Milson, Andrew J.; Bohn, Chara Haeussler; Glanzer, Perry L. and
Null, J. Wesley. (Eds.) (2004). Readings in American Educational
Thought: From Puritanism to Progessivism. Greenwich, CT:
Information Age Publishing.
454 pp.
$39.95 (Paperback) ISBN: 1-59311-253-X
$73.25 (Hardcover) ISBN 1-59311-259-9
Reviewed by Eric Margolis
Arizona State University
October 18, 2005
This is a collection of original source documents
from America’s long, rich, and contentious history of
educational thought selected by a group from Baylor
University’s College of Education. The lack of an index
makes the book far less useful than it might be. It is also
extremely odd that while there is a copyright to Information Age
Publishing on the first page of each selection, there is no
citation at all to the original sources of the readings. This
makes the volume of no value to scholars – even students
working on papers would be expected to move beyond the secondary
source. Moreover, most of the readings are in the public domain
and many have full text versions available on-line. It would
have been very helpful for the editors to have provided links to
those sites.
I am strongly in sympathy with the editors’ goal to
create a compendium of original source material for students to
grapple with. Primary materials have the potential to open doors
into cultures fundamentally different from our own and, as
Clifford Geertz said of ethnography “put us in touch with
the lives of strangers.” Seeing things from the
other’s perspective, however, requires layers of thick
description. As Geertz wrote:
As interworked systems of construable signs (what, ignoring
provincial usages, I would call symbols), culture is not a power,
something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or
processes can be causally attributed; it is a context, something
within which they can be intelligibly – that is thickly
– described. (Note 1)
There are two main reasons why I find this collection less
useful than it could have been: the first has to do with the lack
of context provided for the readings and the second with the
selection of sources. I can imagine it being a helpful
supplementary text for courses in Foundations or the History of
American Education. Perhaps the best approach would be to
combine this anthology with a text like Joel Spring’s
The American School 1642-2004: Varieties of Historical
Interpretation of the Foundations and Development of American
Education (McGraw-Hill, 2004). Spring goes a long way toward
providing the thick description missing in Readings in
American Educational Thought.
In my review I will discuss both choice and context. Each
selection begins with a brief introduction to provide a bit about
the life of the author, the context in which it was written and
its relation to education in America. The problem is simply
brevity. Let me single out two issues to discuss that illustrate
the problem; the first is the Protestant/Catholic debates over
public schooling. The second will be the education of African
Americans.
Perry L. Glanzer wrote in his introduction to the first
reading: “Joseph Cotton (1584-1652) immigrated to America
to escape arrest for his Puritan beliefs and practices.”
True enough, but for today’s students reading
Cotton’s catechism is like encountering a foreign culture.
The nature of religion in peoples’ lives and the bloodbath
of the Reformation needs context to be intelligible. For 300
years European Protestants and Catholics tortured and killed one
another, and destroyed each other’s churches. In the
1520's 100,000 people were killed during the Peasant Revolt in
Germany, Switzerland and Austria. In the 1550's Huguenots
destroyed Catholic churchs throughout France. During the French
Wars of Religion, Catholic mobs massacred Huguenots; in 1572 at
least 3000 Protestants were killed in Paris and many more
throughout the countryside. While Cotton penned his essay in
1641 Civil War raged in the British Isles; perhaps 10% of the
population of England, Scotland, and Ireland died between 1639
and 1651.
When Puritans sought “religious freedom” in
Massachusetts, what they were after bears little resemblance to
the concept enshrined in the Constitution. They viewed all other
religions as anathema, and established a theocracy where everyone
had to wear Puritan dress and attend church. Believing in
pre-destination, that everyone was born either in a state of
grace or damnation, the prevailing Puritan view was that good
works on earth were indicators of being in the state of grace.
When Anne Hutchinson, a devoted follower of Cotton, taught
against this “covenant of works” arguing that
salvation only came when the Holy Spirit entered a person, she
was brought before the judges. Deemed unseemingly proud for a
woman, and condemned as a heretic, Hutchinson and her husband
were cast out of the colony by the very Joseph Cotton she once
followed. Six months pregnant with her 16th child,
Cotton denounced her for being a “Familist and believing in
free love, the "promiscuous and filthie coming together of men
and women without Distinction of Relation of Marriage". "Your
opinions frett like a Gangrene and spread like a Leprosie,”
he cried, “and will eate out the very Bowells of Religion."
She was excommunicated in 1638 with the curse: "I doe cast you
out and in the name of Christ I doe deliver you up to Satan, that
you may learne no more to blaspheme, to seduce, and to
lye."
It is completely appropriate to begin a volume such as this
with Cotton’s catechism for children; as the editor noted
it was widely read in the New England Primer. (Note 2) But
understanding education in Puritan New England requires much more
than a paragraph of context. To leave out Anne Hutchinson and
give Cotton the last word hobbles understanding and misrepresents
what American education inherited from the Puritans.
Hutchinson’s legacy to the development of education in
America can scarcely be overestimated. She was first and
foremost a teacher. Even for the few that could read and write,
women had no access to public space where their views could be
heard and preserved. Due to her trial, she is practically the
only woman from Puritan times whose voice we can hear. The court
records reveal a strong woman willing to stand for what she
believed. In this she was at least a proto-feminist. Her
speech and actions lead directly to the concepts of religious
freedom; together with Roger Williams she helped found the colony
of Rhode Island noted for its tolerance of religious diversity.
The expulsion of Anne Hutchinson, and the Salem witch trials that
took place about fifty years later, were important in developing
the constitutional doctrine of the separation of church and
state. (Note 3) Most interesting, however, is her
connection to Harvard College, which it has been argued, would
not exist if it were not for Anne Hutchinson. In 2002, The
Reverend Peter J. Gomes, Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard
wrote that “As a result of her heresy the colony determined
to provide for the education of a new generation of ministers and
theologians who would secure New England’s civil and
theological peace against future seditious Mrs.
Hutchinsons.” (Note 4)
Misrepresenting the heritage of the reformation leads to
additional error. In Chapter 14 the editors present various
documents of “The Catholic Response to Protestantism in
Public Schools.” It is difficult to understand how one can
marshal documents about the struggle over the treatment of
Catholics by New York City’s Public School Society without
the writings of “Dagger John” Hughes; (Note 5) instead
the editors selected the mild petition of Thomas O’Connor.
Moreover, absent a more detailed context, Protestant view and
the Catholic situation is difficult to fathom. In 1834 the
Ursuline Convent in Boston was set ablaze by a Protestant mob.
In 1844 Catholics and Protestants rioted, shooting and beating
one another to death in the "Philadelphia Bible Riots". Ten
years later the Old South Church, in Bath Maine was burned by an
anti-Catholic mob. From our vantage point today when Catholics
are such an essential part of the American mainstream, how are
students’ to comprehend the hatred and violence that met
Catholics’ observation that non-denominational simply meant
Protestant and their request that their views be recognized? Who
will explain that the Irish were not considered part of the White
race? The editors would have done well to include, for example,
a reading on Samuel F.B. Morse's anti-Catholic rhetoric in which
he proclaimed “popery” the natural enemy of general
education – of perhaps “Tilden's "Wolf at the door,
gaunt and hungry" - Don't let him in” the anti-Catholic
cartoon by Thomas Nast showing “Children trying to keep
wolf, with collar ‘Democrat’, and tag, ‘foreign
Roman church,’ out of door with sign ‘The
public-school system is the bulwark of the American republic and
for its security the application of public funds to sectarian
purposes should be forbidden - Republican
declaration’” (Nnote 6) Thick description is necessary
if students are to comprehend why in the 1840’s and
50’s Catholic struggles for access to schools, and the
elimination of anti-Catholic elements in the curriculum raised
the same virulent reaction that met the integration of Blacks in
the 1950’s and 60’s.
It is another unfortunate consequence of the selection and
lack of context that issues surrounding the education of African
Americans do not appear until an entry from Up from Slavery an
Autobiography published by Booker T. Washington in
1901. (Note 7) This decision
“disappears” the previous four century history of
Blacks in the U.S. and their relentless struggle to obtain an
education. Instead of having Blacks remain invisible until the
start of the 20th century, the editors might have
thought to include a poem by Phyllis Wheatley, kidnapped from the
Senegal-Gambia region when she was about seven, and enslaved to
the Wheatley family of Boston who provided her with a Puritan
education. Eventually she was given her freedom and published a
book of poetry in 1773. (Note 8) Similarly, documents from the
Quaker run Manumission society would have been helpful; they
opened the African Free School in 1787 in New York City.
The census of 1790 counted 59,196 non-white free persons,
which presumably included free Blacks, Native Americans, and
other persons of color. In that year there were nearly seven
hundred thousand slaves in the sixteen United States. Twenty
years later there were more than 1 million one hundred thousand
enslaved persons. In 1809 the Manumission society adopted the
Lancasterian system (also not discussed in the book). A visitor
to the school in 1817, Benjamin Shaw, concluded:
I am fully satisfied and every skeptical man who visits
this school and examines the scholars will be convinced that the
Negro is as capable of mental improvement as any white man in the
creation of God. An African prince was there in one corner
attentively copying the alphabet; a young man say a boy about
fourteen reciting passages from the best authors, suiting the
actions to the words; another answering difficult questions in
geography &c. In fact, let the enemies of these neglected
children of men perform a pilgrimage to New York and at this
shrine of education recant their principles and confess that the
poor despised African is as capable of every intellectual
improvement as themselves.
However, a graduate of the African Free School clearly pointed
out the contradictions of being an educated Person of Color in
America at this time:
Am I arrived at the end of my education, just on the eve of
setting out into the world, of commencing some honest pursuit, by
which to earn a comfortable subsistence? What are my prospects?
To what shall I turn my head? Shall I be a mechanic? No one will
employ me; white boys won't work with me. Shall I be a merchant?
No one will have me in his office; white clerks won't associate
with me. Drudgery and servitude, then, are my prospective
portion. (Note 9)
The history of African American education, and its
ironic consequences, cannot be omitted simply because there may
not be convenient five to ten page documents that fit neatly into
an anthology of source documents. Most of the Southern states,
where the majority of enslaved persons resided, prohibited the
education of African Americans. That said, slaves clearly were
taught things outside the schoolhouse, skilled labor being more
valuable than unskilled. Girls working in the house learned
domestic skills – in some cases so they could be nannies to
their owners children – and passed them on to their own
children. Boys often were trained in work and craft, either
directly or indirectly by observing their masters or others.
Some families also taught their slaves to read and write as part
of their Christian duty. Nonetheless the obstacles to the
education of Blacks cannot be overestimated. They were chattel
to be bought and sold at whim and without regard for family. In
fact marriage between slaves was not recognized. Blacks were not
allowed to testify in court against Whites. Educated or not,
Christian or not, African Americans were all damned with the same
epithets some Whites use against them today. Nearly 400 years of
slavery and racism, especially southern attempts to keep African
Americans from education, is the essential context to understand
the debates between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois over
the relative merits of industrial training versus advanced
education for the talented tenth.
The documents in this anthology (re)present the old fashioned
master narrative of education in the United States. It is a
prettified history that glosses over the more uncomfortable
moments: symbolic and real violence, the use of education to
oppress, schools as a tool of empire and as a justification for
domination. More than 40 pages are devoted to Horace Mann, but
missing are any documents on American Indians when the editors
should have included Captain Richard Pratt whose boarding school
at Carlisle Pennsylvania in 1879 intended to “Kill the
Indian and save the man.” Latino Catholics are similarly
elided, despite the fact the first text book in The U.S. was
probably published in Peru and carried along as mission schools
were constructed in New Mexico, Arizona and along the California
Coast. Even more curiously there is no contribution by Herbert
Spencer on Social Darwinism. Friedrich Wilhelm August
Fröbel, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, and Maria Montessori,
are similarly missing. Despite their enormous influence on
education in the United States, perhaps they were not American
enough to be selected for the volume.
Notes
1. Geertz, C. (1973). Thick description: Toward an
interpretative theory of culture. The interpretation of
cultures; selected essays. C. Geertz. New York, Basic Books. P.
14
3. Similarly, it is fine to note in the introduction
to the section on Cotton Mather that he: "sought to find ways to
reconcile the emerging scientific approach to knowledge with his
Puritan theology." But to fail to mention his connection with
one of the most famous episodes in Puritan New England," the
Salem witch trials" is more than an oversight. In fact Cotton
Mather argued strongly for the admission of "spectral evidence",
that is testimony that the spirit of someone accused of
witchcraft appeared to a witness in a dream. "Evidence" such as
this was used to condemn men and women to death by hanging. This
is hardly evidence of his reconciliation with scientific
evidence.
4. (See LaPlante, E. 2004. American Jezebel: The
uncommon life of Anne Hutchinson, the woman who defied the
Puritans. San Francisco, HarperCollins Publishers. Quote on
pp. 133-134)
5. The
first Irish Bishop in the City was a young priest from
Philadelphia named John Hughes with a reputation as a fighter; he
sometimes signed letters with a little sign of a dagger with a
cross handle – hence the nickname "Dagger John." He was
the founder of Fordham University.
6.
Illus. in: Harper's weekly, v. 20, no. 1029 (1876 Sept. 16),
pp. 756-757. Can be viewed on line at the Library of Congress
Prints and Photographs, http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/catalog.html,
LC-USZ62-126152
7. The
full text of Up From Slavery is on-line at
http://docsouth.unc.edu/washington/menu.html.
I would have included the more salient 1895 Atlanta
Compromise Speech available on line at
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/39/
8. Full text of her book of poems is on line at
http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/wheatley/menu.html
9. Quoted in Kaestle, C. F. (1983). Pilllars
of the Republic: Common schools and American society:
1780-1860. New York, Hill and Wang.
About the Reviewer
Eric Margolis
The author is a sociologist and teaches the social and
philosophical foundations of education at Arizona State
University. Email: eric.margolis@asu.edu
Copyright is retained by the first or sole author,
who grants right of first publication to the Education Review.