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Ideology and American Educational History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Carl F. Kaestle
Carl F. Kaestle*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin
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Extract

The ideological atmosphere has been highly charged recently in the study of American educational history. Hot debates center on the altruistic or self-serving motives of public school reformers, the liberating or oppressive effects of schools, and the relationship of educational history to present policy. Historians of American education are often most readily identified by ideological labels like “radical” or “Whig”. Thus it seems incongruous to me that members of this subfield have paid so little systematic attention to the ideology of the people we write about, and in particular, to the ideology of school reformers. This inattention to the concept of ideology and to the substance of particular ideologies is true of American social historians in general, with some important exceptions. Most often, one encounters the term in a casual reference, where the writer has apparently taken for granted the meaning of the term and the constituency of the ideology mentioned. Nancy Cott refers variously to “early nineteenth-century ideology”, to “ideology in reawakened Protestantism,” and to “nineteenth-century sexual ideology.” Linda Kerber refers to “republican ideology” without defining either term, and Stephen Thernstrom refers not only to the “ideology of mobility” on which he focused, but to a “total reigning ideology,” of which it was a part.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , Summer 1982 , pp. 123 - 137
Copyright
Copyright © 1982 by History of Education Society 

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References

Notes

For helpful criticisms of earlier drafts of this paper I wish to thank members attending a seminar I presented of the Adelaide Social History Group in July, 1981, especially Donald DeBats, Paul Bourke, and Pavla Miller of Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia; also seminar members at Faculty of Education, Monash University, Melbourne, and members responding to the version presented at the History of Education Society meetings in Pittsburgh. Others who have commented include Michael Apple, JoAnne Brown, Francis Schrae and Maris Vinovskis. Because no one would wish his name linked to someone else's pronouncements on this knotty subject, I absolve all named and unnamed critics of any responsibility for the result.Google Scholar

1. Cott, Nancy, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman's Sphere” in New England (New Haven, 1977), p. 189; Kerber, Linda K., Women of the Republic: Intellect & Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, 1980), p. 7 and passim; Thernstrom, Stephen, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century City (Cambridge, 1964), p. 251.Google Scholar

2. Higham, John, “Hanging Together: Divergent Unities in American History,” Journal of American History 61 (06. 1974); Foner, Eric, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (New York, 1970); Bailyn, Bernard, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, 1967); Wood, Gordon S., The Creation of the American Republic 1776–1787) (Chapel Hill, 1969); Curti, Merle, The Social Ideas of American Educators (New York, 1935); Howe, Daniel W., The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago, 1979).Google Scholar

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5. Seliger, Martin, Ideology and Politics (London, 1976), p. 7; see also Seliger, Martin, The Marxist Conception of Ideology: A Critical Essay (London, 1977).Google Scholar

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13. I explain and illustrate these propositions in my Education and the New Republic: Common Schooling and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York, forthcoming)Google Scholar

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17. See Montgomery, David, “Worker's Control of Machine Production in the Nineteenth-Century,” Labor History, 17 (Fall, 1976): 485–509; and Dawley, Alan and Faler, Paul, “Working-Class Culture and Politics in the Industrial Revolution: Sources of Loyalism and Rebellion,” Journal of Social History, 9 (June, 1976): 466–480. On England see Bailey, Peter, “‘Will the Real Bill Banks Please Stand Up?’ Towards a Role Analysis of Mid-Victorian Working-Class Respectability,” Journal of Social History, 12 (Spring, 1979): 336–353, and the works cited there.Google Scholar

18. Gramsci, Antonio, The Modern Prince , excerpted in Hoare, Quintin and Smith, Geoffrey N., trans and ed., Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (London, 1971), pp. 180–181.Google Scholar

19. Laqueur, Thomas, Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture, 1780–1850 (New Haven, 1976), p. 239.Google Scholar

20. Kaestle, , Education and the New Republic.Google Scholar

21. Hillard, George S., quoted in Twisleton, Edward, Evidence as to the Religious Working of the Common Schools in the State of Massachusetts (London, 1854), p. 59.Google Scholar

22. King, Thomas S., The Railroad Jubilee: Two Discourses delivered in Hollis Street Meeting House (Boston, 1851), p. 17 Google Scholar

23. Draper, Lyman, Annual Report of the Superintendent of Common Schools (Madison, Wisconsin, 1858); Bushnell, Horace, quoted in Cross, Barbara, Horace Bushnell: Minister to a Changing America (Chicago, 1958), pp. 39–40.Google Scholar

24. Owen, Robert Dale, in The Free Enquirer, November 14, 1829, quoted in Waterman, William R., Frances Wright (New York, 1924), p. 207.Google Scholar

25. Waterman, , Francis Wright, pp. 184, 193.Google Scholar

26. Barnard, Henry, “Introduction,” in Philobiblius [Brackett, Linus P.], History and Progress of Education (New York, 1859), p. 17.Google Scholar