Victory of the Common School Movement: A Turning Point in American Educational History

By Carl F. Kaestle

This schoolbook was published in 1727 in Boston and later reprinted. “Primer” originally meant book of prayers; it came to mean an introductory school text. The boundary between religious and secular education is still being defined in many societies.

Americans today count on their public schools to be free of expense, open to all, and devoid of religious sectarianism. Although families are permitted to enroll their children in private schools at their own expense in the United States, the percentage of private school students has been stable at about 10-12 percent for half a century. The great majority of students attend public schools, from the first to the twelfth year of schooling, the fulfillment of a crucial policy decision made in each individual state in the northern part of the country in the 1840s, and in the southern states in the late 19th century. It was called "the Common School Movement."

Free schools open to all children did not exist in colonial America. Yet, something like modern American public schools developed in the 1840s, when a majority of voters in the northern regions of the United States decided that it would be wise to create state-mandated and locally controlled free schools. Once this model of schooling prevailed, the stage was set for the creation of an inclusive free-school system in the United States.

In the British colonies of the 17th and 18th centuries, schooling was not compulsory, not free of charge, not secular, not open to all, and not even central to most children's education. Decisions about the provision of schools were made town-by-town. Girls were often excluded, or allowed to attend only the lower-level schools, and sometimes at different hours from the boys. In most towns, parents had to pay part of the tuition to get their young educated. These barriers to the education of all characterized the New England colonies in the Northeast as well as those in the middle-Atlantic and the South. In those sections of North America that were then governed by Spain or France, even less was done for education. Christian missionaries made intermittent efforts to evangelize Native Americans and African Americans through religious education across North America; but schooling, whether local or continental, was not primarily a governmental matter.

The Religious Roots of Colonial Schooling

However, in spite of patchwork, casual customs of schooling throughout the British colonies, there was a push for literacy among many colonists, based largely on the Protestant belief that lay people should learn to read the Bible in the vernacular tongue (that is, for British colonists, in English, rather than Latin or Greek). Passing a law in 1647 for the provision of schools, the Massachusetts colonial legislature commented that "old deluder Satan" had kept the Bible from the people in the times before the Protestant Reformation, but now they should learn to read. Thus, the legislature decreed, towns of over 50 families should provide a school. They did not specify that the education had to be free, nor did they require attendance. The law was weakly enforced. In effect, parents decided whether to send their children; if they did, they had to pay part or all of the cost; and religion was without doubt or question intertwined with education in those days. The most popular schoolbook in British colonial America, The New England Primer, taught children their ABC's through rhymed couplets, beginning with "In Adam's Fall, We sinned all," and concluding with "Zaccheus he Did climb the Tree, Our Lord to see."

Schools offered brief terms, perhaps six weeks in winter and another six weeks in summer, attended mainly by young children who were not working in the fields. These practices swayed to the rhythms of agricultural work and the determination of most towns to provide only modest resources for schools. Formal schooling was more extensive for a tiny elite, as it was in America's parent country, England. In the colonies, only a few boys of European ancestry might go on to more advanced schools for English grammar and then, for an even smaller number, tutoring in Latin, leading to Harvard College, or Yale, or William and Mary. The majority of these privileged few then became ministers, rather than leaders in secular society.

Modern tastes might find this old primer rather gloomy and limiting. Most would argue that pedagogy has improved over the centuries.

The rest of the children learned most of their literacy, adult roles, work skills, and traditions outside of school, from a constellation of institutions, principally the home, the workplace, and the church. However, as colonial society became more highly populated, more complex, and more riven by faction in the 18th century, competition among rival Protestant denominations and quarrels developed over religious doctrine. In addition, political and financial issues ultimately brought relations between the colonists and the English homeland to a breaking point. Thus, the uses of literacy for argumentation – both in oral and written form – grew. And as agriculture became more commercial and efficient, it brought more cash transactions, more focus on single crops, and the prospect of more distant markets, into the countryside, reinforcing the value of literacy. In the growing coastal towns of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, and in some inland centers like Albany and Hartford, philanthropic groups and churches, responding to the increase in poverty and its visibility, established free schools for the moral education of poor children, on the model of English "charity" schools.

The Common School Movement

Given these 18th-century dynamics, one might have expected that when the colonists' victory over British forces in the American Revolution finally left newly-minted Americans free to establish republican institutions to their liking, schools would have been high on the list. Indeed, many of the Revolution's leaders thought they should be – including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Rush. Jefferson wrote from France in 1786, advising a friend to "preach a crusade against ignorance," and support free schools in Virginia. Rush, a Philadelphia physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, proposed a similar bill for free schools in Pennsylvania.

Leaders of this movement for state systems of common schools in the early national period came from both the Jeffersonian Republicans and the Federalists. But their efforts failed in their state legislatures. Most free citizens, it appears, thought that the patchwork colonial mode of education was still quite sufficient. In particular, Americans were wary of any increase in taxes (which had been a major point of contention with England) and did not want their fledgling state governments to meddle in affairs that had always been local matters for towns or families to decide. After Jefferson's bill for free schools in the Virginia legislature had failed twice, he complained to his friend Joel Barlow in 1807, "There is a snail-paced gait for the advance of new ideas on the general mind, under which we must acquiesce."

Picture of boys learning to read and write in the early 19th century, according to the “Lancaster” method. Lancaster tried to devise efficient ways to educate poor children.

Thus, in the countryside, towns still decided whether to have a school, and if so, how to fund it. The cost was usually covered through some combination of taxes on all citizens plus tuition fees for the parents of children who attended. Sometimes parents paid by providing food for the teacher or firewood for the school, but usually it was cash. Parental payments were called "rate bills." Sometimes the school would be free for all children for a set amount of time and then a "continuation" school would be provided for those whose parents were able to pay. Thus the amount of schooling a child received was in the last analysis determined by wealth. At most, there would be a single school for each town or district. Blacks and Indians in general received no formal schooling in these institutions. Even for white children, the terms were brief, the teachers often poorly educated, and the buildings generally in poor condition. The rural school became a favorite target of school reformers later in the early 19th century. Michigan's superintendent, John Pierce, called little rural districts "the paradise of ignorant teachers"; another report spoke of a district school building in such bad repair that "even the mice had deserted it."

The Monitorial School Model

In cities, there were more opportunities. Even in the 18th century in urban areas, there were several different kinds of schools, funded in different ways and with different levels of financial resources. A modest amount of "charity" schooling provided some free instruction for children of poor whites and of African Americans, often subsidized by churches and by state and local government. Such efforts resulted in African Free Schools, "infant" schools for the two- and three-year-old children of the indigent, and other types of sponsorship. As time passed and as concern grew, many cities in the new Republic experimented with a type of charity school, the "monitorial" school, which became popular in England, Europe, and Latin America in the 1810s and ‘20s. Invented by Joseph Lancaster, a Quaker schoolmaster in England, the "monitorial" school model encouraged more advanced pupils to teach those who were less advanced. Lancaster wrote many manuals in his efforts to popularize the methods. Lancaster attempted to define appropriate discipline and to provide detailed instructions for classroom procedures. At a time when boys were routinely paddled for school infractions, advocates applauded Lancaster's ideas about motivation without corporal punishment, discipline motivated by an active curriculum and competition, neutrality with regard to religious denominations, and, perhaps most important, economy of expense. Lancaster claimed that with his system a single master could teach 500 poor children at a time. By the 1820s, Lancasterian schools had popped up in Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, and many other Pennsylvania towns; in Detroit, Michigan; Washington, D.C.; Hartford and New Haven, Connecticut; Norfolk and Richmond, Virginia; and dozens of other cities. In New York City and in Philadelphia, reformers organized entire networks of Lancasterian monitorial schools, systems that became the physical and organizational basis of the later public free schools of those cities. Later critics derided the monitorial schools for regimenting their poor students and separating them from other children, but Lancaster's ideas helped popularize the notion of a school "system," referring not only to the pedagogy and curriculum but to the organization of schools into a network.

For parents with a bit more money, there were inexpensive pay schools advertised in the newspapers, taking in children whose parents could afford a few shillings a quarter. The wealthy educated their children with private tutors or sent them to expensive boarding schools in the English style, now increasingly available to the English-speaking ex-colonials. The cream of society might even send their favored sons and daughters to acquire intellectual and social finesse in academies abroad. Well into the 1820s and ‘30s, "free" education thus connoted only limited privileges granted to the poor, and was distinctly dependent on the goodwill of local congregations, both Protestant and Catholic, or perhaps the largesse of nondenominational philanthropic societies. In New York and elsewhere these charity schools might receive some support, variously from the city council or the state. Our current distinction between "private" and "public" education had not yet crystallized.

The Common School Reform Movement Gathers Steam

Meanwhile, in the small towns and countryside, where a majority of Americans still lived, school reformers of the 1840s worked to end the discriminatory practices of continuation schools and rate bills, recommending instead that schools be supported entirely by property taxes. In effect, this meant that all property owners would subsidize education for the entire community. Traditional opponents of taxation labelled this an unwarranted and oppressive intrusion of state government into local affairs; however, Henry Barnard, Connecticut's school superintendent, called it "the cardinal idea of the free school system." Reformers also urged the centralization of the little rural districts into larger town-wide units, for better supervision and support. Simultaneously, in urban settings, school reformers of the same period began to focus their efforts on absorbing the charity schools into free public school systems and then trying to attract the children of more affluent parents into these "common" schools. The idea of the school as a common, equal meeting ground took on great force for reformers, and they aimed their criticisms at the evils of private schools. A system of private schools for the rich, said Orville Taylor in 1837, "is not republican. This is not allowing all, as far as possible, a fair start." The present system, Henry Barnard complained, "classifies society . . . assorting children according to the wealth, education, or outward circumstances of their parents." As Jefferson had discovered earlier, however, old practices die hard. Even Horace Mann, the best known of the education reformers in the 1840s, lamented the slow progress of his efforts, labeling his opponents as "an extensive conspiracy" of "political madmen."

There remained much support for small-scale district control. In Massachusetts, for example, traditional Protestants of the Congregational denomination rightly perceived that the state would use its influence to discourage the advocacy of particular doctrines in such common schools. In New York state, a petition from a little town in Onondaga County complained that the newly passed school law of 1849 allowed people "to put their hands into their neighbors' pockets" to get support for schools. Roman Catholics in New York City fought the creation of a single public school system, arguing that it would be biased toward Protestant beliefs. Thus, in many states, opponents of the reforms enacted in the first part of the 19th century won repeal in state legislatures and in municipal councils of key elements. In some states, the centralization of districts into towns went through waves of passage and repeal. In 1842, opponents of reform abolished the position of state superintendent of instruction in Connecticut. The Hartford Times, a Democratic paper, called such centralized power "despotic" and "Prussian." Similar attempts to abolish the job of state superintendent failed narrowly in Massachusetts and Ohio.

Nonetheless, during the 15-year period from 1838 to 1853, most states in the Northeast (from Maine down the coast to Maryland) and the "old" Northwest (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin) authorized the position of state school superintendent and required towns to provide totally free schools through property taxes. What had happened between the generation of Jefferson and the generation of Horace Mann to tip the balance? We should look first at the country's economic development.

The Industrial Revolution, spawned by the cotton gin and the widespread development of steam engines, for one, had fueled further European immigration into the United States, a sprawling, crowded urbanization, and the differentiation of the economic functions of the country's three main regions in the three decades before 1860. The Midwest became an agricultural powerhouse, as well as a processing and shipping region, spawning new cities and rail transportation. Since the region's labor force was free of slavery, new European immigrants moved into the Midwest en masse. In the Northeast, agriculture, often based on small farms and in hilly country with rocky soil, became less profitable, while factory production, particularly of textiles and shoes, absorbed more and more of the labor force and dotted the landscape with new conglomerations of brick industrial towns and cities. The South, with its slave labor force and its staple crops of cotton, tobacco, and rice, remained largely rural in the decades leading up to the Civil War that would finally put an end to slavery.

It would be an oversimplification, however, to say that as economies developed, "common" schools flourished entirely as a result. Each stage contributed to progress, and each threatened to provoke a backlash. In particular, the arrival of many Roman Catholics from Ireland and Germany among the immigrants to the northern United States in the 1830s and ‘40s sparked a renewed chapter in the long history of Protestant-Catholic conflict, creating anxieties among leading groups of Protestants, who became persuaded that they should set aside their own denominational tensions and doctrinal disputes, at least in the education arena, while putting forward a program of moral education and a view of history that would support their values. In order to do this, the American elite and the Protestant majority had to be in favor, essentially, of centralized schooling, and they had to abandon some traditions of rural independence, cultural separatism, and local control.

The Role of the Whig Party

The political party that best represented progressive Protestantism in the three decades prior to the Civil War was the Whig Party. Born in the 1820s, the Whig Party as time went on increasingly based its politics on government activism that included programs of institution building, economic development, and moral regulation – resulting in canals, insane asylums, temperance societies whose purpose was to discourage alcohol abuse, and free public schools. Most of the early state superintendents of public instruction of the 1840s were Whigs, and most of the laws to create the first school systems were Whig-sponsored.

There was some bipartisan support, to be sure. Many Democrats also supported free education for all and wanted schools to teach children morals, the glories of America's past, and the virtues of its political institutions. Yet it fell to the Democratic Party of the day to favor local control and oppose strong state government intervention. Criticizing this view, Whig leader William Seward, the governor of New York, said it was absurd to think that a nation could employ its resources in carrying on war, punishing crime, and fighting sedition but could not employ the same resources to "avert the calamities of war, provide for the public security, prevent sedition, improve the public morals, and increase the general happiness."

It was a hard-fought battle. But in a relatively short period, from 1837 to 1853, every state legislature in the North passed into law most of the key features of common free school systems. To prevail in these hard-fought battles, common school advocates, working largely through the Whig Party, had to convince a majority of their compatriots that common schools could play a critical role, not just in providing people a more equal chance at education, but in consolidating the country's culture around republican, capitalist, and Protestant values.

In the South, a regionally strong 19th-century Democratic Party, localism, a laissez-faire tradition about education, and a strong belief in a hierarchical society based on slave labor, combined to thwart the more democratic and middle-class values of the region's school reformers. Free common schools would come to the South only in the aftermath of the 1861-65 Civil War, first introduced and promoted by the Reconstruction legislatures that included black legislators in the 1860s and early ‘70s. Then, in the late 19th century, when Southern white Democrats had returned to power in the state legislatures, the region gradually moved toward free school systems based on property taxes, but separate for blacks and whites and unequal in their resources. Indeed, there was much racial segregation in the North as well, and schools for racial minorities across the nation generally had poorer resources.

The Balance Wheel of the Social Machinery

As the modern common school system began to acquire a clear shape in the North between 1837 and 1853, it retained evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, features. Governance, while devolved from strictly local groups, was still shared between local and state authorities, with increasing federal involvement in the 20th century. The amount of control retained to this day by local, elected school boards in the United States is unique among the industrial nations of the world, and testifies to how dearly the concept of local control of school curricula and of their budgets still appeals to the average American. However, by introducing a modicum of state regulation, and in persuading local school districts to remove all parental fees for children's school attendance, the common school reformers affected a significant shift. Class bias was ameliorated if not eliminated. The ground was prepared for some integration by race. Both sexes were ultimately seen as entitled to equal educational opportunity.

Horace Mann declared in 1848 that in America, common, public schools would be "the balance wheel of the social machinery," and the idea of equality of opportunity – in many senses implicit in the texts of the Declaration of Independence and in the U.S. Constitution – was reinforced and expanded by that declaration, and similar reformist credos. However, the balance wheel metaphor has another, perhaps unintended meaning. A balance wheel keeps machinery from shaking apart. This is what has kept public schools attractive to most of the public in most parts of the country for the past century and a half. Americans have consistently believed that common public schools are necessary to teach common values, common knowledge of the political system, respect for institutions, respect for property, and other values that are needed to keep a democratic system from flying apart. Thus, while promoting equality, public schools in the United States are seen by some as essentially conservative social institutions that continue some level of traditional cultural distinctions on the base of race, class, and even talent within a democratic framework. The retention of local control and the reliance on local taxes to this day creates inequalities in per-pupil expenditures. Organization of school districts along residential neighborhood lines has continued racial separatism in public education, in spite of massive attempts on the part of the federal judiciary to change this over the past half century. And very large public schools practice a certain amount of sub-organization aimed at recognizing scholarly aptitude.

To this day, the values and the curriculum of the "common" public schools remain skewed towards the cultural institutions and beliefs of traditional American Protestants. Nonetheless, as promoters of the "melting pot" concept of assimilation, public schools remain popular. Even over the past few decades, which have seen new waves of immigration from developing nations, American public schools have consistently enrolled about 90 percent of the school-age population, with the remainder largely in Roman Catholic and Protestant private schools at their own expense.

In the United States, free public schools for all are seen as democratic institutions that foster social cohesion.

Nonetheless, as more and more Americans coming from vastly divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds enter the public schools, some parents and educators have questioned the very idea of a single, comprehensive public school system. The heart of the debate at the moment is whether schooling conceived of in the 19-century model is preparing young Americans adequately to compete in the global technological economy of the 21st century, and if not, why not.

Americans are revisiting the issues of the great common school debates again. Should public funds be distributed directly to parents to use as they wish for their child's education? Should public funds be used for religiously based schools? Should the line between the public and private sector be blurred, as it was in the first 50 years of the nation's history? Should local and independent schooling initiatives prevail, unregulated by state and federal policy? Should there be expanded national testing within the current framework to prod lagging public school districts into providing better education for their students? A rapidly evolving society holds the answers to the current great common school debate in the United States.

Carl F. Kaestle is a professor of education, history, and public policy at Brown University. He joined the faculty at Brown in July of 1997, after teaching at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Chicago. His writings include Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780-1860, and Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading Since 1880. Recently he was a principal consultant and professional commentator in the public television documentary "School."