Page 313 - American Stories, A History of the United States

In practice, new or improved public schools often alienated working-class pupils
12.1 and their families rather than reforming them. Compulsory attendance laws deprived
poor families of needed wage earners without guaranteeing jobs for those with an ele-
mentary education. As the laboring class became increasingly immigrant and Catholic
12.2 in the 1840s and 1850s, dissatisfaction arose over the evangelical Protestant tone of
“moral instruction” in the schools. Mann and his disciples were deliberately trying to
impose a uniform culture on people who valued differing traditions.

12.3 In addition to the “three Rs” (“reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic”), mid-nineteenth-
century public schools taught the “Protestant ethic”—industry, punctuality, sobriety,
and frugality. These were the virtues the famous McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers, which
first appeared in 1836, stressed. Millions of children learned to read by digesting
McGuffey’s parables about the terrible fate of those who gave in to sloth, drunkenness,
or wastefulness. Such moral indoctrination helped produce generations of Americans
with personalities and beliefs adapted to the needs of an industrializing society—people
who could be depended on to adjust to the precise and regular routines of the factory
or the office. But as an education for self-government—in the sense of learning to think
for oneself—it left much to be desired.
Fortunately, however, education was neither limited to the schools nor devoted
solely to children. Every city and almost every town or village had a lyceum, a debating
society, or a mechanics’ institute where adults of all social classes could broaden their
intellectual horizons. Lyceums featured lectures on such subjects as “self-reliance” and
“the conduct of life” by creative thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson; explanations and
demonstrations of the latest scientific discoveries; and debates on controversial issues.
Young Abraham Lincoln, who had received less than two years of formal schooling
as a child in backwoods Indiana, sharpened his intellect in the early 1830s as a member
of the New Salem, Illinois, debating society. In 1838, after moving to Springfield, he set
Quick Check forth his political principles when he spoke at the local lyceum on “The Perpetuation
how did horace Mann change ideas of Our Political Institutions.” More than the public schools, the lyceums and debating
about public schooling in America?
societies fostered independent thought and encouraged new ideas.

Reform Turns Radical

12.3 What were some of the major antebellum reform movements?
D uring the 1830s, dissension split the great reform movement spawned by

the Second Great Awakening. Efforts to promote evangelical piety, improve
personal and public morality, and shape character through familial or insti-
tutional discipline continued and even flourished. But bolder spirits set their
sights on the total liberation and perfection of the individual.

The Rise of Radical Abolitionism
The new perfectionism had its most important success within the antislavery move-
ment. Before the 1830s, most people who expressed religious and moral concern over
slavery were affiliated with the American Colonization Society. Most colonizationists
admitted that slavery was an evil, but they also viewed it as a deeply rooted social and
economic institution that could be eliminated only gradually and with the cooperation
of slaveholders. Reflecting racial prejudice, they proposed to provide transportation to
Africa for free blacks who chose to go, or were emancipated for that purpose, to relieve
southern fears that a race war would erupt if freed slaves remained in America. In 1821,
the society established the colony of Liberia in West Africa, and in the 1830s, a few
thousand African Americans were settled there.
Colonization proved to be grossly inadequate as a step toward eliminating slavery.
Many of the blacks transported to Africa were already free, and those liberated by masters
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