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Reviews
The book provides a compelling account of how Horace Mann, Reverend William Ellery Channing, Catharine Beecher, and other antebellum advocates of the United States’s common schools brought what amounts to a liberal arts education to the nation’s children. In the face of widespread cynicism about public education, Neem reminds us that public schools can liberate children’s minds from prejudice or vocational preoccupations.
This generally clear and ample account of the origins of public education draws upon the latest research and a good deal of primary-source material. Neem’s adept treatment of the many conflicts evident at the time, along with the extravagant rhetoric that often accompanied reform, makes this book an attractive option for illuminating this period in American history... Democracy’s Schools documents the advance in our understanding of early schooling in the United States, and points to directions for further exploration.
There is much about Democracy's Schools to appreciate. Neem has immersed himself in a wide array of archival sources. He renders sensible a multitude of dense, sprawling treatises and texts. He produces a well-written, provocative, and cohesive narrative accessible to a lay and scholarly audiences. Moreover, one cannot finish Democracy's Schools without understanding why Neem personally has great faith in public education.
Neem's insights are timely in our twenty-first-century world. At a time when critics on both the Left and Right advocate homeschooling and charter schools as alternatives to traditional public education, when activists question the benefits of a liberal education in a technology-driven age, and when our nation grapples with the effects of ever-increasing cultural diversity, it is worth contemplating the role public schools have played in upholding our democratic institutions.
Neem is masterful in explaining, to new and seasoned readers, antebellum public education. The origins of debates over governance, funding and curricula (local control versus national priorities, public regulation and taxation versus private management and market fundamentalism) as well as the rights and responsibilities of the majority vis-à-vis those of the many minority groups are illuminated in a clear, thoughtful and even-handed way. Thus, his narrative does more than interpret the past: it also provides a ready and accessible context for many of the current tensions in US education and American democracy.
No matter your opinion on public education, [Democracy's Schools] is a valuable book, and its history of American schools is also a fascinating history of America itself.
Beautifully written, clearly organized, and deeply grounded in a nice mix of primary and secondary sources, Democracy's Schools is the best short introduction to antebellum public education that I've ever read. It is also hugely relevant to ongoing questions about liberal arts and democracy.
In this compact and ambitious interpretive history, Neem does a masterful job of laying out the many, frequently conflicting, values and ideas that make the public school such a dynamic and essential democratic institution.
In this outstanding study, bursting with fresh insights, Johann Neem balances critical assessments of common school reformers’ vision of American education against a sympathetic understanding of their aspiration to provide all Americans the tools necessary for 'self-culture,' an ambitious ideal of a fulfilling life. Democracy’s Schools shows how these tensions shaped antebellum American politics and social life as well as education, and why struggles between a shared national vision and distinctive local institutions remain at the heart of debates about education in a pluralist democracy.
About
Book Details
Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x 9
Pages
256
ISBN
9781421423210
Illustration Description
9 halftones
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Citizenship and Self-Culture
2. Democratic Education
3. Politics of Education
4. Teachers and Students
5. Containing Multitudes
Conclusion
Appendix
Notes
Index
Featured Contributor
Johann N. Neem
Johann N. Neem is a professor of history at Western Washington University. He is the author of Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts and Democracy's Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America.Resources
