Upon visiting the U.S. Constitution in the National Archives museum, or seeing an image or recreation of the document elsewhere, one is at once struck by an interesting oddity. The letter “s” appears to be, in some places, replaced with a lowercase “f”! Why in the world does the Constitution speak of “Congreſs” rather than “Congress”?

You may need to zoom in or find a magnifying glass to notice that the letter is not actually an “f.” The little horizontal line is either nonexistent or is only found on the left side of the symbol’s body, rather than going all the way through. It looks like this: “ſ.” This letter is, in fact, a “long s,” which has long fallen out of use.

Conservator Rachel Bartgis at the National Archives writes that the English alphabet, being an offshoot of the Roman alphabet with the same feature (why the Romans favored this is unknown), used both a short and long “s” until the early 1800s. The “ſ,” the “long s,” was used at the (uncapitalized) beginning or middle of words. The “short s,” the one we know and love, was used at the end or when capitalization was involved. Today’s double “s” (like in “Congress”) would have both letters if at the end of a word (“Congreſs”), but you’d see “ſſ” in the middle of words (“paſſed”).

These rules, Bartgis says, changed over time and were not always followed. Marissa Laliberte at Reader’s Digest suggests that people of past centuries understood how confusing it could be to have an “f” and a “long s” that looked so similar, given certain historical rule breaks: “Often, a short S would go next to the letter F (e.g. misfortune) to avoid confusion.” Considering how small text was printed in newspapers in early America, one imagines plenty of opportunities for frustration.

According to Laliberte, printers in the late 18th century may have begun simplifying and streamlining their typesets, ditching the redundant letter, as technology changed. Each additional letter for new printers, after all, required materials and effort to create and use it. Bartgis implies, however, that the nature of typesetting may have slowed down the transition a bit, as getting rid of one letter required getting rid of several combination blocks used in the printer, such as “ſh” (for the “shhhh” sound). Replacing all those could be costly.

While you will not see the “long s” much outside of historical documents, and there remains work to do for historians to uncover why users of Latin (as well as Greek) felt the need for two lowercase “s” letters, your visits to the National Mall will at least be far less confusing in the future.

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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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The history of American education is quite intriguing. I’m particularly interested in the higher purposes of schooling — though not all the facts featured in this multi-part series will explicitly relate to this. Some purposes have faded away, others persist to this day. Imparting religious beliefs, patriotism and citizenship, moral values, the desire to build a new socialistic society (see later articles, not so much this one), and more demonstrate how far and how often education stepped beyond more basic aims like the acquisition of academic knowledge or occupational preparation. Let’s explore some of these purposes and other aspects of education history together.

When schools inculcating patriotism was deemed necessary for national survival

In the early republic, education was often seen as an important means of preserving the new nation — its liberties and system of government. Schools could impart loyalty and virtue that would ensure both obedience and wise politics. Historian Carl Kaestle argues in Pillars of the Republic that post-war rebellions, ideological factionalism, and fears that the United States was too diverse for democracy to last motivated the thinking of some Founders and educational reformers (p. 4-5). Schools needed to produce wise voters and lawmakers, so students would need to be made to think in certain ways. 

Noah Webster insisted schools should develop in students an “inviolable attachment to their own country,” while Benjamin Rush saw the need to “convert men into republican machines” who do their part in the collective whole: “good citizens of the republic” were the necessary output of schools, and “the most useful citizens have been formed from those youth who have never known or felt their own wills till they were one and twenty years of age” (p. 7). The “obligations of patriotism should be inculcated” in students (Rush, On the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic, 1798). Thomas Jefferson, in his 1778 “Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” wrote that in addition to public happiness, education would give ordinary people “knowledge…which history exhibiteth” that would allow them to recognize “ambition” and “tyranny” — and “defeat” it, protecting the “sacred deposit of the rights and liberties of their fellow citizens.” Emma Willard, in “Proposing a Plan for Female Education” (1819), echoed such sentiments when she wrote that educating women could bring “national glory” and help defend liberties. Indoctrination was for a noble purpose indeed, being how freedom, republicanism, and stability would endure.

This purpose appears in both the earliest and later years of schooling. The New England Primer, which helped little ones learn the alphabet through rhyme, updated its positive views on monarchs to read: “Queens and Kings / Are gaudy things” (Urban, American Education, p. 34). Geography textbooks glorified the beauty of the United States and its republic system, stomped on people from other nations (the Mexicans and Spanish had “bad qualities,” the Irish were “blundering,” the English “haughty”), and in other ways encouraged national pride (Nash, Women’s Education in the United States, p. 46). Students in academies would also learn about Rome and how without citizen virtue a republic would fall (p. 47). These ideas were impressed upon both boys and girls alike, with republican virtue important for male voters or lawmakers and for republican mothers and wives, who were expected to guide and influence men positively (Kaestle, 5; see also Rush, Thoughts on Female Education, 1787). Benjamin Rush recommended subjects like eloquence, which was taught in the Roman Empire and constituted the “first accomplishment in a republic” and was as important as the “sword” in “bringing about American revolution” (On the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic, 1798). Ancient republics, the tyranny of European states, and of course the American system of government and U.S. history should also be studied.

When girls had highly similar educations to boys, to a point

In the 17th and 18th centuries, while colleges, many apprenticeships, grammar schools, and other enterprises were solely for boys and young men, schools launched by towns, churches, tutors, and benefactors were generally open to girls and boys alike (and later there were secondary schools like academies and seminaries for young women to continue their studies). Urban, in American Education, highlights girls being educated (p. 20, 33), but mostly just uses the all-inclusive “children” (19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 32, and so on). It is clear that the purposes that drove education applied to boys and girls — the Puritans wanted all children to learn the faith and attain salvation, not just boys (29-35); revolutionary thinkers wanted everyone completely devoted to the new nation, and educated women had a role to play in that.

We indeed observe schooling for girls aiding nationalism and male control of society. “Girls’ robust education was to be put to the service of…‘Republican motherhood,’ in which ‘righteous mothers were asked to raise the virtuous male citizens on whom the health of the Republic depended’” (Urban, 67; see also Kaestle, 5). Rush wrote that a purpose of education for women was to “concur in instructing their sons in the principles of liberty and government” (Thoughts on Female Education, 1787). Teaching children was the “duty of mothers.” Other positives of learning related to assisting working husbands with bookkeeping or property management. Education was for equipping women to fulfill duties in the home. This was part of a larger trend to redirect women away from public life after advancements during the Revolution. 

The early republic era entailed the reinforcement of the traditional gender order alongside challenges to that order. Urban uses the phrases “complex,” “contradictory,” and “paradoxical” (67). There were clashing sets of ideas: It made sense to Americans — men and women alike — that women should learn intellectual subjects (be a part of the enlightenment tradition) like philosophy, mathematics, language, science, history, government, and so on, and some even considered women to not only be as worthy of intellectual study as men but indeed their intellectual equals (Urban, 67; Nash, 35-36). But after schooling, women should not have “independence” or freedom or power in social life, they should serve as mothers, or at most seamstresses, bookkeepers, teachers, and a limited number of other roles (Urban, 66-67). Beings of equal intelligence or worthiness of education did not deserve social and political equality! 

Another tension was between all the revolutionary rhetoric of liberty and women’s subordinate status, a contradiction women drew attention to. Women justified more education and liberties using the philosophy that justified the Revolution: “The awareness of Abigail Adams, Judith Sargent Murray, Mercy Warren, and a few other women who questioned traditional gender relations and educational conventions was rooted in the same Enlightment faith that motivated their husbands and other patriots…” (Urban, 67). Emma Willard implies that because the United States is an enlightened place, caring about liberty, including that of women, educating women is appropriate (“Proposing a Plan for Female Education,” 1819).

Higher education for men and women was generally quite similar, as the large majority of men and women did not attend academy, college, or seminary school. In the context of the men and women who actually did attend such institutions, we see in Nash and Urban that there was much crossover in terms of what was taught, again pretty similar educations, minus some subjects and vocation preparation being reserved for a specific gender (and of course colleges being only for men, to study medicine, law, theology, and so on). 

When it comes to childhood or lower education, something similar can perhaps be said, but with inverted attendance figures. The schooling rate for children in the early republic era appears high. Kaestle (p. 11) estimates that in New York in 1800, 75% of school-age children attended state-funded schools alone, for at least some of the school year. Meaning even higher enrollment when schools that were not state funded are factored in. So with elementary education, one could again say that boys and girls had similar experiences, this time given that a majority participated. Then, again, in the context of what’s actually being taught, Urban (chapters 2-4) suggests highly similar curricula for boys and girls.

When schooling was all about morality and crime prevention

The major goal of common schools — state-funded, open and free to most American children — was to develop moral character. In the early nineteenth century, a lack of virtue was seen as a cause of individual and societal decline, real or potential. Without restraint, self-sacrifice, intelligence, devotion to the common good, hard work, and other marks of good character, people would fall into poverty, vice, and crime (Kaestle, 81-82). Further, morality (most always founded on Christianity in this era) was key to protecting and maintaining the republican experiment. Without commitment to the common good, noble behavior, and a shared understanding of what’s right among citizens, voters, and lawmakers, democracy and liberty would fall (Kaestle, 79-80). Significant social change (industrialization and urbanization creating new forms of poverty, immigration creating both less homogenous populations and concerns about loyalty to and understanding of American ideals) fueled interest in shared moral and attitudinal frameworks (Kaestle, 80).

In Noah Webster’s American Spelling Book (1831), teaching children to read was combined with teaching them to “know their duty” (p. 43-46). “You must not tell a lie,” it instructs, “nor do hurt… Help such as want help, and be kind…” Children are told to “love the law [of God] and keep it,” “walk with the just and do good,” and “shun vice,” never swearing, cheating, or stealing, or else suffer a “bad end.” These instructions are quite lengthy and repetitive to drive home the message. Webster’s text also offers comparative stories of a hardworking, thrifty man who becomes wealthy and a lazy drunk who lives in poverty and misery. Proper character, enforced by schools, was judged to be the cure for American social ills. “All the members of society have a direct interest in the manners of each of its individuals,” reformer Horace Mann wrote (Fourth Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board of Education, 1840), reflecting the popular sentiment of the age.

Enforcement may or may not have involved corporal punishment. In the reform era, there was a certain stress on creating a nurturing environment to ensure good behavior was internalized and intrinsically motivated, rather than attempting to beat it into children (Kaestle, 89). Some teachers of course still struck palms. But the most important thing was that order and obedience reigned, as this would ensure children developed proper moral character (Kaestle, 96-97). Mann, in the Fourth Annual Report, wrote that “if order do not pervade the school, as a whole, and in all its parts, all is lost…” It was critical that teachers have strong management and disciplinary skills (teacher qualifications were part of the common school reform agenda). Without those skills, without order, the consequences would be “disastrous.” Physical punishment (Mann uses “chastisement”), while lawful and still widely accepted by the citizenry, was a “last resort,” the “ultimate resource,” a “barbarism” that was still at times “necessary.” If order (so necessary for the development of virtue) required physical discipline, so be it.

In his Twelfth Annual Report (1848), Mann advocates for “Moral Education,” framing the law as an insufficient method of reducing criminality. “For every lock that is made, a false key is made to pick it” — people will earn “dishonest profits” from illegal black market sales, they’ll smuggle, commit fraud, and so on. The law is not enough, you need to develop good character in children to prevent them from becoming adults capable of crime. Religious education and the ethics that came with it played a role here as well.

“Political Education” is also highlighted. Without intelligence, a republican form of government cannot function; Mann compares it to a “mad-house” without supervisors. Students must understand the “true nature and functions of the government,” to prepare for later democratic participation. The Constitution, the separation of powers, elections, the courts, and so on must be understood and supported, discouraging “rebellion” or vindictively taking matters into one’s own hands in a criminal fashion. 

Common schools, then, were a “preventative means against dishonesty, against fraud, and against violence.”

When Horace Mann saw schools as fighting poverty and capitalism

The famous Horace Mann had much more to say about education and morality in his 1848 report. 

“Intellectual Education” was his “means of removing poverty,” an unnecessary evil in society. Schooling, Mann declares, is the great equalizer of social conditions — “all are to have an equal chance for earning” income and growing prosperous after a proper education. The “highest duty of a State” is to safeguard people’s well-being, expanding “human welfare,” thus common schools are necessary. Mann’s opinions are sympathetic toward the poor, containing a high degree of class consciousness, castigating the “treasures” that exist beside “starvation,” declaring “the earth contains abundant resources” enough for all, and highlighting the “grossest inequalities” between those who “toil and earn” (workers) and those who “seize and enjoy” (employers, capitalists). “Labor” (workers) and “property” (employers, capitalists) can be brought into the “same class” through education, so that the former are no longer “subjects” of the latter, under a “tyranny, in the form of capital.” 

We see in Kaestle’s fifth chapter that immoral character was often seen as the cause of poverty. Mann sees a connection, but his empathy is moving: “actual, living beings, beings that have hearts to palpitate” and precious “affections” are testing the “capacities of human nature for suffering and for sin.” Suffering and sin go together, but it’s not so clear that Mann blames the sin for the suffering. Perhaps to a degree — we know he blames poor character for crime and violent rebellion. We also know that he does not believe intelligent, educated people will remain poor — there’s something wrong with the poor that if fixed will solve the social ill. But he seems to assign at least partial blame to the capitalist economic system, with its “antagonistic” classes, the tyranny of employers who seize wealth from workers, gross inequalities, “one class possess[ing] all the wealth and the education,” and so on. 

His explicit comments on morality here are interesting. Education “gives each man the independence and the means by which he can resist the selfishness of other men.” This is a reference to the tyranny and seizing of wealth and low wages and so on, and turns the morality discussion around: the central problem isn’t your immorality, which common schools need to purge, it’s the immorality of others, of capitalists and employers and the rich, people you’ll encounter as a working adult. With education, you’ll be free (or freer) from class exploitation; you’ll be more intelligent, you’ll have more job opportunities, maybe avoid miserable factory life, start your own enterprises, grow prosperous, and so on. Mann isn’t highlighting the immorality of the poor, but rather the sins of the economic system and owners, who engage in “oppression.” Education can free people of that, reducing poverty (and, Mann adds, the riots, rebellions, and hostilities that come with it). 

Mann explicitly places blame for poverty on society and economy, rather than the poor, when he notes “miseries that spring from the coexistence, side by side, of enormous wealth and squalid want.” Moral development in schools is no doubt part of how education will help bring about equality and prosperity for all in the nineteenth century, but moral failure does not appear to be the only cause of poverty or daunting challenge in this reformer’s mind.

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This study uses oral histories from North Carolina to posit that it was not uncommon for former students and educators of color in the late 1990s and early 2000s to judge school desegregation as having wrought significant negative side effects. These interviews — conducted by others, not this author — reveal much nuance and complexity in opinion, as the subjects place positive changes alongside harmful ones. The value of racial integration is lifted up, as one might expect, though this paper does not extensively cover those comments.^[1] It rather seeks to build a more holistic understanding of the perceptions of African Americans and to a lesser extent Native Americans at the turn of the millennium. Of course, talk of bad things about integration and good things about segregation can be as discomforting as it is surprising, at least to those outside certain communities and age groups. But like the scientist whose results betray her hypothesis, the historian is only more fascinated, and follows the truth wherever it goes. And “integration as harmful” can become less counterintuitive rather quickly. After all, desegregation in the 1950s and ’60s suddenly placed children of color under white authority and in dangerous situations. Former students described disproportionate expulsions and punishments for black students.^[2] Black youths faced all manner of racist abuse and nastiness, and some may have dropped out of school completely as a result.^[3] Black communities faced a violent white backlash, causing some individuals to wonder whether integration was worth it.^[4] Perceived downsides to desegregation, whether short- or long-term, should not be so surprising. The changes explored herein concern the relationships, institutions, close communities, and other positives lost to blacks and Native Americans during and after this process.

Historians have documented black views on the benefits of schooling under segregation, including teachers who were extremely demanding but also felt like part of the family.^[5] James Atwater, a black student in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, from the 1930s to the 1950s, spoke of such connectivity in a 2001 interview. He was asked about Lincoln, the black school described by interviewer Jennifer Nardone as “a very tight knit community” with “a sense of family.”^[6] Atwater explained that “it comes back to the physical”: teachers lived across the street from students, attended church with them, knew parents well, hosted gatherings at their homes, and so on. “So there was,” Atwater remembered, “the kind of relationship that one wouldn’t normally have with a teacher if the teacher had been living in another town, or been living in another part of town.” And as Lincoln was first through twelfth grade, students and educators would know each other long before and long after they shared a classroom. Integration would disrupt these patterns.

Atwater was out of school by the time of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, but had “misgivings” about the desegregation order.^[7] “Would that mean that all schools would simply be integrated or would it mean that black schools would disappear?” This was a question about who ran schools and colleges — a black school was operated by black leaders and educators; it did not merely have a majority black student body. “I think that that was the general fear among many people, many African Americans,” Atwater said. “Does this mean that [there] won’t be any more black university presidents? Does this mean there won’t be any more black principals? And any more black teachers[?]” Integration wrought “mixed feelings” due to concerns that power in and ownership of institutions would simply pass to whites. “Obviously, there’s going to be duplication” of roles when city schools are merged (and, we can add, building closings). “How fair would the process be, in determining who goes and who stays[?]” Many black educators indeed lost their jobs.^[8] Integration would mean black students had fewer black teachers; leaving behind or losing beloved educators was quite painful for children.^[9]

Desegregation resulted in the closing of many black schools. Arthur Griffin, who grew up in Charlotte, believed Second Ward, his high school that shut down in 1969, was a “casualty” of a “desegregation lawsuit,” and urban renewal that forced black families to move to other parts of town.^[10] Significantly, the poorer, unequal condition of black schools like Second Ward — a result of the Jim Crow segregation that civil rights lawsuits aimed to address — spurred integration policies that favored the desires of white families. “You’d have white students from Myers Park coming to Second Ward, and students from Second Ward going to Myers Park,” Griffin remembered, speaking of the potential desegregation plan in Charlotte. “And I think, like in many other decisions back then, [white] folks just said, ‘No, we’re not going to a school that looks like this.’ Because [our] school was not in great repair, didn’t have nearly the things that Myers Park High School had.” Whites insisted their transferred children attend a better school, but one farther away than Second Ward. This transpired, and Second Ward closed down. Griffin felt “a sense of betrayal and loss.” Asked in 1999 why Second Ward had been so special to him, Griffin described the school as akin to “roots” — the older kids had attended, he had never envisioned going anywhere else, the sports tradition was important, he had a wealth of fond memories, etc. Second Ward “was a family”: people came together, cared for one another, and strove for self-improvement. The building itself was like a family member. It was a cornerstone of the community — integration broke many such cornerstones. “Progress,” Griffin said, “caused all of the black schools to close.”

Latrelle McAllister, another African American student in Charlotte, shared the concerns over school closures.^[11] Alumni, she recalled, would still be fundraising for and involved with her high school decades after graduating. One would be involved long before attending as well, as children experienced regular athletics events and band performances. Everyone went to West Charlotte High. “There is a rich heritage. There is a broad base of support for this institution.” McAllister’s “first civil rights protest” was to prevent the closing of her high school in the early 1970s; the “whole community…gathered” to save the school. This is again notable — a civil rights march was necessary to counter the (white-run and -favored) effects of civil rights and integration. Progress had its downsides, given who retained power and oversaw policy changes. “A lot of the historically black schools had been closed,” but activism preserved West Charlotte.

While McAllister saw the benefits of integration, such as equitable funding and greater cultural tolerance, she said in 1998 that “​​there is probably in the black community, and certainly in our household, an ongoing debate about the degree to which integration helps our children or hurts our children,” as students did not have the same caring, lasting, family-esque relationships with teachers that they used to.^[12] The teacher-parent relationships were likewise lost, damaging efforts to keep students on the right path: “if I got in trouble…I could be sure that my mother would know about it or my father would know about it and that something would be done about it. There’s not that type of support [today]. There’s not that village that we talk about that’s important in raising and nurturing and shaping young minds.” (Another student recalled teachers coming to student homes for discussions, rather than waiting on parent-teacher conferences.^[13]) Scholar Gloria Ladson-Billings of the National Academy of Education and the University of Wisconsin notes that the civil rights era freed better-off blacks to move to other parts of town, meaning disconnected, distant teachers regardless of color: low-income, urban students’ “Black teachers are driving in from the suburbs the same way their White teachers are.”^[14] Integration, then, separated people.^[15] Student from teacher, teacher from family. Busing students hours away from their neighborhoods was yet another component of the new divides and dynamics created by desegregation.

West Charlotte was “one big family,” recalled former student Alma Enloe.^[16] Competition and fights between students were rare. Teachers knew everyone’s name, even in such a large school, and made time for students one-on-one. Enloe appears to see the school as an extension of a close, trusting, family-like community: “When we were growing up any parent in the neighborhood could say something to you if you had done something wrong, even spank you, and nothing was said by the parents because they knew if another parent chastised you that way…you had done something wrong.” Teachers and principals were part of this system. Historian of education Vanessa Siddle Walker writes that they operated with “parentlike authority” and “almost complete autonomy.”^[17] Educators were seen as virtual mothers and fathers, students as their own children.^[18] Enloe speaks of teacher strictness alongside their caring attitudes, implicitly linking the two.^[19] Other interviewees did the same.^[20]

Enloe regrets the fights, guns, and other troubles in the public schools of 1998, and notes that some blame integration: “Some people would look at us and say when we were just the blacks by ourselves, at least we knew who the enemy was, saying white people. But now, everybody is together and don’t nobody know who’s the enemy or what, so everybody is just fighting everybody.”^[21] Enloe more blames the decline of “stronger,” sterner parenting, but perhaps leaves room for the notion that segregation fostered such parenting by creating a close-knit, self-reliant community, which was lost after integration and progress on civil rights: “[Now] ​​we don’t have that togetherness. Everybody is just pulling apart…” Scholar James D. Anderson of the University of Illinois recently argued that when teachers no longer lived in the school neighborhoods and knew families intimately, students had less respect for them, less of a connection and desire to please.^[22] We might add that white supremacy and violence surely created an immense pressure on black Americans to set high behavioral and academic standards for children (“Be twice as good” is a well-known mantra^[23]), in order to survive. Teachers battled to create advancement opportunities for students and the community as a whole.^[24] This is not to glorify segregation or ignore the well-established link between the disproportionate poverty wrought by slavery/Jim Crow and today’s troubled schools, children, or neighborhoods, but rather to consider an additional possible factor, one that the individuals in these sources take seriously: integration weakened school-family relationships, community cohesion or closeness, and certain standards and expectations, contributing to social problems. In a similar vein to Enloe, former student Stella Nickerson said that a black high school “was very important. It was a connection. It was something that the communities could say was definitely theirs.”^[25] But, she argues, integration erased a sense of ownership (and generated bad experiences), leading to less parental involvement in the following decades.

Let us now briefly observe the parallels and intersections with the indigenous experience of integration. Native Americans could see influxes of black and white students into their schools as detrimental to a sense of community and therefore optimal learning. This is revealed in an oral history offered by James A. Jones, a principal in Prospect, North Carolina, in the 1970s and ’80s.^[26] In 2003, Jones recalled that the area was formerly “nearly a hundred percent” Native American, like “a little Indian reservation.” “We like to kind of keep it that way,” he admitted. It remained “a very close knit community. There were a lot of family relations, family connections in this Prospect community. And it’s very deep. It goes way back to probably the eighteenth century… Most of the land…has been inherited from our ancestors. It’s just been passed down, passed down, passed down…” Redistricting in the 1970s shuffled indigenous students to different schools and brought increasing but modest numbers of black students to Prospect School, sparking consternation and resistance. The principal before Jones resigned. Troopers accompanied black learners to ensure peaceful integration. More white students enrolled as well. Mergers in the 1980s continued to change where students went to school and how close administrators and educators were to students and their families.

Jones directly connects this familiarity with academic and behavioral success. Prospect produced doctors, lawyers, and managers — “I attribute this to the fact that our teachers, most of the teachers knew every parent… I could walk in the classrooms, and I could name ninety percent of those kids’ parents, because I taught…a lot of their parents. If a problem surfaced, I said, ‘Do you want me to talk to your mother and daddy about you?’ ‘No, Mr. Jones. No.’ That eliminated the [need for] discipline right there…”^[27] But the changes of the 1970s and ’80s had altered that arrangement. Jones blames higher truancy and dropout rates on the new disconnect between teachers and families. Further, Native American students sent to other schools did not feel like they belonged, violence and fears of it grew more common, and so on. “Crossing the lines” and “racial issues” had taken a toll, and not “left [the] Prospect community happy.” Jones’ interviewer, Malinda Maynor, remarked that “all the ways that children have benefited from greater access and inclusion” occurred alongside the serious new problems Jones described. Clearly, blacks and Native Americans shared concerns that racial integration had caused teacher-family segregation, leading to negative outcomes for students.

To conclude, schools were of massive importance to communities of color, and integration could represent a serious threat. Vanessa Siddle Walker cites instances of direct opposition to desegregation among African Americans.^[28] Four decades later, some former students and educators of color remembered desegregation as a mixed bag. There was discrimination and mistreatment. Schools were closed and jobs were lost. At formerly all-black schools, integration changed or pushed aside school traditions.^[29] Institutions no longer felt like cornerstones of communities. Teachers no longer lived with and knew families intimately. That lack of familiarity and trust, and perhaps the end of white supremacy in general, changed discipline and how hard students were pushed to excel. The bonds of community were loosened. Social ills followed. Determining, in some empirical way, the full truth of these last perceptions is beyond the scope of this study. There are many factors that could explain changing relationships, behavioral norms, academic success, social problems, and so on, and broad changes have also occurred in predominantly white communities and the nation as a whole over the decades. But there is fertile ground for historians and sociologists to explore these observed effects of desegregation, and should causal veracity be established, we need not be so surprised.

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^[1] See for instance Oral History Interview with Burnice Hackney, February 5, 2001, interview K-0547, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-0547/K-0547.html. Hackney praises the better facilities black students had access to.

^[2] Ibid.

Oral History Interview with Arthur Griffin, May 7, 1999, interview K-0168, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-0168/K-0168.html.

^[3] Oral History Interview with Sheila Florence, January 20, 2001, interview K-0544, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-0544/K-0544.html.

^[4] Shifting from North Carolina to Arkansas for a moment, Melba Pattillo Beals, Warriors Don’t Cry (New York: Simon Pulse, 2007) is a fine source for both the mistreatment of black students in integrating spaces and for the hesitancy about integration among blacks in the South. There was intense worry that the attempt at integration would cause a white backlash against African Americans in Little Rock, which indeed occurred, with worsening violence, vandalism, firings, and exclusion from public spaces. Melba Beals, one of the nine integrating students, is deserted by black friends and given the cold shoulder by some black neighbors — the Little Rock Nine are “meddling children” (p. 218) who should never have created such an explosive situation. Beals’ friend, expressing fear of coming to her house, which might be targeted, summed up the reaction: “You gotta get used to the fact that you’all are just not one of us anymore. You stuck your necks out, but we’re not willing to die with you” (p. 145). What the Nine did brought danger to everyone else, against their will; the Nine endured some criticism and exclusion in the black community as a result. Other black residents of course supported integration and were proud of the students and their bravery. The point is that there existed differing views on whether integrating Central High was a wise or worthwhile thing to do.

^[5] Vanessa Siddle Walker, Their Highest Potential: An African American School Community in the Segregated South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 3.

^[6] Oral History Interview with James Atwater, February 28, 2001, interview K-0201, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-0201/K-0201.html.

^[7] Ibid.

^[8] Interview with Burnice Hackney.

^[9] Gloria Ladson-Billings and James D. Anderson, “Policy Dialogue: Black Teachers of the Past, Present, and Future,” History of Education Quarterly 61, no. 1 (February 2021): 95-96.

^[10] Interview with Arthur Griffin.

^[11] Oral History Interview with Latrelle McAllister, June 25, 1998, interview K-0173, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-0173/K-0173.html.

^[12] Ibid.

^[13] Oral History Interview with Nate Davis, February 6, 2001, interview K-0538, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-0538/K-0538.html.

^[14] Ladson-Billings and Anderson, 95.

^[15] Interview with Latrelle McAllister.

^[16] Oral History Interview with Alma Enloe, May 18, 1998, interview K-0167, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-0167/K-0167.html.

^[17] Siddle Walker, 3.

^[18] Ibid., 134-135.

^[19] Interview with Alma Enloe.

^[20] Oral History Interview with Stella Nickerson, January 20, 2001, interview K-0554, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-0554/K-0554.html.

^[21] Interview with Alma Enloe.

^[22] Ladson-Billings and Anderson, 95.

^[23] Interview with Stella Nickerson. “We’ve always had to work harder and prove ourselves more…”

Interview with Burnice Hackney. “You still have got to work harder at whatever you do. You still might come in second.”

^[24] Ladson-Billings and Anderson, 95, 97, 100.

^[25] Interview with Stella Nickerson.

^[26] Oral History Interview with James Arthur Jones, November 19, 2003, interview U-0005, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/U-0005/U-0005.html.

^[27] Ibid.

^[28] Siddle Walker, 4.

^[29] Oral History Interview with John Love, February 17, 1999, interview K-0172, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Retrieved from https://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-0172/K-0172.html.

When someone says they hate country music, they’re typically referring, whether they know it or not, to the neotraditionalist “young country” that arose in the late 1980s and came to full force in the 1990s and early 2000s. You know, the George Strait, Reba McEntire, Alan Jackson, Garth Brooks, Tim McGraw, Kenny Chesney, Brooks & Dunn, Toby Keith, Faith Hill, LeAnn Rimes, Shania Twain, and Brad Paisley era. Luke Combs and other younger artists help keep the style going, though it has evolved a bit under the influence of other genres.

As someone who consumes copious amounts of folk and hip-hop, and enjoys rock as well, this dominant brand of country is fairly torturous. This despite enjoying it when I was a teenager (I was a religious conservative surrounded by many fans of country, and had somewhat limited exposure to certain genres). This also despite trying to appreciate art in all its forms. I try to appreciate young country for what it is, but most songs can only be “enjoyed” ironically, hate-screaming I’d like to check you for ticks, she thinks my tractor’s sexy, my love affair with water, and we’ll put a boot up your ass, it’s the American way!

Of course, there’s plenty of dumb, low-brow nonsense in hip-hop, pop, and so on as well. For my personal tastes, country suffers from a content problem and a sound problem. Now, the content can be absurd, but the major themes aren’t all fundamentally bad. I reject blind patriotism and nationalism, but farms, trucks, beer, small towns, cowboy boots, dancing, that’s all good stuff to sing about. But the musical style is largely grating to my ear, like death metal or some pop. Christmas music is a good parallel — I like snow, decorations, presents, lights, and holiday feasts, but find the sound of such songs annoying and childish.

All that said, all genres have their bangers. Country is no exception. That’s why I’ve created a “Begrudgingly Acknowledged Country Bangers” playlist. Most songs, of course, don’t come from the young country branch. Just a couple. Others are more 1970s and ’80s — a far superior style — and some are newer songs but influences from other forms have clearly taken them a step away from Kenny Chesney. Finally, these are predominantly mainstream songs you’d hear at a country bar. This was to prevent me from simply finding the “good country” outside popular, contemporary tastes. You won’t see many alternative country artists like Lyle Lovett or rockabilly legends like Johnny Cash, both of whom are of course incredible and represent my favorite artists of the genre.

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