Walt Whitman And Education Reform In The Early Nineteenth Century

Author : Jed Woodworth
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 264 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (18 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Horace Mann and the Revolution in American Childhood written by Jed Woodworth and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of American public educational reform during the first half of the nineteenth century is often told as a story of democratic triumph. According to this account, Horace Mann, secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education and widely considered to be America's most important early school reformer, brought the benefits of schooling to the working classes, allowing equality of opportunity for all. This approach to Mann's work emphasizes the material and economic transformations in American life during this period while largely ignoring the intellectual and religious transformations during the same period. The dissertation argues that, rather than a democratic reformer, Mann is better viewed as a reformer of childhood. The dissertation explores the history of five reforms championed by Horace Mann during the first decade he served as secretary of the Board of Education (ca. 1837-46): common schools for rich and poor alike, normal schools, school libraries, school buildings, and the diminution of corporal punishment. In each case, Mann's arguments on behalf of reform are shown to have been made along child-centered lines. Adopting the image of the innocent child, a post-Calvinist image found widely among writers and poets beginning in the second half of the eighteenth-century, Mann argued that children do not merit poor schooling conditions. These conditions, if not corrected, could stunt the intellectual and moral growth of children. Conceptualizing Mann as a reformer of childhood helps us make better sense of the relationship between Mann's own life history and his reforms. It also highlights the dependence of American educational reform on the tactics and arguments made by other humanitarian reforms taking place in Europe and America between 1800 and 1850. This view of Mann also amends standard theories about the formation of the middle class during these same years. By bringing the image of the innocent child under state sponsorship, Mann showed how the state, and not just churches and voluntary associations, could be instrumental in promoting a new kind of middle-class respectability.