The Shift in Massachusetts' Educational Philosophy

Introduction

In earlier pieces, I discussed the common school/public school system of Massachusetts at length, and the general educational emphases associated with it. But the education of prominent 19th-century residents of antebellum Massachusetts, and their influence on late 19th-century educational developments, is worth a closer look. Many of those involved in education reforms were privately educated, tutored at home, and/or self-educated. Some grew up in rural areas without access to common schools, or preferred self-education to the early common schools, where corporal punishment and uncomfortable conditions were common. Others came from socially or economically privileged families, who were able to make private arrangements or homeschool.

In general, private tutoring, small private academies, home-schooling, and self-education were the norm, with promising young men of social standing continuing to Phillips Exeter and/or Harvard in their teenage years. Boston Latin, a public exam school that admitted academically promising young men from local families, was another option.

By young men, I mean students who were junior high- and high school-aged, in modern terms, who had completed their primary level education and were interested in pursuing higher education, probably at Harvard. The common school system, even after Horace Mann’s reforms, was designed to make primary level education as accessible as possible, but formal education at the secondary level was typically privately arranged, and much rarer.

Demand for such education did increase over the course of the nineteenth century, however. Small private experimental schools started popping up in the 1830’s, as part of the New England Transcendentalism movement (I refer to this as “Emersonian philosophy”). This movement reflected anxieties common to influential residents of Massachusetts who were passionate about education. See the below section on Transcendentalist Academies. Those associated with the movement displayed great pride and missionary zeal with regard to the state’s educational tradition and institutions, but at the same time expressed deep concern, often desperation, about its perceived inadequacies. The dynamic is best summarized as a fear that the approach had become legalistic or disconnected from present realities, failing to serve or perpetuate the spirit that originally animated the traditional practices.

Some of these inadequacies were related to a perceived unwillingness to pursue the highest potential of individuals or cultivate the full talents of the community, being too easily satisfied with the comfortable and enviable situation they had achieved, verging on complacency that could lead to ossification and vulnerability. Others were related to the preservation of their deepest values and social conditions.

“The younger generation [who reached adulthood in] the 1820s still grew up with the immediate accessibility of the nexus of founding and order in the form of living fathers; this same generation was of necessity thrown into an iden­tity crisis by experiencing the death of the fathers,” explained one scholar.

In other words, the behaviors associated with Emerson and Transcendentalists were more of a symptom than a cause before 1850, and the underlying disorder gave rise to more than one symptom: “Many Americans were more or less attempting the emotional task Emerson had undertaken: that of incorporating the powers of the fathers who no longer seemed to be present, qua father, or minister, or state.”

So, while reformers at this time are often seen as a self-undermining mix of conservatism and radicalism, or else blinkered utopians unable to see what they were setting in motion, it would be better to understand them as people who wanted to preserve the spirit of the past by translating the educational process (moral, institutional, and academic) into new forms—something done in response to a well-founded sense of being surrounded by rapid and destabilizing social changes. The nature of Massachusetts’ religious and cultural practices led many reformers toward a “theory of educated anarchy” that could address social, political, and individual educational needs simultaneously and allow for stability without a centralized authority.

This paved the way for more radical Transcendentalist approaches, which encourage casual and constant small-scale and self-selected experimentation among those within the tradition and attached to the institutions that embodied it, in an effort to discern its full potential and range of expression. Such reformers also wanted to improve upon existing traditions as much as possible, and modified ideas borrowed from European Romanticism, a contemporary movement.

It also led to attempts to expand the tradition to those who had not yet been integrated into it. More conservative and practically-minded reformers like Mann consciously attempted large-scale cultural assimilation of the poor and uneducated, immigrant or native, in order to prevent social strife. This perspective led him to pursue relatively rigid and bureaucratic approaches to providing a simple, civics-oriented primary education to children, one that could be scaled up quickly and broadly, by coercion if necessary. He "conceived of popular education as a vehicle carrying not only morality but truth itself to those who might otherwise neglect them.”

Nevertheless, Mann was more a creature of 1830s Boston than of Prussia:

To get a sense of the educational environment and how it evolved in the middle of all this change, it is useful to look at a handful of people and schools that coexisted within it:

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, born in Cambridge in 1809, to one of Boston’s most respectable families, first attended the Port School, a select and co-educational private academy in Cambridge, alongside Margaret Fuller.

In Holmes’s case, his father sent him to the most prominent prep school, Phillips Academy in Andover, at age fifteen. Phillips prepared students to succeed at the entrance exam for Harvard College, and was known for its orthodox Calvinist teachings, also in line with Harvard’s culture.

There, Holmes received a liberal arts education.

In antebellum Boston, even the most privileged, academically inclined students who went onto to become great scholars tended to have mixed feelings about the rare educational opportunities they were offered. Even John Adams, born in Quincy (then known as Colonial Braintree) all the way back in 1735, skipped school and tried to drop out upon reaching the age when it was legal for him to do so. His father flatly refused to let him, and Adams entered Harvard at age sixteen.

Perhaps because of this, many of these men showed a consistent interest in educational reform throughout their adult lives. In his later years, Dr. Holmes, like his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, was excited by some of the recent reforms that had been made at Harvard since Charles W. Eliot had become president in 1869. Approving the medical school's new emphasis on the practical and experiential, Holmes praised Eliot for turning Harvard “over like a flapjack.” Holmes’s last public appearance was at a National Education Association reception that was held in Boston in 1893.

Margaret Fuller

Born in Cambridge in 1810, Margaret Fuller was taught by her father, a classically educated congressman and former schoolteacher, to read and write at the age of three and a half. He went on to offer her “an education as rigorous as any boy's at the time and forbade her to read the typical feminine fare of the time, such as etiquette books and sentimental novels."

However, as mentioned above, Fuller did attend formal school, starting with two years at the co-educational Port School in 1819, when she was nine, alongside Holmes. She then spent two years at the Boston Lyceum for Young Ladies. At age fourteen, she was sent to the School for Young Ladies in Groton, leaving after only two years. At home, she studied the classics, trained herself in several modern languages, and read widely. She did not feel that she was cut out for the life expected of a woman in antebellum Boston, and hoped to be a professional writer, but her father’s unexpected death in 1835 led the independent-minded 25-year-old to assume the position of head of the family and scramble to support herself, her mother, and her younger siblings. In 1836, Fuller was given a job teaching at Bronson Alcott's Temple School in Boston, where she remained for a year. She then accepted an invitation to teach at the Greene Street School in Providence, Rhode Island, in April 1837, with friends having secured her the unusually high salary of $1,000 per year.

By her 30s, Fuller became possibly the most well-read woman in Boston at this time, and a noted translator of German literature. She used her knowledge to give private lessons based on the teaching style of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who had also taught at Alcott’s school. Now deeply involved in the Transcendentalist movement and respected by Emerson, Fuller arguably became America’s first female public intellectual, magazine editor, and newspaper reporter. Tragically, she died in a shipwreck in 1850 after several years in Italy, but the situation for young girls and women with intellectual aspirations in the Boston area had certainly improved by that time, in part due to Fuller’s own efforts and example.

The innovation she was most remembered for was her “Conversations” discussions, attended by a small group of socially respectable female intellectuals in Boston starting in 1839. They met in the Peabody home, where Fuller showed off the brilliant conversational skills that would soon make her famous among Boston elites and the northeastern literati more generally.

“Fuller intended to compensate for the lack of women's [formal higher] education with discussions and debates focused on subjects including the fine arts, history, mythology, literature, and nature. Serving as the "nucleus of conversation", Fuller also intended to answer the "great questions" facing women and encourage women "to question, to define, to state and examine their opinions". She asked her participants, "What were we born to do? How shall we do it? Which so few ever propose to themselves 'till their best years are gone by". In Conversations, Fuller was finally finding equal intellectual companions among her female contemporaries.”

One of these was Sophia Ripley, born in 1803, who in the 1840s was part of the Transcendentalist-associated utopian community called Brook Farm in West Roxbury, a neighborhood of Boston. She and her Harvard-educated husband George moved to the community, along with George’s brother and his wife Marianne Ripley. Sophia and Marian “oversaw Brook Farm's primary school using a progressive child-centered pedagogy that has been compared to the later reforms of John Dewey.” She was a practiced educator, as “her father traveled abroad often and left his daughters to fend for themselves,” so at age 20, while he was away, she and her sisters decided to earn their own living by teaching. They opened a girls’ school in Cambridge, with Sophia serving as the principal teacher.

Frank Sanborn’s Concord School

"Transcendentalist Academies,” the more practical descendants of the Brook Farm experiment, were run by people who subscribed to what we’d call progressive ideas about education in the period between 1830 and 1870. They were almost all located in eastern Massachusetts, many of them in Concord, with a few in Boston or Cambridge. They were small private schools, attended by the children of open-minded community leaders. The founders and schoolteachers were normally well-educated, self-employed “freestylers” who didn’t stay in one job long, but the values their schools promoted were visible in their other endeavors, and sustained a culture where such experiments were constantly being made. The most famous are A. Bronson Alcott’s Temple School and Frank Sanborn’s Concord School.

Franklin Benjmain Sanborn was a well-connected political activist, abolitionist, Transcendentalist writer, journalist, and intellectual born in New Hampshire in 1831. After a year of private tutoring and a year at Phillips Exeter Academy, he was admitted to Harvard, and graduated in 1855, at which time he moved to Concord and set up a school, apparently running it out of a house he was renting.

The school was co-educational, which was still controversial at the time for students who had reached adolescence. That at least some of the students were from out-of-town and boarded at the school may have exacerbated this concern.

The highly-educated and innovative Transcendentalist elite that congregated in Concord was perhaps the group most interested in progressive education at the time, and they certainly were the most dedicated to the experiment, by funding it and enrolling their own children. They shared a distaste for physical punishment and believed in lifelong, experiential learning, and believed in cultivating self-reliant and socially responsible adults by encouraging creativity, questioning, debate, independent thought, and self-expression.

The school must have been something special, as both Ralph Waldo Emerson and Horace Mann enrolled their own children. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s children Edward and Edith were about ten and thirteen, respectively, upon the school’s founding, and attended it for most of their teenage years. Horace Mann, Jr. seems to have done the same, while pursuing nature studies with Henry David Thoreau in his spare time.

Five years after the school opened, when Nathanial Hawthorne’s family returned from a long stay in Europe, he enrolled his fourteen-year-old son Julian, but not his teenage daughters. (The co-educational dances held by the school were particularly upsetting to Mrs. Hawthorne). This recalls the problem Alcott faced in abandoning traditional methods for experimental ones: even open-minded parents from similar backgrounds found they disagreed over exactly where to draw such lines.

Conclusion

In these three examples, we see how the educational tradition in Massachusetts was becoming both more democratic and more focused on promoting the fullest expression of individual potential. Reformers and thinkers reacted to social change and restrictions by pioneering more active and collaborative approaches to education. However, while they were in agreement that existing practices were inadequate, their proposed solutions were not identical and often tentative. As a result, this creative energy proved difficult to institutionalize. Striking the right balance between innovation and practicality continues to pose challenges to American education reformers.

Endnotes