Schooling Readers: Reading Common Schools in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

By Allison Speicher

Schooling Readers investigates the fascinating intersection of two American passions: education and literature. Allison Speicher introduces readers to the common school narrative, an immensely popular genre of fiction—though now often forgotten—set in the rural one-room school in the nineteenth century.
 
Despite hailing from different regions with diverse histories and cultures, authors in all parts of the US produced remarkably similar school fictions. These stories, rather than offering idealized depictions of earnest schoolchildren in humble, rough-hewn schoolhouses, expose common schools as sites of both community bonding and social strife. These stories, Speicher shows, reflect surprisingly contemporary problems like school violence and apprehensions about assessments.
 
In four insightful sections, Speicher illuminates the plotlines that define the common school narrative: school exhibitions, in which common schools were opened to the public for a day of student performances; romances between teachers and students; violence against teachers; and teachers adopting their students. She offers rich examples from one hundred and thirty school stories by well-known authors such as Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and Edward Eggleston, as well as by educational reform pioneers such as C. W. Bardeen and long-forgotten contributors to nineteenth-century magazines.
 
By reading these fictions alongside the discourse of reformers like Horace Mann, Speicher illustrates the utility of fiction for uncovering the diverse reactions nineteenth-century Americans had to the expansion of public education as well as the role fiction played in shaping these responses. Throughout she maintains a dual focus, drawing on both literary and educational history, thereby offering much of value to those interested in either field.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9780817389918

Book preview

SCHOOLING READERS

SCHOOLING READERS

READING COMMON SCHOOLS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN FICTION

ALLISON SPEICHER

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

TUSCALOOSA

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2016 by Allison Speicher

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Minion

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover art: Illustration from Benjamin Taylor’s poem

The District School, Scribner’s Monthly, May 1874

Cover design: Mary-Francis Burt / Burt&Burt

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Speicher, Allison, author.

Title: Schooling readers : reading common schools in nineteenth-century American fiction / Allison Speicher.

Description: Tuscaloosa : University Alabama Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015039993| ISBN 9780817319168 (hardback) | ISBN 9780817389918 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: American fiction—19th century—History and criticism. | Teachers in literature. | Students in literature. | Schools in literature. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General. | EDUCATION / Philosophy & Social Aspects.

Classification: LCC PS374.T43 S84 2016 | DDC 813/.3093557—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015039993

for my mother, Karen Wisniewski Speicher,

my first and best teacher

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Pedagogues and Performers

2. Combatants and Collaborators

3. Teachers and Temptresses

4. Parents and Patrons

Conclusion

Appendix: Archive of Common School Narratives

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Fittingly, given its subject, this book provides me with the opportunity to express my gratitude to the many individuals with whom I’ve shared a classroom, on both sides of the teacher’s desk. Schooling Readers never would have been written had not my graduate school mentor, Christoph Irmscher, decided to trust me when I pitched him a project built around a hundred-plus obscure texts. His keen insights and clear vision of this project’s potential contributed greatly to its final form. Generous with his time, his intellect, and his influence, Christoph has created many opportunities for me and modeled all I could wish to be as a teacher, a mentor, and a scholar.

Donald Warren also played a significant role in shaping the project, continually reassuring me that a literary scholar could indeed have something important to share with historians of education. Jennifer Fleissner and Paul Gutjahr likewise offered valuable guidance. Suzanne Jones has provided sustained support over the last decade. My teaching mentors, Kimberlye Joyce and Kathy Smith, did much to shape the way I see the teacher’s work and, in turn, to shape this project. My new colleagues at Eastern Connecticut State University, especially Lisa Rowe Fraustino, have provided a warm welcome for my research and for me. I’m also deeply grateful to my students at ECSU, Indiana University, and Highland Springs High School for inspiring my thoughts about what it means to teach and learn. Thank you also to the staff of the University of Alabama Press for their efforts to bring this book to fruition.

In addition to wonderful teachers, mentors, and colleagues, I am also surrounded by supportive friends and family. I’d especially like to thank Anna D’Ambrosio, who began the task of making me into a nineteenth-century Americanist when I was five years old, and my late grandfather, Joseph Wisniewski, who possessed limitless faith in my capabilities. Katherine Anderson, Shannon Zellars Strohl, and Lindsey Lanfersieck read drafts and offered much needed empathy, and the fierce and faith-filled women of my Bloomington book club also provided compassion and encouragement. My father taught me how to work hard, my sister is still my favorite student, and my mother remains my first and best teacher. She typed hundreds of pages of notes for this book, bringing order to scribbles on margins, musings on Post-Its, and passages from sources, saving me labor and allowing me to share something I love. Mom, this book is for you.

Introduction

Hired as the editor of Hearth and Home in 1871, Methodist preacher Edward Eggleston was tasked with reviving the failing periodical. Hoping to attract subscribers with a quaint narrative of rural life, he drew on his childhood in Indiana to produce a story in Hoosier dialect based partly on his brother’s experience keeping school. He succeeded more than he had dared to hope. Reviewers hailed The Hoosier Schoolmaster as one of the first novels to represent midwestern life realistically, and the reading public loved it too: by the end of its serialization, the circulation of Hearth and Home had increased four- or five-fold.¹ The novel was reprinted in periodicals across the country and promptly translated into French, German, and Danish.² It even sparked an international vogue for spelling bees.³ With an unassuming narrative of the tribulations of a rural schoolteacher, Eggleston saved Hearth and Home and established his reputation as an innovative novelist with a taste for social history.⁴

Though The Hoosier Schoolmaster is a slender volume, it is remarkably action-packed. The novel traces the experiences of Ralph Hartsook, a young man who leaves his hometown, a small city in Indiana, to teach a common school in Flat Creek, a nearby rural community. In a single school term, Ralph has quite a series of adventures: he falls in love with a local girl at a spelling bee, becomes a father figure to one of his students, outsmarts the big boys when they try to expel him from the schoolroom, and narrowly escapes being lynched for crimes he did not commit. In the end, he wins over the community, but he leaves it behind, marrying his spelling bee love and returning to his hometown. The curious mixture of humor, sentimentality, and realism that makes The Hoosier Schoolmaster a compelling and confusing read is all Eggleston’s own, but the novel is as significant for the ways in which it carries on literary traditions as for the ways it innovates. The Hoosier Schoolmaster is one of many works of nineteenth-century fiction to feature a common school, the historical precursor to the public school, an institution intended to offer elementary instruction to all the children of a community from as young as age three to as old as age twenty-one. And the events of school life the novel privileges—the spelling bee and school exhibition, school romance, teacher-student adoption, and violence against teachers—have a long history before and after The Hoosier Schoolmaster. These four plot points appear again and again in American fiction from the 1820s into the 1890s. Collectively, they define the tradition of common school narratives, fictional representations of common schooling published during the expansion of popular education in the nineteenth century.

Schooling Readers recovers this literary tradition, bringing together 125 narratives, which share a protagonist (a schoolteacher) and a setting (a rural community) in addition to a series of plot points. Although schooling developed differently in each region, narratives set in the South, the Midwest, the North, and the West prove strikingly alike, if not equally common. Though common school narratives appear in a variety of genres—sentimental novels, local color sketches, reform novels, regional novels, cheap magazine fiction—they unfold similarly in each of these contexts. But despite their versatility, numbers, and long-term popularity, common school narratives have been neglected by literary critics. Some common school narratives, such as The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, have received considerable critical attention in other contexts, but the majority are long-forgotten magazine stories. This project thus draws attention to neglected texts and offers a new way of valuing them.

In addition to their protagonists, settings, and plots, common school narratives also share an interest in responding to the common school reform movement, negotiating the meaning and promise of mass education as it was becoming a reality. By increasing the length of school terms and the number of years each student attended; improving the quality of teachers, textbooks, and school buildings; lowering the cost of schooling through tax support; and increasing school attendance, common school reformers promised grand social transformation. In a characteristic passage in his Twelfth Annual Report (1848), for example, leading school reformer Horace Mann proclaimed that in only two or three generations mass education would inaugurate heaven on earth by alleviating war, intemperance, and dishonesty, inspiring reverence for institutions of learning and religion, and ensuring that only the best men gained political leadership.⁵ Though Mann’s utopian vision never became a reality, the nineteenth century was a period of great educational change, thanks in part to the efforts of reformers and of ordinary Americans. By 1860, thirty years into the reform movement, the once-controversial ideas that schools should be supported by property taxes, should have greater uniformity, should be nonsectarian, should last for more than six months, and should be taught by trained, professional teachers were widely accepted, though in the eyes of reformers much work remained to be done, particularly in rural areas.⁶ By examining the relationship of literature to common school reform, Schooling Readers fills a gap in literary history and enriches our understanding of the role of fiction in one of the most successful reform movements of the century.

Despite the fact that modern representations of schools and nineteenth-century British school stories have been studied extensively, common school narratives have not yet garnered scholarly interest.⁷ However, my focus on common schools extends to recent work on the interconnections between fiction and education in nineteenth-century America, including Mark Vasquez’s Authority and Reform (2003), Sarah Robbins’s Managing Literacy, Mothering America (2004), Angela Sorby’s Schoolroom Poets (2005), and Jaime Osterman Alves’s Fictions of Female Education (2009). Most closely allied to my project is Sarah Robbins’s work recovering the domestic literacy narrative. Much like the domestic literacy narrative, the common school narrative is a flexible genre that circulated in a variety of publishing venues throughout the nineteenth century. Robbins claims that authors of the domestic literacy narrative valued literature not only as an aesthetic product but also as a source of knowledge and improvement.⁸ This likewise holds true for common school fictions. The texts in Robbins’s archive and my own both portray characters gaining educations while offering an education to readers. Common school narratives, however, teach rather more equivocally than domestic literacy narratives do. According to Robbins, domestic literacy narratives model and engage in literacy management, carving out a critical role for women authors and women within the home as molders of literate and moral citizens. The lesson of common school narratives, however, cannot be condensed into such a precise and universally applicable statement. Instead, the lessons of these narratives reflect the diversity of the venues in which they appeared, the diversity of the authors who penned them, and the diversity of the readers to whom they were pitched. What they teach, and how they do so, varies. Schooling Readers aims to make sense of these lessons, to discern patterns in plot and message without flattening the rich diversity of common school fictions.

Given that their subject matter is education, school stories lend themselves to instruction particularly well: as Beverly Lyon Clark explains in her study of Victorian school fiction, Schooling is, in part, a metaphor for the effect that the book is supposed to have.⁹ In order to consider how these texts teach lessons, throughout Schooling Readers I think about readers in two different but related ways. I consider the implied reader of these texts, the way the stories work to construct and instruct their imagined audiences. I am particularly interested in the ways the overt lessons these stories offer their readers, through prefaces and narratorial intrusions, frequently differ from the lessons suggested by the unfolding of the plot. Many common school narratives teach in equivocal ways: that is, they frequently tell readers one thing and show them another. Because I am interested in how literary form both creates the opportunity to teach readers and complicates authors’ ability to communicate their messages clearly, I pay special attention to this question in my extended readings of individual texts. Just as these stories reflect on the promise and pitfalls of common schooling, so too do they allow me to reflect upon the potentials and limitations of fiction as a mode of education.

In addition to attending to how texts construct lessons for their implied readers, I try, as much as possible, to draw on actual reader response from the nineteenth century, in the form of book reviews, periodicals, and literary anthologies. While of course it is difficult to recover readers’ responses to two-paged stories published in local periodicals 150 years ago, for many of the common school narratives examined here, especially the novels, we do have reviews to draw upon. I use the phrase schooling readers to encapsulate the educative potential of common school narratives on both these levels, how these fictions seek to work on their implied readers and the effects they had on actual readers, which I unpack whenever I find them possible to reconstruct. We’re accustomed to thinking about what literature means and what schools do, but Schooling Readers flips this logic, considering instead what literature does and what schools mean.

The context in which common school narratives appeared, a historical moment when popular schooling was being debated and expanded, gives them their educational force. By offering a particular vision of what schooling did, could, or should look like, common school narratives intervened into the conversation surrounding education reform. Many contemporary commentators had great faith in the educational potential of school fictions and their substantial impact on real schools. For example, in March 1857 the American Journal of Education, the most important education periodical of its time, ran a new feature entitled The Popular School and the Teacher in English Literature. This inaugural article was the first of many the journal published over the next nine years reviewing a long history of literary representations of schooling. Literary texts, the author of the article explains, are worthy to appear alongside elaborate dissertations by the best writers and thinkers of different countries and ages, on the principles and methods of education for two reasons. First, they are valuable as historical documents: the character of the school and the teacher at any given period, is to some extent reflected in the popular writings of the day. But school literature does not just reflect contemporary educational practices, the author continues. To a still greater extent, existing educational practices are perpetuated by such representation, as fiction normalizes these practices for readers.¹⁰

Many of the author’s contemporaries shared his sense of the educative nature of school fiction, but while he focuses on the role of fiction in preserving the status quo, others celebrated the ability of literature to challenge and correct existing educational practices. Nineteenth-century schoolchildren had reason to be thankful for school fiction, or so many of their elders believed. In the eyes of one reviewer, school reform was more speedily advanced by the circulation of school fiction than by treatises written on education.¹¹ Some went so far as to claim that school fiction saved lives: one enthusiastic reader of Locke Amsden (1847), for example, thanked the author for the beautiful manner in which he has illustrated the subject of ventilating school houses, thus saving thousands of children from being sent to a premature grave by diseases contracted, aye, created, in school rooms.¹² Nor was such thinking restricted to the early days of school reform. Writing in 1892, in the introduction to an anthology of school stories, The Schoolmaster in Literature, Edward Eggleston praised Dickens’s Dombey and Son for doing more than the soberest treatises on pedagogy to discourage the ancient mode of education by cramming, the only sort of infanticide permitted in civilized countries.¹³ In the eyes of these readers, common school narratives performed what María Carla Sánchez calls the social work of American literature, working to alter the institutions, systems, and processes that order our lives, or, alternatively, to ensure they remain unaltered.¹⁴ Fiction’s reputed ability to change hearts and minds was particularly useful in the case of school reform, as reformers had little legal power and thus spread their message primarily through campaigns of persuasion.¹⁵

However, even ardent school fiction enthusiasts recognized that responding to educational practices was not the only aim of school stories. School fiction was seen as a particularly effective means of disseminating educational thought, in fact, because it would hold readers’ attention better than nonfiction and thus circulate more widely. That is, in addition to schooling readers, fiction was expected to amuse them. For example, Eggleston claims the selections included in The Schoolmaster in Literature, which range from the work of Rousseau and Pestalozzi to excerpts from Irving and Dickens, are sure to delight the intelligent reader as well as to edify him. Eggleston’s focus on the intelligent reader offers an ample hint as to what kind of delight he has in mind, and the final use he envisions for the school story confirms this hint: school fiction is also particularly useful as "a means of cultivating a taste for literature and a discriminating taste in literature. The delicate shading of artistic literature" adds to both the enjoyment and the instruction school fiction affords.¹⁶ The three uses of the school story Eggleston articulates here—instruction, entertainment, and artistry—echo those envisioned by reviewers throughout the period, who frequently comment not only on the ways in which school fiction promotes educational improvement but also on the quality of the writing and the amusement that school stories provide.¹⁷

Eggleston imagines these three aims as compatible and mutually reinforcing, and perhaps, within the confines of the carefully curated anthology, they are. Outside its meticulously controlled pages, however, in the dozens of school stories published throughout the century, instruction, entertainment, and artistry are as likely to come into conflict as to coalesce. The inconsistencies within these texts reflect not only the challenges of teaching via literature but also the fact that popular understandings of schooling continued to evolve throughout the century. Common school fiction is far more diverse in its forms and its messages than The Schoolmaster in Literature would lead readers to believe, ranging from one- or two-paged magazine stories to five hundred–paged novels, from sentimental novels to local color sketches. Common school narratives were published in both respected literary periodicals and dollar magazines, appeared both before and after the Civil War, and were written by northerners, southerners, midwesterners, and westerners alike. Rather than considering only a narrow range of texts and authors, those most obviously invested in common schooling, Schooling Readers demonstrates that writers devoted to reform as well as writers with different priorities shared concerns about education.¹⁸

Collectively, common school narratives offer unique insights into the ways common school reform was negotiated—insights that produce a different picture of the common school than that which historians have derived from nonfictional sources. Fiction publication was accessible to a wide variety of writers, which likely contributes to this difference. So does the specificity of these texts, in contrast with the grand generalizations frequently offered by school reformers. Fiction writers replace the amorphous school, teacher, and students present in the writings of reformers with particularized classrooms populated by teachers and students with names and narratives. Picturing school life on a daily basis in a single community dissolves generalizations, and the image of school life fiction offers is decidedly messier than those offered in nonfictional sources. I suggest throughout Schooling Readers that one reason for this difference is the difficulty authors face meeting the expectations of fiction readers while also teaching a lesson. While some of these stories have intrusive narrators, even the most directive can’t offer the same kind of clean-cut pronouncements Horace Mann does and continue to look and read like fiction.

This appreciation of the importance of fictional form is an essential way in which Schooling Readers differs from inquiries into school fiction conducted by historians of education. Nearly fifty years ago, Maxine Greene urged scholars to move beyond the rhetoric of prophetic crusaders like Mann in their studies of nineteenth-century education and promoted fiction as a valuable archive for doing so. In her groundbreaking book, The Public School and the Private Vision, she turned to the work of canonical writers like Emerson, Melville, and Thoreau, contrasting the ‘dark’ perceptions of life of many literary authors with the hopeful exuberance of school reformers.¹⁹ By focusing on canonical writers, however, she missed the many nineteenth-century narratives that actually feature schools, and few historians have since taken up Greene’s charge.²⁰ In Schooling Readers, I embrace Greene’s challenge, issued half a century ago, with the sensibilities and training of a literary scholar, seeking not to flatten out this literary tradition but rather to use the rich and diverse images of the common school it offers to add dimension to our understanding of nineteenth-century schooling.

COMMON SCHOOL REFORM: CHANGE AND STASIS

Reading nineteenth-century school fiction for its lessons on education requires significant inquiry into the process and politics of common school reform, the movement to which common school narratives respond.²¹ Although the common school reform movement sought to reshape American education between 1830 and 1880, reformers did not invent local schooling, nor did they convince Americans to support it. By the 1830s, when common school reform first garnered significant attention, locally controlled, voluntary elementary schooling was already available in most communities.²² At some point in their lives, most white children attended one of a variety of institutions, including charity schools for the urban poor, inexpensive dame schools for small children, private academies and seminaries for older students, and rural district schools for children of all ages.²³ Rural district schools were the most widespread form of schooling, particularly in the North and Midwest. These schools were organized by small communities and funded through a combination of property taxes, fuel contributions, tuition, and state aid. In the South, schoolmasters frequently selected their own locations and invited those parents able to pay tuition to send their children or taught in old-field schools, cabins located on fallow land. The curriculum and clientele of these southern schools and rural district schools were quite similar, but fewer southern children attended school. Parents controlled these local institutions, selecting the textbooks, deciding what subjects should be taught, hiring teachers, and determining the length of the school term. Little power rested with the teacher, and turnover was high.²⁴ In the winter, most schools were taught by men who doubled as farm laborers, tavern-keepers, prospectors, craftsmen, college students, and [d]rifters shunning hard physical labor and handicapped fellows unable to perform it.²⁵ In the summer, when fewer mature pupils attended, many schools were kept by widows or young women who had just completed their own schooling.

Although common school reformers appreciated the widespread public support for schooling, by the 1830s they began to criticize most of the defining characteristics of the district school: parental control, local funding, flexible school terms, itinerant and untrained teachers, and lack of uniformity. Reformers proposed replacing the variety of school options available with a single system of schools, supported by public funds, which would enroll all local children.²⁶ When reformers spoke of the need to enroll all children, most meant all white children. African Americans were excluded from most common schools, as were American Indians.²⁷

Historians debate the causes of the reform movement, but most acknowledge six important factors that made common school reform attractive after 1830: concerns about the fragility of the republic, urbanization, industrialization, immigration, changing views of childhood, and widespread Protestantism. From the time of the Revolution, leaders worried that the fragile American republic could not survive without mass education, a concern that only intensified with the expansion of suffrage.²⁸ Education was seen as uniquely important for the cultivation of a national identity, for the maintenance of social cohesion and for the promotion of republican values.²⁹ This concern about social cohesion was accelerated by the social changes brought on by industrialization, immigration (particularly the mass immigration of Catholics), and urbanization, which made school systems a realistic possibility. Advocates hoped that schools would promote order and harmony in an age when instability seemed to be an ever-present threat.³⁰

And if immigration, industrialization, and urbanization made shoring up traditional American values seem necessary, new views of childrearing and a Protestant belief in the perfectibility of human society made social change seem possible. The growing conviction that environment played a crucial role in character formation made schooling more important, as a skilled teacher could reshape malleable children into ideal moral citizens.³¹ Reformers believed that mass schooling would be a panacea for social ills: common schooling was expected to provide moral education to produce obedient children, reduce crime, and discourage vice; citizenship training to protect republican government; literacy for effective economic and political participation; and cultural education for assimilation and unity.³²

Though the effects of common school reform were to be heavenly, the changes reformers proposed were rather more practical. As Joseph Kett rightly describes it, common school reform was a curious mixture of tender sentiment and hard efficiency, which is apparent in the changes reformers sought.³³ One of their major targets was teachers: someone tasked with shaping children into moral citizens should not be an itinerant drifter, impecunious college student, or starving widow. Reformers campaigned for higher standards in hiring teachers, for state-funded higher education for future educators, and for increased attendance at summer teaching institutes.³⁴ Poorly qualified teachers were only hired, reformers reasoned, because local school boards lacked the insight to choose well or refused to pay enough to attract qualified applicants. As a result, reformers took aim at the district system, hoping to consolidate independent districts into town school systems and to develop methods of state supervision and regulation. More effective oversight and consolidation of schools would allow for greater uniformity in schooling, removing important issues like curriculum and schoolhouse design from the vagaries of local opinion.³⁵ To take advantage of these improvements, reformers claimed, children needed to attend school for longer periods of time each year and for more years. Many rural communities operated schools for eight to ten weeks in the summer and another eight to ten in the winter, which reformers saw as far too short. To increase attendance, reformers sought to eliminate rate bills, which required parents to pay some tuition for their children, and to support schools entirely through state funds and local taxes. Hoping to make schools more inviting, reformers took aim at corporal punishment, which made the schoolhouse a site of fear, and at stultifying pedagogy.³⁶ Through these changes, reformers attempted to turn scattered local schools into a school system, staffed by competent and trained teachers, paid for by public funds, and open to all white children.

Though this was a tall order, in many ways common school reform was highly successful. By 1860, state legislatures and local school committees in the North and Midwest had accepted much of the reform program. Free common schooling was widely available and most states had a superintendent to oversee schools. Corporal punishment had declined significantly, thanks in part of the hiring of female teachers, whose assumed moral superiority and willingness to accept low salaries made them a natural fit with the reform program. Almost all communities devoted more time and money to schooling than in 1830, and school terms were significantly lengthened.³⁷

Still, work remained to be done. Improving teacher qualifications proved particularly difficult, and as late as 1910 more than a third of all teachers had not completed high school.³⁸ Common schools were uncommon in the South until after the Civil War, when the North required each state pass a public school law as a condition for readmission to the Union.³⁹ While urban school systems embodied the dreams of reformers, rural schools in all regions continued to be seen as problematic. In 1860, many communities still hired untrained, transient teachers to work in ramshackle buildings teaching a crowd of students of all ages, each of whom brought along a different textbook.⁴⁰ In short, reformers remained dissatisfied with the results of their efforts in rural schools, the schools most Americans actually attended, so much so that by the 1870s discussion of The Rural School Problem was widespread.⁴¹ Schools in rural communities were difficult to consolidate for practical and philosophical reasons: they were located too far apart and rural communities clung to them tenaciously.⁴²

Despite the successes of reformers, disagreements about the purposes and effects of schooling continued. Historians agree that virtually no Americans