The Teacher Wars

by Dana Goldstein

  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:

  As a teacher of schools … how divinely does she come, her head encircled with a halo of heavenly light, her feet sweetening 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 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?

  The gadfly Boston journalist Orestes Brownson proved prescient in his skepticism toward the common schools movement. A convert to Catholicism, Brownson worried about Protestant reformers’ attempts to make public school teachers double as missionaries, and thought parents should exercise more control over community schools. In general, he subscribed to a more pragmatic vision of the role of the school in society, arguing it was unlikely teachers could make much headway in defeating poverty as long as workers lacked vocational training and labor rights. He wrote:

  Education, such as it is, is ever going on. Our children are educated in the streets, by the influence of their associates … in the bosom of the family, by the love and gentleness or wrath and fretfulness of parents, by the passions or affections they see manifested, the conversations to which they listen, and above all by the general pursuits, habits, and moral tone of the community. In all these are schoolrooms and schoolmasters sending forth scholars educated for good or for evil or, what is more likely, for a little of both. The real question for us to ask is not, Shall our children be educated? but, To what end shall they be educated, and by what means? What is the kind of education needed, and how shall it be furnished?

  Beecher and Mann believed morality was the end of public education, and female teachers were its means. In fact, there was little public consensus on what American common schooling should look like. Subsequent generations of education reformers—and women’s rights leaders—would angrily challenge the status quo Mann and Beecher had wrought: of masses of low-paid, poorly educated “motherteachers,” prioritizing faith over academic learning.

  • Chapter Two •

  “Repressed Indignation”

  THE FEMINIST CHALLENGE TO AMERICAN EDUCATION

  In 1838, eighteen-year-old Susan B. Anthony was away at Quaker boarding school when she received a letter informing her that a childhood friend had married a middle-aged widower with six children. Letters home had to be edited by a teacher for moral content, so Susan took her true feelings to her diary: “I should think any female would rather live and die an old maid.”

  A few months later, Anthony withdrew from school. Her father’s cotton mill had gone bust, and he could no longer afford tuition. She began working as a teacher in village schools near her family’s upstate New York home. By the time she moved away, eight years later, she had turned down at least two marriage proposals. She liked working and had secured an exciting new job, as head of girls’ education at the Canajoharie Academy in Palatine Bridge, New York, where her uncle served on the school board. With her $110 annual salary, more money than she had ever had before, Anthony binged on high fashion, including a dress made of purple merino wool at $2 per yard, an $8 gray fox muff, and a $5.50 white silk hat that “makes the villagers stare.” In a letter home she wondered (a little churlishly) if her sisters did not “feel rather sad because they are married and can not have nice clothes.”

  At age twenty-six, Anthony was exhilarated by life on her own, attending balls and the circus for the first time. Always a Quaker—if a somewhat lapsed one—she founded a local women’s temperance organization. Yet she took her teaching job seriously and resented the fact that she earned less than her male colleagues. Anthony wrote to her mother in November 1846 that although her students’ parents celebrated her “diligent” teaching, and she had recruited four new pupils to the school, she would not receive a raise. “That salary business runs in my head, I can tell you,” she complained. She immersed herself in the work, giving special attention to one fifteen-year-old girl who had what Anthony considered an unfair reputation for being “unmanageable. I hope to find her otherwise.” Soon enough, the child regarded her young teacher as “a sort of cousin,” Anthony reported, and began to “carry herself rather strait.”

  Over the next two years, Anthony’s enthusiasm for teaching waned. She admired the headmaster who had hired her, but when he retired in 1848, she disliked the new boss, a nineteen-year-old fond of corporal punishment. Though Anthony had been teaching for a decade, her gender disqualified her for a larger role at the school—it was unthinkable that a woman would supervise men. Her stagnant salary meant she was still living in a tiny, cold room in a relative’s home. In May she wrote to her parents that she now considered teaching a “penance … A weariness has come over me that the short spring vacation did not in the
least dispel. I have a pleasant school of 20 scholars, but I have to manufacture the interest duty compels me to exhibit. I am anxious they should learn, but feel almost to shrink from the task.”

  Like many extraordinary nineteenth-century women, Anthony had an unusually supportive father. “I have only to say,” Daniel Anthony responded, “that when you get tired of teaching, try something else.”

  In 1848 Anthony moved back in with her parents and tried to figure out what that something else might be. Through her family’s involvement in New York State temperance and antislavery circles, she was becoming aware of the growing women’s rights movement, which had held its first national conference that summer in the Finger Lakes town of Seneca Falls.

  The conference’s chief organizer was a young mother named Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the daughter of an affluent and politically well-connected judge. In 1840 Stanton and her husband had traveled to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London. She and another American female activist, Lucretia Mott, hoped to be recognized there as official delegates, but the male abolitionists refused to seat them. It was highly unusual for women to speak in front of large, mixed-gender crowds—especially on controversial topics—and many antislavery activists of both sexes worried that the radicalism of early feminism would hamstring the global abolitionist movement.

  So Stanton came to the realization that without a social movement of their own, the cause of women’s rights in America would not move forward. In planning the Seneca Falls Convention, she recruited not only female activists, but also important male abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass and a number of influential Quakers. The extraordinary manifesto that came out of Seneca Falls was called the Declaration of Sentiments. It borrowed the structure and vocabulary of the Declaration of Independence—“we hold these truths to be self-evident,” “consent of the governed”—to argue in favor of women’s suffrage, equal treatment before the law regardless of sex, and equal access to marital property and child custody.