The Teacher Wars (4 page)

Just a year after her fiancé's death, Beecher began to put her new theories into practice. In 1823 she deployed her father's social connections to establish the Hartford Female Seminary, and within a year had attracted a hundred students from throughout the eastern United States and as far away as Canada, many of whom hoped to become teachers. Beecher's school embraced a level of academic rigor unheard of at elite girls' academies of the period; students took classes in Latin, Greek, algebra, chemistry, modern languages, and moral and political philosophy. Beecher opposed rote memorization and overt academic competition; her school gave out no awards, which she believed inflated students' vanity when they should be motivated to learn by simple love for God, their parents, and their
country. Beecher believed in hands-on learning, through field trips and science experiments. Her educational philosophy was far ahead of its time. It would be another seventy years before John Dewey would famously articulate similar notions about teaching the “whole child.” Some of the school's graduates launched new schools based on Beecher's ideas.

The Hartford Female Seminary was controversial. Some local parents objected to the teaching of classics, which they believed inflated their daughters' expectations beyond reason, since these girls were likely to lead rather monotonous, domestic lives as wives and mothers. “I would rather my daughters would go to school and sit down and do nothing than to study philosophy,” one father wrote in a letter to the
Connecticut Courant
newspaper. “
These branches fill young Misses with vanity to the degree that they are above attending to the more useful parts of an education.”

In her 1827 essay “Female Education,” Beecher responded directly to such critics, rejecting the conventional wisdom that the only reason for a girl to attend school was to refine her deportment in order to snare a husband. “
A lady should study, not to
shine
, but to
act
,” she wrote. “She is to read books, not to talk of them, but to bring the improvement they furnish.… The great uses of study are to enable her to regulate her own mind and to be useful to others,” primarily as a teacher.

Beecher and her school attracted so much attention that by the late 1820s she was spending almost no time teaching and was instead traveling the nation on the lecture circuit, speaking to ladies' church groups and at libraries and social clubs. She had become America's first media darling school reformer. By this time, Beecher had declared she would never marry. She lived during a cultural moment of high anxiety about the proper role for unmarried women—“old maids” who, without husbands or children, were often thought to be unable to contribute productively to society. In her speeches, she would cite U.S.
Census figures showing that there were 14,000 more unmarried women than unmarried men in the Northeast. At least one-quarter of these single women, Beecher guessed, might want to become “missionary teachers,” migrating west to educate the two million “ignorant and neglected American children” of the frontier,
whose parents presumably lacked the educational commitment of the New England elite and needed to be prodded into establishing village schools.

Well before most states or territories began raising taxes to fund education, Beecher summoned up the terrifying specter of the French Revolution to make the argument for universal schooling. In her speech “The Duty of American Women to Their Country,” she described education provided by female teachers as the best bulwark against a violent uprising by the underclass.
The French Revolution, she warned, had been “a war of the common people upon the classes above them” in which “the wealthy, educated, and noble are down” while “the poor, the ignorant, the base hold the offices, wealth, and power. Everything is mismanaged. Everything goes wrong.” Beecher had imagined a way for elite young women to go west, not as wives or mothers, but with a patriotic duty to their young, expanding nation—to educate the masses for democracy. These lady teachers would be motivated by “
energy, discretion, and self-denying benevolence,” she said, taking inspiration from Catholic nuns. With teaching as an option, Beecher argued, women could choose to marry only if they fell in love, not because marriage was the only socially acceptable role.

It was radical to suggest women should teach in co-ed schools. In the early nineteenth century, only
10 percent of American women worked outside the home. Because the assumption was that public work of any kind was degrading to a middle-class woman, Beecher had to make the case that opening the teaching profession to women would be good for students and society—not just for the women themselves. Women, she posited, would make better teachers than the men currently presiding over most classrooms. In fact, she helped ignite a moral panic about male teachers. In her famous 1846 lecture, “The Evils Suffered by American Women and American Children,” she enthusiastically cited a New York State report on local schools that called male teachers “incompetent” and “intemperate … coarse, hard, unfeeling men, too lazy or stupid” to be entrusted with the care of children. Ichabod Crane, the protagonist of Washington Irving's 1820 classic short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” epitomized the type. Described as a sort of well-intentioned petty
tyrant lording it over the children at a poorly maintained single-room schoolhouse through the generous use of a birch rod, Crane is “tarrying” away his youth before, he assumes, beginning a more illustrious career. He fancies himself an intellectual, but in truth, the schoolmaster is a superstitious simpleton.

Pious young women seemed preferable to the hapless Ichabod Cranes of the world. “
I simply ask,” Beecher said, “if it would not be better to put the thousands of men who are keeping school for young children into the mills, and employ the women to train the children?” There was another argument, too. Female workers were cheap. Beecher openly pitched hiring female teachers as a potential money-saving strategy for state and local governments launching compulsory schooling for the first time. “
[A] woman needs support only for herself” while “a man requires support for himself and a family,” she wrote, appealing to the stereotype that women with families did not do wage-earning work—a false assumption even in the early nineteenth century, when many working-class wives and mothers labored on family farms or took in laundry and sewing to make ends meet. Black women almost universally worked, whether as slaves in the South or as domestic servants or laundresses in the North. What was truly new about Beecher's conception of teaching was that it pushed middle-class white women, in particular, into public view as workers outside the home.

Male teachers of this period may have been less cruel or stupid than frustrated. They were struggling with educational neglect, such as the short school year and lack of funding for decent classrooms and school supplies. Many promising young men of Beecher's generation tried teaching school but quickly became disgruntled by the conditions under which they were forced to work—conditions that Beecher, who attended and then taught in elite private schools, never experienced firsthand. At the age of eighteen, Herman Melville spent a winter as a teacher in a remote part of rural Massachusetts, wrangling thirty poorly behaved students of every age and size, all of them crammed into a one-room schoolhouse that had no supplies, tiny windows, and bad ventilation. He boarded with a local family and earned $11 per month, about the same salary as a farm laborer and half that of a skilled mechanic. These conditions
left
Melville “anxious for some other occupation,” he admitted.
Henry David Thoreau found his two weeks teaching public school in Canton, Massachusetts, so bleak that he concluded that classroom education—as opposed to education from “real life”—was almost always a futile effort, one in which children were subject to “the process, not of enlightening, but of obfuscating the mind.”

As much as men were frustrated with the working conditions in schools, such concerns were not the real reason the profession transitioned from college-educated males toward the young female moral educators envisioned by Catharine Beecher. Antitax sentiment played a more important role, as did the political evolution and influence of Horace Mann.

In the years after Horace Mann left Litchfield, he established a successful legal practice, and in 1827 he was elected to the lower house of the Massachusetts legislature. As part of the political movement that would become the Whig Party—a marriage between social liberals and fiscally cautious northeastern business interests—Mann supported the establishment of insane asylums and schools for the blind and deaf. He was a critic of the death penalty and wanted to shut down lotteries, which he considered unchristian. On August 11 and 12, 1834, an anti-Catholic mob torched an Ursuline convent and school in Charlestown, Massachusetts, burning it to the ground. Mann was appointed to lead a citizens committee investigating what he called the “
horrible outrage” of the arson. Several months after this high-profile assignment, Mann was elected to the state senate. He had patrons in the railroad industry, as well as political support from Boston intellectuals, so he focused on social issues around which these two constituencies could converge, especially education.

Mann had become a devotee of phrenology, the analysis of people's physical characteristics, especially the sizes and shapes of their heads, in order to determine their moral and intellectual nature.
Phrenologists like the Scottish philosopher George Combe (after whom Mann named one of his sons) characterized Mediterraneans as hotheaded and lazy, blacks as brutish, and northern Europeans
as hardworking and intelligent. During the nineteenth century, phrenology was considered a progressive ideology. Its proponents believed that each individual's deficiencies could be identified, then ameliorated through schooling; these methods, it was thought, would eradicate poverty and crime in just a few generations.

Mann found phrenology appealing, in part as a replacement for religious doctrine. When he was a young teenager,
his brother Stephen drowned horsing around in a local pond, where he was playing hooky when he was supposed to have been in church. The next Sunday the town preacher, a fire-and-brimstone Calvinist, sermonized on the incident, warning the children of Franklin that they too would die and suffer in eternal hell if they sinned as Stephen Mann had. Sitting in the pews that day were Horace, his two surviving siblings, and their mother, who during the sermon let out an audible groan of pain. Horace Mann never forgot the preacher's act of cruelty toward his grieving family, and, like Catharine Beecher, struggled to accept Puritan notions of predestination and original sin, with their implication that people could not improve themselves.

Unlike strict Puritanism, phrenology held that individuals—even the poor, the drunk, or the criminal, like those who perpetrated the convent arson—could save themselves through education. If that was true, Mann the politician could promote funding schools as the primary means of improving society, while overlooking more controversial interventions. Biographer Jonathan Messerli writes that as Mann became more and more fascinated by school reform, he largely ignored his colleagues in the state legislature who called for regulating the free market more aggressively, through preventing industrialists from seizing public land, establishing monopolies, and paying low wages. Of course, the miseries of nineteenth-century poverty had as much to do with dismal working conditions and low pay as with lack of schooling. Historian Arthur Schlesinger called Mann's impulse “
moral reform.” Whigs, Schlesinger stated, “saw things simply. They ignored the relationship between ethical conduct and the social setting,” and believed social improvement was “a personal problem” more than an economic or structural one.

In 1837 Mann helped lead a Whig push to establish a state board of education to oversee local schools and require compulsory
enrollment for all children. This was the flowering of the national common schools movement, a state-by-state effort to fund universal elementary education. From the state senate floor, Mann asked his fellow legislators to commit $2 million to achieve these goals, arguing that through education “[t]hose orders and conditions of life among us now stamped with inferiority are capable of rising to the common level, and of ascending if that level ascends.” He complained that Bostonians had paid a collective $50,000 for tickets to see the European ballerina Fanny Elssler, known “for
the scantiness of her wardrobe.” This was the same amount of money, total, paid to Massachusetts teachers each year. What did society value more—salacious dancing or schools?

The legislature appropriated $1 million for the new board of education, half of what Mann asked for. This was an early lesson in the broad appeal of the common schools movement—as long as costs could be contained. Mann left the state senate to become Massachusetts's secretary of education, the first such position in the United States. Overflowing with enthusiasm for his new position, he undertook a self-guided study of the most important educational theories then circulating in the Western world. Like many American reformers, he was intrigued by the French philosopher Victor Cousin's 1831 report on Prussian public schools. With the goal of creating a unified, educated, and—above all—morally superior citizenry, the Prussian monarchy had prioritized improving the quality of its teacher corps. In 1811 Prussia issued a decree banning teachers from holding secondary jobs and discouraging the practice of teachers boarding with local families, which the government thought compromised teachers' dignity. (Both of these remained common practices in the United States well into the twentieth century.) By 1819, Prussian law guaranteed teachers a living wage and a pension paid to their families after their deaths.
Schoolhouses were to be “properly laid out, kept in repair and warmed,” and local governments were required to provide “furniture, books, pictures, instruments, and all things necessary for the lessons and exercises.” To train teachers,
Prussia established normal schools, which admitted both male and female students between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, called normalites. They spent two years studying pedagogy
and the subjects they would teach, and then passed a third year as an apprentice teacher in a real school.