What Textbooks Reveal
about the 19th-Century
Common School Movement:
Prep for Watkinson Library “History Lab”
presentation by Jack Dougherty for
Educ 300: Education Reform Past & Present
Trinity College, Hartford CT
updated January 2019
Except for material labeled from other sources, this content is shared by the author under a Creative Commons Atribution-NonCommerical-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. You may freely modify and share with others under the same terms, with a source citation.
What was Common-School Movement?
Early national period (after Revolution: 1780s-1830s)
Informal system of sporadic, locally-controlled schools, usually not funded by state government taxes
Several unsuccessful attempts by leaders to create statewide schooling, such as Thomas Jefferson's numerous failed plans (1779, 1790s, 1817) for Virginia public education system
Common School era (antebellum period: 1830s-60s)
Successful creation of formalized networks of state-sponsored schools with elementary-level curricula, beginning in northeastern states (Massachusetts, Connecticut, 1830s)
• free schools without tuition
• larger enrollments; longer school year
• attempts to create uniform grade levels and textbooks
• rise of female teachers and training schools (aka normal schools)
• rise of school superintendent
Who were Common-School reformers?
Source: Learn more about Catharine Beecher and her family, from the Harriett Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford
Henry Barnard, CT Secretary of Education; first US Commission of Education, from
Henry Barnard Collection at Watkinson Library
Henry Barnard, CT Secretary of Education; first US Commission of Education, from
Approximately 7,000 textbooks that he collected and publishers sent to him as a leading common school reformer and editor of American Journal of Education from 1855-1881
In our Watkinson “history lab” exercise we will work in pairs to discover what these source materials tell us about the ideologies of school reformers, as well as teaching and learning in the classroom
Analyzing Ideology in Common School Textbooks
Source: McGuffey's First Reader (1844), reprinted in Lindberg, The Annotated McGuffey (1976)
How did reformers wish to socialize youth?
Analyzing Ideology in Common School Textbooks
How did reformers view the US versus other nations?
Analyzing Ideology in Common School Textbooks
How did reformers view the US versus other nations?