The Teacher Wars (5 page)

Considering the limited funds available to the Massachusetts Board of Education, Mann decided to focus on two projects: first, making sure each district school was equipped with at least a rudimentary library, and second, opening Prussian-style normal schools to train teachers. His hopes for these new teacher training academies were nearly ecstatic: “
I believe Normal schools to be a new instrumentality in the advancement of the race,” he wrote.
By 1840 Mann had opened three normal schools, and by 1870, twenty-two states had followed suit. The best early normal school was probably the very first, in Lexington, Massachusetts (now Framingham State College). Unlike Prussian normal schools, it was open only to female applicants because they would be cheaper than men for the state to employ as teachers. The normalites were supposed to spend three years taking classes in algebra, moral philosophy, and “the art of teaching.” They practiced their skills in a model classroom, with thirty real students between the ages of six and ten. A celebrated veteran teacher named Cyrus Peirce was the principal of the program. He described in his journal how he helped the apprentice teachers learn their craft:

It is uncanny how this routine describes today's acknowledged best practices in teacher training and professional development,
with a mentor teacher acting as a thoughtful instructional coach. Alas, most normal schools across the United States had little of the curricular rigor of the Lexington normal school and were especially lacking in opportunities to practice teaching in real-world conditions. Up through the early twentieth century, normals were considered an alternative to academic high school or college, with far less prestige. They enrolled many young girls who were straight out of primary school themselves, with the equivalent of just a sixth- or seventh-grade education. Between the 1920s and 1960s, as the high school diploma became more universal and states passed laws requiring teachers to earn bachelor's degrees, often in education,
many normal schools transitioned into regional state colleges with lower admissions standards than flagship state universities.
Most American teachers continue to enter the classroom after studying education at the undergraduate level at nonselective colleges. In many ways, we are still living with the teacher training system the common schools movement created.

By the early 1840s, four times as many new Massachusetts teachers were female than male. Not everyone was happy about this shift. The Boston masters, an association of university-educated male high school teachers, complained that bringing normal school alumnae into the classroom would weaken academic standards and school discipline, and that adolescent boys would run amok. Mann responded by adopting the ideas of his old acquaintance Catharine Beecher, offering both pragmatic and idealistic arguments for employing female teachers.
In his eleventh annual report as secretary of education, he noted that replacing male teachers with women had saved the state $11,000, which was “double the expense of the three State Normal Schools.” Hence—a bargain for taxpayers! Mann depicted these cost-effective female educators as angelic public servants motivated by Christian faith; wholly unselfish, self-abnegating, and morally pure. He said that careers in politics, the military, and journalism ought to remain closed to women, who were too innocent to wade into those “black and sulfurous” spheres. Teaching, Mann argued, was woman's true calling, one that would
take advantage of all her natural, God-given talents as a nurturer, whether or not she had biological children of her own:

Mann's descriptions of the perfect female teacher sounded very much like his eulogies of his late wife, Charlotte, whom he mourned acutely for nearly a decade after her death at the age of twenty-three, just two years after their wedding. In an early letter to Mary Peabody, who would become his second wife, Mann wrote that Charlotte had “
purified my conceptions of purity and beautified the ideal of every excellence … Her sympathy with others [
sic
] pain seemed to be quicker and stronger than the sensation of her own; and with a sensibility that would sigh at a crushed flower, there was a spirit of endurance, that would uphold a martyr.”

This rose-tinged conception of women teachers' virtue spread from Horace Mann and Catharine Beecher throughout the common schools movement. An 1842 manual for local schools produced by an anonymous New York philanthropist was unapologetic about promoting female teachers as
the cornerstone of “a cheap system,” positing that the most talented women would be willing to work for half of what men of the “poorest capacity” would demand. But the authors made sure to add that “women have a native tact in the management of very young minds which is rarely possessed by men … they have a peculiar power of awakening the sympathies of children, and inspiring them with a desire to excel.”

Given widespread nineteenth-century assumptions about women's lack of intellectual capacity, there was an explicit connection between the promotion of non-college-educated female teachers and the idea, influenced by phrenology, that American public schools should focus more on developing children's character than on increasing their academic knowledge beyond basic literacy and numeracy. Although both Mann and Beecher had enjoyed studying
Latin, Greek, and the sciences, their public pronouncements on education rarely devoted much attention to the academic curriculum, especially from the 1840s forward, as the common schools movement began to attract more support from influential politicians and business leaders, the kind of men more concerned with educating the next generation of voters and workers than in fostering intellectuals. Early in her career at the Hartford Female Seminary, Beecher had fought to win for elite young women access to the classical liberal arts curriculum. But when it came to setting the agenda for public schools for the masses, she seemed to feel differently about what the purposes of an education should be. “
Education in this country will never reach its highest end,” she wrote in her autobiography, “till the care of the physical, social, and moral interests shall take precedence of mere intellectual development and acquirements.” Mann agreed. “
The teaching of A, B, C, and the multiplication table has no quality of sacredness in it,” he said in an 1839 lecture. Instead, the purpose of schooling was to lead students' “
affections outward in good-will towards men, and upward in reverence to God.”

This value system, in which morality was given more weight than intellect, set the new American public school system apart from some of its Western European counterparts.
Between 1830 and 1900, the American teacher corps feminized much faster than did the teaching forces in Germany or France, which remained about 50 percent male. Prussia's comparatively generous teacher pay and pensions, as well as gender-segregated schools,
helped keep men in the classroom (since boys' schools were more attractive to male teachers). In France, an additional factor was at play: the government's insistence that public schools maintain rigorous liberal arts standards. For the French philosopher Victor Cousin, the one failing of the Prussian system was that it was more concerned with imparting religiosity than with teaching secular knowledge of languages, literature, and history. “
Classical studies,” Cousin wrote, “keep alive the sacred tradition of the moral and intellectual life of the human race. To curtail or enfeeble such studies would, in my eyes, be an act of barbarism, a crime against all true and high civilization, and in some sort an act of high treason against humanity.”

Horace Mann referred to this intellectual critique of moral
schooling as “
the European fallacy.” He considered a French-style liberal arts education irrelevant to the masses in a popular democracy, where the most important task facing any man was, as a voter, to assess the moral character of candidates for political office. As he aged, the leader of the common schools movement grew increasingly anti-intellectual in his worldview. His scorn for Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of
The Scarlet Letter
and one of the first truly great American writers, is evidence of this trait in full flower. Mann haughtily disapproved of Hawthorne, a bohemian who was in love with Mary Peabody Mann's younger sister, Sophia. The young couple scandalized Boston society by reputedly lying in bed together (albeit fully clothed) before they were married. In a letter to a friend, Mann confessed that he did not understand Hawthorne's writing, adding, “
I should rather have built up the blind asylum than to have written
Hamlet
.” This view of art and social good as in opposition to each other—with intellectual pursuits coded as somewhat decadent—contained more than a kernel of the Puritan ideology Mann believed he had rejected in his adolescence.

In the late 1830s, Mann and Catharine Beecher began to carry on an occasional correspondence about Beecher's newest project, the
Board of National Popular Education. The Board, a sort of prototype of Teach for America, would make Beecher's vision of a corps of “missionary” female teachers a reality. It aimed to locate well-bred, evangelical young women from the Northeast and send them west to open frontier schools. It took Beecher until 1847 to raise enough philanthropic funds to recruit the Board's first class of seventy volunteer teachers. In their month-long training, conducted by Beecher, the women learned some basic pedagogy, were warned about the primitive living conditions in the West, and, most of all, were encouraged to act as “a new source of moral power” in frontier communities. If no Protestant Sunday school existed in their settlements, they were expected to establish one, in addition to teaching secular school during the week.

The
young women were dispatched to Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Conditions
in the territories were difficult, and during the first decade of this work,
twenty-one teachers died. Some
recruits found that despite their best intentions, communities were too poor to build schoolhouses or heat them in the winter. Some parents objected to religious proselytizing by Board recruits, and others complained that the young women had too little teaching experience. One recruit became the only teacher in a rural school serving children aged five through seventeen. “
Not one can read intelligibly,” she lamented in a letter to Beecher. “They have no idea of the proprieties of the school-room or of study, and I am often at a loss to know what to do for them.… Though it is winter, some are without stockings and no shoes.”

Recruits boarded with local families and shared bedrooms with their students. There was little privacy, and sometimes not even candlelight or basic sanitation. Yet many of the teachers remained grateful for the opportunity and experienced modest success. One recruit reported that she was teaching forty-five students in a “small log house … The people here are
very
ignorant; very few of them can either read or write, but they wish to have their children taught.” Religion sustained these young women. A recruit who taught both secular and Sunday school in Minnesota wrote to Beecher that despite being broke and suffering from a two-month fever, “the refinements of society, the wealth or honor of earth, cannot attract me from this isolated spot so long as God has work for me here. I have never had the first regret at having come.”

After rebelling against the harsh Calvinism of their parents, the tightly knit first generation of American education reformers tended to see schools as secular churches: community centers where any child could be improved—even religiously “saved”—through education. Mann and Beecher believed it was more important to teach a child good deeds than good doctrine; to focus less on the details of literature or mathematics than to create faithful, decent, socially adept young men and women—people who would resist the mob rule represented by the French Revolution and the Ursuline convent arson. Teaching was promoted as the female equivalent of the ministry:
a profession whose prestige would be rooted not in worldly rewards, such as money or political influence, but in the personal satisfaction that came from serving others.

Yet during an era of deep bias against women's intellectual and professional capabilities, the feminization of teaching wrought by the common schoolers carried an enormous cost: Teaching became understood less as a career than as a philanthropic vocation or romantic calling. The common schools movement succeeded in attracting political support in part because of its emphasis on accessible moral education over more academic concerns. But this left a number of important educational problems unresolved. Should schools prepare students for particular occupations, or give all children the exact same education? If teachers were expected to be the chief architects of their pupils' moral lives, what implications did this have for the role of parents—and was it reasonable to expect the influence of teachers to outweigh the influence of the family? How would common schools founded as purveyors of WASP morality deal with increasingly diverse student populations, soon not only Catholics but free blacks and immigrant Jews as well?