Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Preface
- 1 Education and social change: Massachusetts as a case study
- 2 Trends in school attendance in nineteenth-century Massachusetts
- 3 From apron strings to ABCs: school entry in nineteenth-century Massachusetts
- 4 The prospects of youth: school leaving in eight Essex County towns
- 5 From one room to one system: the importance of rural–urban differences in nineteenth-century Massachusetts schooling
- 6 Education and social change in two nineteenth-century Massachusetts communities
- 7 Trends in educational funding and expenditures
- 8 The politics of educational reform in mid-nineteenth-century Massachusetts
- 9 Conclusion: the triumph of a state school system
- Appendix A Statistical tables
- Appendix B Definition of the variables contained in Tables A2.1 through A2.5, Appendix A
- Appendix C Discussion of adjustments, estimates, and extrapolations made in calculating Tables A2.1 through A2.5, Appendix A
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Education and social change in two nineteenth-century Massachusetts communities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Preface
- 1 Education and social change: Massachusetts as a case study
- 2 Trends in school attendance in nineteenth-century Massachusetts
- 3 From apron strings to ABCs: school entry in nineteenth-century Massachusetts
- 4 The prospects of youth: school leaving in eight Essex County towns
- 5 From one room to one system: the importance of rural–urban differences in nineteenth-century Massachusetts schooling
- 6 Education and social change in two nineteenth-century Massachusetts communities
- 7 Trends in educational funding and expenditures
- 8 The politics of educational reform in mid-nineteenth-century Massachusetts
- 9 Conclusion: the triumph of a state school system
- Appendix A Statistical tables
- Appendix B Definition of the variables contained in Tables A2.1 through A2.5, Appendix A
- Appendix C Discussion of adjustments, estimates, and extrapolations made in calculating Tables A2.1 through A2.5, Appendix A
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Introduction
Our analysis of some of the quantitative aspects of education in a large number of communities has afforded us the opportunity to be systematic and comparative within a particular historical setting. But at the same time, studying all the towns of Massachusetts, or even eight selected Essex County towns, makes it difficult to capture the unique quality and meaning of educational developments in those communities. For these same reasons, the traditional case study method has maintained its appeal and its usefulness in educational history, as in social history generally.
Because we, too, wished for contact with the complexities of the local situation, we chose to complement our quantitative study of education in the towns with detailed studies of two communities. The two we chose, Boxford and Lynn, seem to have been at opposite ends of the development spectrum in the Massachusetts context. Boxford was a relatively insular, rural community, with a struggling economy and a declining population, whereas Lynn was an expanding, bustling center of the shoe industry. Of course, there is no single rural–urban continuum that links population size to other indexes of change in a predictable way for individual communities. Boxford should not be considered representative of all rural communities, nor does Lynn establish an invariant urban pattern. Many small towns in Massachusetts, unlike Boxford, were growing, were adopting innovations, and were trying to boost their way into economic prosperity.
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- Education and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts , pp. 139 - 185Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1980