Americans of the 19th century believed that the success of the Republic depended upon an educated citizenry. Education was a key component of national identity in the Civil War era. A unique program of education emerged, encompassing democratic hopes, Protestant piety, and utilitarian values.
The meaning of education and the types of schools changed dramatically over the course of the 19th century. In the early decades of the century, children and young adults acquired education in a variety of settings. Many received a rudimentary education at the kitchen table in the home. Girls obtained domestic skills there as well. Boys learned crafts such as carpentry, and young men studied law through a system of apprenticeships. Charity schools in cities taught the children of the poor. Small “dame” schools (usually taught by an unmarried female instructor) were opened for young children. Academies, usually boarding, offered higher education to those who could pay. And in church-sponsored schools, children learned religious tenets and how to read the Bible.
By the time of the Civil War, a more systematic and uniform public school system had become the backbone of American education in the North and Midwest. Horace Mann has been credited with the emergence of the public school in the United States. As head of the Massachusetts Board of Education from 1837 to 1849, he advocated schools that were publicly supported, publicly controlled, and available to children of all classes and races. In Mann’s optimistic reform vision, the inclusiveness of the common schools would have a positive effect on the country as a whole by fostering social harmony and morality.
Although there were some regional differences, the public school movement spread across the country before and after the Civil War. New England was ahead of the nation in public schools, with more than 75 percent of school-age boys and girls attending school at mid-century. In most of the rural United States, the one-room schoolhouse prevailed, with one teacher responsible for instructing between 40 and 60 boys and girls. Strains on the teachers and students in this setting school were enormous. The teacher usually lived with his or her pupils, and disciplining the rowdy students was a trial, as was teaching a variety of age and skill levels.
Urban centers had designed a unitary system of education that gradually spread to other areas over the course of the century. A child was assigned to a grade according to age. Then the student would proceed from a primary school to some kind of intermediate school, to a high school or academy. The schools stressed reading, spelling, writing, arithmetic, geography, and history. Teaching was centered on textbooks such as McGuffey’s readers. High schools began to develop an expanded curriculum, offering vocational education such as bookkeeping in addition to their traditional subjects.
Advanced education was less available to girls than to boys, and those girls who sought an education usually went to a sex-segregated institution. Private female academies or seminaries offered a secondary education to middle-class girls who could afford to pay. Not only did girls go to separate schools, but the subjects they were taught were different than those taught boys, reflecting prevailing notions of girls’ abilities and the female role in society.
In the South, most states did not adopt tax-supported, state-regulated common schools by the time of the Civil War. A number of factors worked against public education in the South, including the perception that education was for the elite. Aristocratic PLANTATION owners regarded education their private concern and thus left it to tutors. It was illegal in the Southern states to teach slaves to read and write. There was also little support in the South for TAXATION for education purposes. Then too, much of the South was rural and sparsely populated, with a poor system of communication making education reform difficult.
The Civil War and Reconstruction brought dramatic changes to education in the South. During the war, education nearly came to a standstill. Schoolhouses were commandeered for military purposes; teachers and students were scattered. After the war, the most dramatic change in the South was the education of African Americans. Under the auspices of the Freedmen’s Bureau, established in 1865, Northern teachers came to the South to teach thousands of eager black children and adults. Ex-slaves were determined to learn, but white Southerners were unwilling to pay for their education. There was a drive to build colleges to provide higher education for African Americans, but the idea of universal public education continued to lag in the South after the war, in part because it was seen as a Northern concept imposed upon the defeated South.
Colleges, too, were transformed in the 19th century. At the beginning of the century there were only 18 colleges in the United States; 100 years later, there were more than 450 colleges and universities. The upsurge in colleges occurred after the Civil War. In 1862 the government set aside funding for land-grant colleges in the Morrill Act. Private colleges also expanded after the war as men who had accumulated large fortunes endowed private institutions. The number of women’s colleges, such as Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, and Bryn Mawr, also increased after the war.
Although the number of colleges grew dramatically, only 1 percent of college-age Americans actually attended college in 1870. Men found more opportunities entering business or farming than in pursuing professions that demanded a liberal arts education. College reformers attempted to make colleges more relevant over the century. Choice was introduced in the curriculum, and some schools added utilitarian subjects such as chemistry, law, and the principles of AGRICULTURE.
See also SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY.
Further reading: Lawrence Cremin, American Education: The National Experience, 1783-1876 (New York: Harper & Row, 1980).
—Jaclyn Greenberg
World History
