The Teacher Wars PDF

# The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession ## First Anchor Books Edition, August 2015 **Copyright © 2014 by Dana Goldstein** *All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada...

# The Teacher Wars: A History of America's Most Embattled Profession ## First Anchor Books Edition, August 2015 **Copyright © 2014 by Dana Goldstein** *All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2014. Some reporting in chapters 9 and 10 originally appeared in The American Prospect, Slate, The Daily Beast, The Nation, and Zócalo Public Square. Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.* ## The Library of Congress has cataloged the Doubleday edition as follows: Goldstein, Dana. *The teacher wars: a history of America's most embattled profession / Dana Goldstein. First Edition.* *pages cm* 1. Teaching-United States-History. 2. Teachers-Professional relationships-United States-History. 3. Public schools-United States-History. 4. Educational change-United States-History. I. Title. LA212.G65 2014 371.1020973-dc23 2014007024 **Anchor Books Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-345-80362-7** **eBook ISBN: 978-0-385-53696-7** *Author photograph Michael Lionstar* *Book design by Maria Carella* *www.anchorbooks.com* *Printed in the United States of America* *10 9 8* ## To My Parents, Laura Greene and Steven Goldstein ## Chapter One: "Missionary Teachers" - **The Common Schools Movement and the Feminization of American Teaching** In 1815 a religious revival swept the Litchfield Female Academy, a private school in a genteel Connecticut town. - in those years, there were few truly "public" schools in the United States. The U.S. Constitution did not mention education as a right (it still doesn't) and school attendance was not compulsory. Schools were generally organized by town councils, local churches, urban charitable societies or in more remote parts of the country - ad hoc groups of neighbors. A mix of tuition payments and local tax dollars supported the schools. - Two-thirds of American students attended one-room schoolhouses, where as many as seventy children from age five through sixteen were educated together, usually by just one overwhelmed schoolteacher, who was nearly always male. School was held only twelve weeks per year, six in the summer and six in the winter. There were rarely any textbooks on hand, and the most frequent assignment was to memorize and recite Bible passages. Naughty children were whipped or made to sit in the corner wearing a dunce cap. - At Litchfield, a relative island of privilege, girl after girl loudly and publicly achieved the state of "conversion" expected of all fervent Calvinists, a transcendent, nearly manic period in which God's plan for one's life would be revealed, setting an individual upon her predestined path toward heaven. Conversion tended to be catching, like the flu. But fourteen-year-old Catharine Beecher refused to convert. This made her conspicuous, because she was the daughter of a celebrity preacher. ## Her father, Lyman Beecher, first came to the public's attention after he delivered a passionate sermon against dueling in the wake of Alexander Hamilton's death in 1804 at the hands of Aaron Burr. - He cast himself as a moral compass on matters both religious and secular. In sermons and articles, he opposed Catholic immigration and the spread of liberal Unitarianism, supported the gradual elimination of slavery and the re-colonization of black Americans to Africa, and celebrated American expansion into the West as a sign that God intended the Protestant United States to lead as a light to the nations – a phrase he borrowed from the prophet Isaiah. In 1830 he would speak out against President Andrew Jackson's brutal relocation of Native American families from the Southeast to land west of the Mississippi River. - Those views were fairly liberal for their time. Lyman Beecher's faith was not. He preached predestination, the doctrine that holds that a baby is fated from birth for either salvation or damnation, and that his deeds on earth can hardly change the outcome. In riveting sermons, Beecher would sketch a vivid portrait of the death and perdition of sinners, their brows sweating and extremities growing cold as they sunk down to hell. - Catharine Beecher hated disappointing her father, to whom she was very close. He would even boast that Catharine was "the best boy he had" – quite a statement coming from a man with seven sons! But she found Bible study "irksome and disagreeable" and chafed against the notion of original sin. How could an unformed child be guilty of all of humanity's past corruptions? She was far more passionate about poetry than religion; several of her verses were published in journals while she was still a teenager. She earned every academic distinction and then took up the only job considered socially respectable for a young woman of her class: She worked as a finishing school teacher of the "domestic arts" – needlepoint, knitting, piano playing, and painting. In truth, Catharine hated those feminine pastimes. She would later lament the "mournful, despairing hours" she had once devoted to such activities, which were thought to raise a girl's value on the marriage market. But for Catharine, wage earning was an important goal, at least until marriage. Her mother had died when she was sixteen, and Lyman Beecher quickly remarried. The preacher had a dozen younger children to support, including the future author of *Uncle Tom's Cabin,* Harriet Beecher Stowe. ## At a party in the spring of 1822 when Catharine Beecher was twenty-one years old, she met Horace Mann. - He had grown up on a farm in Franklin, Massachusetts, southwest of Boston, and was at the time a twenty-six-year-old law student in Litchfield, rumored to have political ambitions. Mann had already heard of Beecher: She was the famous preacher's iconoclastic daughter, and a published poet, too. Up to this point in his life, Mann, though tall and handsome, had demonstrated almost no interest in women, even pretty ones. (His roommate at Brown University would recall Mann as someone so self-serious that he had committed "not a single instance" of youthful misbehavior.) But Beecher was different. With tightly wound curls framing a square-jawed face, she conveyed a certain harshness, which she had inherited from her father. The young teacher was fascinating not because she was beautiful, but because she was intelligent. - Beecher and Mann traded thoughts that evening on the romantic novels of Sir Walter Scott; later Mann regretted that the conversation had produced only "truisms" on his part, nothing at all "tremendous" to demonstrate the depth of his ideas. But no matter, for Beecher was already engaged to a far more accomplished man: Alexander Metcalf Fisher, a math prodigy who at the age of twenty-four had become Yale's youngest-ever tenured professor, and had already written several well-regarded textbooks. Fisher had grown up a few farms away from Mann in Franklin, and Mann gossiped in a letter home to his sister that Beecher "is reputed a lady of superior intellect" and would "probably make the Professor a very good help-mate." - Impressed as he was with Beecher, Mann had underestimated her. She was destined not to be a housewife, but to assume her father's mantle as a leading public intellectual. Together, she and Horace Mann would define public education as America's new, more gentle church, and female teachers as the ministers of American morality. ## Less than two weeks after Beecher met Mann, her fiancé drowned in a shipwreck off the coast of Ireland. - Fisher had been on his way to Europe for a yearlong tour of the continent's universities, to study alongside the leading scientists of the day. They had planned to marry the following spring. Now Beecher's future was uncertain. *I lie down in sorrow and awake in heaviness, and go mourning all day long,* she wrote. Following several months of confinement in her father's home, she fled to the Fisher family farm in Franklin. Alexander's parents asked if Beecher might tutor their younger children, a teenage boy and two small girls, who had lost not only their beloved eldest brother, but also their academic mentor. ## Upon her arrival, a depressed Beecher retreated to the Fisher attic, where she searched obsessively through her dead fiancé's diaries and letters. - She was surprised by what she found. The couple's courtship had been stilted and almost all their time together chaperoned. It turned out she had not known her fiancé very well at all. Alexander Fisher's diaries laid bare a tortured soul who, at the age of nineteen, endured a case of "delirium," so torn was he between the obligations of religion and his attraction to his true passions, math and science. During this episode, Fisher suffered from delusions of grandiosity, believing he could deploy mathematical problem solving to save the universe from sudden destruction. When the mania passed, Fisher returned to his scientific studies at Yale, chiding himself for a lack of religious faith, which he described as "an incapacity of making moral truth the subject of steady contemplation." Like Beecher, Fisher had devoted years of tedious Sundays to devotional study, only to regretfully conclude in 1819, when he was a professor, that his spiritual life was "a blank," and he would never achieve conversion. Around this time, he stopped keeping a journal and devoted himself full-time to planning lessons, writing textbooks, and counseling his Yale students. - Beecher was moved by Fisher's frustrations with traditional religion--so similar to her own--and by his eventual decision to commit himself fully to a career as a scholar and teacher. She felt certain, for the first time in her young life, that predestination was false. Fisher had been a good man – a saved man – not because he had converted, but because he had done good in his life. Beecher wrote to her father: "The heart must have something to rest upon, and if it is not God, it will be the world." ## Beecher's new conviction that public works could serve society as well as private faith set her off on a career in education. - As a girl, she had been denied the academic opportunities granted to Fisher to study classical languages, master higher-order mathematics, and immerse herself in contemporary political thought. The Litchfield Female Academy had been organized around religious piety, public shaming, and social positioning. Each morning, the students would queue up to submit to a barrage of leading questions posed by the commanding headmistress: Have you been patient in acquiring your lessons? Have you spoken any indecent word or by any action discovered a want of feminine delicacy? Have you combed your hair with a fine-tooth comb and cleaned your teeth every morning? Have you eaten any green fruit during the week? Every girl was required to keep a daily journal of her spiritual faults; entries notable for either their righteousness or depravity were read aloud to a Saturday morning general assembly with names attached. The school's pedagogical techniques were stultifying, and entirely typical of the era. In class, the headmistress merely read aloud to her pupils: for homework, the girls regurgitated in their journals all the trivia they could remember: the longitudes and latitudes of various countries, the dates of major battles, the lineages of British kings. Math instruction ceased before algebra or trigonometry, while chemistry and physics were neglected entirely. - Poring over Fisher's notebooks and lesson plans, Beecher was exposed for the first time to philosophy and logic. With guidance from her younger brother Edward, who had been educated at Andover and Yale, she was able to grasp the challenging material quickly and impart it to her pupils. Didn't all girls deserve the opportunity Beecher was now offering Fisher's sisters to undertake broad intellectual pursuits? And if Beecher could successfully learn and teach serious subject matter – not just the "domestic arts" – why couldn't other smart young women? - Most crucially for the history of American education, Beecher came to believe that women were likely to be the most effective teachers not only of girls, but of boys as well. A middle-class lady like herself, without immediate marriage prospects, faced a strictly limited landscape of opportunity. She could not enroll in college (Mount Holyoke and Oberlin did not become the first American colleges to admit women until the 1830s), nor study for the ministry (it was closed to women), nor train to become a doctor or lawyer (medical and law schools were male only), nor set out in business on her own (banks rarely lent to women). The more Beecher thought about it, the more it seemed that teaching was the one profession in which a woman could gain “influence, respectability, and independence" without venturing outside “the prescribed boundaries of feminine modesty,” she wrote. Beecher was a lifelong opponent of women's suffrage; she thought politics a dirty game that would corrupt women's God-given virtue. But that virtue, she thought, made women the ideal educators. Beecher saw the home and the school as intertwined, two naturally feminine realms in which women could nurture the next generation. "Woman, whatever are her relations in life, is necessarily the guardian of the nursery, the companion of childhood, and the constant model of imitation,” she wrote in her "Essay on the Education of Female Teachers." "It is her hand that first stamps impressions on the immortal spirit, that must remain forever." Historian Redding Sugg dubbed this the "motherteacher” ideal – the notion that teaching and mothering were much the same job, done in different settings. ## 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, spreading the influence of reformed Protestantism. ## 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. ## 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: - Twice every day the Principal of the Normal School goes into the model school for general observation and direction, spending from one half hour to one hour each visit. In these visits, [I] either sit and watch the general operations of the school, or listen attentively to a particular teacher and her class, or [teach] a class myself, and let the teacher be the listener and observer. After the exercises have closed, I comment upon what I have seen and heard before the teachers, telling them what I deem good, and what faulty, either in their doctrine or their practice, their theory or their manner. ... In these several ways, I attempt to combine, as well as I can, theory and practice, precept and example. - It is uncanny how this routine describes today's acknowledged best practices in teacher training and professional development, proving a time-honored tradition, but with no end in sight. ## 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 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: ## As a teacher of schools how divinely does she come, her head encircled with a halo of heavenly light, her feet sweeten-ing the earth on which she treads, and the celestial radiance of her benignity making vice begin its work of repentance through very envy of the beauty of virtue! - 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