such as the one Dewey established at the University of Chicago (Urban, 189). Tyack notes (p. 197) that Dewey’s book highlighting teachers using his child-centered approach featured teachers from small, private schools. Because the method “demanded substantial autonomy on the part of teachers and children,” it clashed with the administrative progressives, standardization and the “one best system,” and so on, the defining features of public schools at the time. Tyack also argues that attempted transitions to the new pedagogy in public schools “often brought more, not less, red tape and administration.”
When colonized people used colonizer ideas for their own purposes
Scholarship on education uses the term “negotiation” to describe how colonized people modified or uniquely utilized colonizer ideologies, practices, and institutions to serve their own interests and goals. Indigenous teachers and students alike engaged in negotiation when they pushed forward or preserved their own ideas in colonial schools, while also often adopting or acquiescing to components of colonizer ideology, in the give-and-take fashion of a negotiation — though here, of course, there is little choice.
For example, Solsirée del Moral writes in “Negotiating Colonialism: ‘Race,’ Class, and Education in Early-Twentieth-Century Puerto Rico” that while white government and school officials wanted Puerto Rican students prepared for U.S. citizenship and loyalty, Puerto Rican teachers wanted to ready students for citizenship in an independent Puerto Rico (McCoy and Scarano, Colonial Crucible, 137). It was “an alternative citizenship-building project” (p. 138). A key component was “racial regeneration” — tackling diseases like malaria and social problems like alcoholism — which fit neatly into the American desire to improve the moral, intellectual, and physical nature of the colonized (p. 139-140). In other words, colonial schooling was imposed on Puerto Ricans, but it was used for Puerto Rican nation-building rather than full Americanization; U.S. officials had goals for Puerto Rican improvement, and prior local ideas about racial progress were married to them. This is negotiation — some colonizer practices and ways of thinking are accepted, but they are adapted to suit the interests of the occupied. It’s a mix of resistance and acquiescence, as indigenous interests are advanced through imperial mechanisms. Some American ideologies and goals were rejected, but del Moral notes that the practices of some of the colonized did not outright challenge colonialism and reinforced racial stereotypes and hierarchies (p. 143-144).
In “Americanizing the Teachers: Identity, Citizenship, and the Teaching Corps in Hawai’i, 1900-1941,” Michelle Morgan writes that in Hawaii strict hiring filters ensured immigrant and indigenous teachers were largely supportive of Americanization, but these educators pushed the ideology of equal opportunity and social mobility for students, countering the needs of white planters and businessmen, who wanted students to go through vocational schooling and be ready for agricultural labor on plantations (p. 161, 164-166). Here two American ideologies clash, but colonized teachers on the islands nevertheless stood up for their own goals (and people) and rejected those of the powerful: “American political and educational rhetoric emphasizing democracy conflicted with the goals of a settler colonialist society. This contrast clearly emerged in the debates surrounding vocational education, as teachers and students rejected or modified the efforts of elites to create a malleable plantation labor force” (p. 167). Meanwhile, native Hawaiian students were selective in what lessons they took to heart, rejecting some ideas and keeping others, preserving their cultural pride and identities (Derek Taira, “Embracing Education and Contesting Americanization: A Reexamination of Native Hawaiian Student Engagement in Territorial Hawai‘i’s Public Schools, 1920–1940,” 362, 368).
Different occupied societies would counter or co-opt Americanization in unique ways, having different pre-existing beliefs and practices (but cultural preservation is a major theme). Puerto Rican belief in their approaching national independence and racial decline impacted how students were taught, as did the Hawaiian and immigrant disdain for imperial plantation labor. While this can be seen as successful resistance, scholars suggest Americanization and U.S. officials were also adapting, negotiating. Del Moral writes that “the American empire was daily reproduced within Puerto Rican public schools because it was malleable enough to incorporate those interests, demands, visions, and projects local actors already maintained and defended” (p. 144). Minor pushbacks and indigenous interests could be tolerated and absorbed, as long as they did not seriously threaten colonization. This is a powerful reframing. Morgan writes: “In Hawai‘i’s diverse society, schools needed to suppress indigenous culture and Americanize waves of immigrants. In order to create a teaching force that could accomplish these goals, administrators drew on colonial and local constructions of race, which categorized Kanaka Maoli teachers as the most assimilated and Asian teachers, particularly the Japanese, as the least assimilated” (p. 167). Officials took these pre-existing ideas and made them filters for employment, ensuring they had patriotic and loyal teachers. All of this is to say that in each unique territory the indigenous ideologies and traditions not only determined how indigenous teachers and students would negotiate (often resist) but also how the United States would negotiate (often oppress).
When female teachers joined unions despite it seeming unladylike
Leftwing anticapitalist reformer George Counts, among others, saw teachers as key to broad social reforms. They should preach democracy and other values in the classroom, join unions and organize, and be leaders of radical change (Urban, 236-237).
Whether or not they agreed with these things, in the early twentieth century teachers were joining unions “in large numbers” (Urban, 237). Union ranks were “enlarged greatly” due to the Depression — teachers came together to protect their jobs and wages, which at times entailed strikes, pickets, and so on.
A challenge to further growth, however, was the perception that joining a union was low brow and low class (Richard Quantz, “The Complex Visions of Female Teachers and the Failure of Unionization in the 1930s,” p. 456), tarnishing the image and social status of teachers. Another challenge would be the conservative nature of most teachers (Urban, 237, 245, 248), who wouldn’t be inclined to challenge the status quo or disobey authority, although many conservative teachers joined unions during this time as well (Urban, 237), as everyone faced the tribulations of the Depression. Further, female teachers had a tender, mother-like image and expectation of docility that contrasted with troublemaking, rebellious union activities (Urban, 246-247, citing Quantz). This would be another factor that prevented even more teachers from joining unions in this era. Many were unconcerned and joined anyway.
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