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Birth of a Canon: The Historiography of Early Republican Educational Thought

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Siobhan Moroney*
Affiliation:
Lake Forest College

Extract

What we choose to read from the past matters enormously in how we assess history. Many of the most serious debates about the revolutionary and founding eras of the United States hinge on texts, and if some historians have revised their interpretations of American history it is in no small part due to the reevaluation of the relative importance of one set of writings against another. In the last three decades we have seen many texts move from background to foreground, from Bernard Bailyn's exhaustive study of revolutionary pamphlets which challenged the conventional wisdom that the revolution was an exclusively Lockean enterprise to Pauline Maier's recent look at the Declaration of Independence, situating that document in the context of the many, many declarations of independence put forward before July of 1776 and challenging prevailing assumptions about the intellectual influences on the colonies’ break with England. These endeavors reveal the human touch in historiography because it is always the decision of individual scholars to point our attention to recently discovered or newly reinterpreted texts.

Type
Historiographical Essay
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by the History of Education Society 

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References

1 Rush, BenjaminThoughts upon the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic,“ in Essays on Education in the Early Republic, ed. Rudolph, Frederick (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 17.Google Scholar

2 Webster, Noah, “On the Education of Youth in America,“ in Rudolph, Essays on Education, 56.Google Scholar

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4 Cremin, Lawrence, The Wonderful World of Ellwood Patterson Cubberley (New York: Teachers College Press, 1965).Google Scholar

5 Hansen, Allan Oscar, Liberalism and American Education in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Octagon Books, 1977).Google Scholar

6 Ibid., 44–5.Google Scholar

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10 Godwin, William is an unusual choice given the wide array of thinkers whose ideas better reflected liberalism, for Godwin wrote only at the end of the century. Other significant British liberals, including those of the late seventeenth century, receive only the briefest treatment. Using Rousseau is equally problematic. Hansen described Rousseau as progressive, supportive of progress through science and an advocate of public and universal education, an interpretation he culled from The Social Contract. This interpretation falls apart, however, when Discourse on the Arts and Sciences and Entile are also considered. As to Rousseau's influence in America, Hansen grossly overemphasized its impact. For a more accurate reading of Rousseau's influence on the colonies and new republic, see Spurlin, Paul Merrill Rousseau in America, 1760–1809 (University: University of Alabama Press, 1969).Google Scholar

11 Hansen chose Paine for his articulation, in plain language, of the revolutionaries’ principles, his connection to England, and his anticipation of a social revolution which would accompany the political one. Liberalism and American Education, 22, n.Google Scholar

12 Ibid., xxii.Google Scholar

13 Webster, Noah writing as “A Hawk,” “Education,” American Magazine December 1787 through May 1788.Google Scholar

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62 Hansen received his Ph.D. in 1926 from Teachers College, Columbia University at that time, arguably, the center of history of education scholarship in the United States. Hansen and Cubberley shared—albeit 20 years apart—a thesis director in Paul Monroe. For the influence of both Columbia and Monroe, see Cremin, The Wonderful World of Ellwood Patterson Cubberley.Google Scholar