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AMERICAN POLITICAL ECONOMY AND THE COMMON SCHOOL MOVEMENT: 1820–1850

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2015

Joseph Persky
Joseph Persky*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, University of Illinois at Chicago.
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Abstract

Classical political economy in Great Britain was broadly supportive of education, but limited government’s role to modest assistance for charitable schools. The early classical economists in the United States, men like Thomas Cooper and Francis Wayland, in addition to supporting free trade, took this classical position with respect to education. But a more aggressive democratic claim was being advanced by the American common school movement and its supporters among Whig protectionists. The early economic tracts of William Jennison, Willard Phillips, Calvin Colton, and Henry Carey envisioned a larger role for government and advocated support for publicly financed common schools. Most notably, the leader of the common school movement, Horace Mann, built a defense for public financing based on a radical theory of property, derived from distinctly Puritan economic doctrine. If his radical positions received little support from post-Civil War mainstream economists, Mann’s practical advocacy of public taxation for public schools very much carried the day.

Type
Symposium: American Political Economy From the Age of Jackson to the Civil War
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , June 2015 , pp. 247 - 262
Copyright
Copyright © The History of Economics Society 2015 

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