292 Chapter 10 The Making of Middle-Class America
Mann. Both were New Englanders, Whigs, trained in
the law, and in other ways conservative types. They
shared an unquenchable faith in the improvability of
the human race through education. Mann drafted the
1837 Massachusetts law creating a state school board
and then became its first secretary. Over the next
decade Mann’s annual reports carried the case for
common schools to every corner of the land. Seldom
given to understatement, Mann called common
schools “the greatest discovery ever made by man.”
He encouraged young women to become teachers
while commending them to school boards by claiming
that they could get along on lower salaries than men.
Young women adhered to the call. By 1860,
women comprised 78 percent of the common school
teachers in Massachusetts, a trend that prefigured
developments elsewhere. The influx of young women
invigorated the common schools and brought to the
enterprise the zeal of a missionary. Harriet Beecher
Stowe, who once taught at the Hartford Seminary,
explained that men teachers lacked the “patience, the
long-suffering, and gentleness necessary to superin-
tend the formation of character.”
By the 1850s every state outside the South pro-
vided free elementary schools and supported institu-
tions for training teachers. Many extended public
education to include high schools, and Michigan and
Iowa even established publicly supported colleges.
Historians differ in explaining the success of the
common school movement. Some stress the arguments
Mann used to win support from employers by appealing
to their need for trained and well-disciplined workers.
Others see the schools as designed to “Americanize” the
increasing numbers of non-English and non-Protestant
immigrants who were flooding into the country.
(Supporting this argument is the fact that Catholic bish-
ops in New York and elsewhere opposed laws requiring
Catholic children to attend these “Protestant” schools
and set up their own private, parochial schools.)
Still other scholars argue that middle-class
reformers favored public elementary schools on the
theory that they would instill the values of hard work,
punctuality, and submissiveness to authority in chil-
dren of the laboring classes. All these reasons played a
part in advancing the cause of the common schools.
Yet it remains the case that the most compelling argu-
ment for common schools was cultural; more effec-
tively than any other institution, they brought
Americans of different economic circumstances and
ethnic backgrounds into early and mutually beneficial
contact with one another. They served the two roles
that Mann assigned to them: “the balance wheel of
the social machinery” and “the great equalizer.”
Mann,Report of the Massachusetts Board
of Educationatmyhistorylab.com
ReadtheDocumentWho Was Horace Mann and Why Are So Many
Schools Named After Him?atmyhistorylab.com
What Was the Progressive Education
Movement?atmyhistorylab.comThe State of the Colleges
Unlike common schools, with their democratic over-
tones, private colleges had at best a precarious place
in Jacksonian America. For one thing, there were too
many of them. Any town with pretensions of becom-
ing a regional center felt it had to have a college.
Ohio had twenty-five in the 1850s, and Tennessee
sixteen. Many of these institutions were short-lived.
Of the fourteen colleges founded in Kentucky
between 1800 and 1850, only half were still operat-
ing in 1860.
The problem of supply was compounded by a
demand problem—too few students. Enrollment at
the largest, Yale, never topped 400 until the mid-
1840s. On the eve of the Civil War the largest state
university, North Carolina, had fewer than 500.
Higher education was beyond the means of the aver-
age family. Although most colleges charged less than
half the $55 tuition required by Harvard, that was still
too much for most families, wages being what they
were. So desperate was the shortage that colleges
accepted applicants as young as eleven and twelve and
as old as thirty.
Once enrolled, students had little worry about
making the grade, not least because grades were not
given. Since students were hard to come by and class-
work was considered relatively unimportant, disci-
pline was lax. Official authority was frequently
challenged, and rioting was known to break out over
such weighty matters as the quality of meals. A father
who visited his son’s college dormitory in 1818
found it inhabited by “half a dozen loungers in a state
of oriental lethargy, each stretched out upon two or
three chairs, with scarce any indication of life in them
[other] than the feeble effort to keep up the fire of
their cigars.”
The typical college curriculum, dominated by
the study of Latin and Greek, had almost no practi-
cal relevance except for future clergymen. The Yale
faculty, most of them ministers, defended the clas-
sics as admirably providing for both “the discipline
and the furniture of the mind,” but these subjects
commended themselves to college officials chiefly
because they did not require costly equipment or a
faculty that knew anything else. Professors spent
most of their time in and out of the classroom try-
ing to maintain a semblance of order, “to the exclu-
sion of any great literary undertakings to which
their choice might lead them,” one explained. “OurWatchtheVideoWatchtheVideo