The Common School

common school A publicly supported and locally controlled elementary school. were calibrated to groups of students who moved in unison from lesson to lesson; lessons were broken down into small parts, or units, with each phase of instruction assigned to particular monitors. Monitorial schools were popular in large eastern cities. For example, more than 600,000 children attended the New York Free School Society’s monitorial schools.13 In the 1840s, common schools replaced monitorial schools when their educational limitations become increasingly apparent.

5-3a the common school

The common school movement of the first half of the nineteenth century is highly significant in American education because it created publicly controlled and funded elementary education. It was called a “common” school because it was open to children of all social and economic classes. Historically, however, enslaved African children in the South were excluded from common schools until the Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery, and more public schools were established during the Reconstruction period.

In the country’s common schools, despite separation of church and state, the school day usually began with a Christian prayer, hymn, or reading from the Bible, which would be followed by the recitation of the pledge of allegiance to the flag and the reading of a short patriotic passage or the singing of a patriotic song. The teacher led the students through a basic standard curriculum of reading, writing, spelling, arithmetic, history, and geography. Often lessons in health, art (drawing), and music (singing) were included. Because the school contained students of a variety of ages, the teacher might arrange them into groups of a similar age. In this way, she could do some simultaneous group instruction. However, a considerable amount of time was spent on the individual recitation in which a student would stand before the teacher and recite a previously assigned lesson. In the early nineteenth century, it was not unusual for each student to bring the books their family owned with them to school. The teacher would make an assignment from the book, and the student would memorize and then recite it.

13William R. Johnson, “‘Chanting Choristes’: Simultaneous Recitation in Baltimore’s NineteenthCentury Primary Schools,” History of Education Quarterly (Spring 1994), pp. 1–12.

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Benjamin ruSh

Classic Ima ge /A l a m y

1740 1750

1745 Birth 1760 Awarded BA, College of New Jersey

1768 Received medical degree from university of Edinburgh

1769 Chemistry professor at College of Philadelphia

1783 Appointed to staff of Pennsylvania hospital

1776 Pennsylvania delegate to Continental Congress

1760 1770 1780

educational ladder The system of

public education in the United States that begins with kindergarten, proceeds through elementary school, continues through middle and high school, and leads to attendance at a community college, state college, or university.

Because of the historic tradition of local control and the Constitution’s reserved powers clause in the Tenth Amendment, the states, rather than the federal government, were responsible for the establishment and support of public schools. The United States, unlike France and Japan, did not establish a national school system. The patterns by which common schools were established differed from state to state and even within a given state. Especially on the western frontier, where there were many small school districts, resources and support for schooling varied significantly from one district to another. Because of this history, public-education funding is still seriously uneven in the school districts and states.

The common-school movement gained momentum between 1820 and 1850. The New England states of Massachusetts and Connecticut, with a tradition of town and district schools, were the earliest to establish common schools. In 1826, Massachusetts required every town to elect a school committee responsible for all the schools in its area of jurisdiction. Ten years later, in 1836, Massachusetts established the first state board of education. Connecticut then followed its neighbor’s example. Other northern states generally adopted New England’s common school model. As the frontier moved westward, and new states were admitted to the Union, they, too, established common or public elementary-school systems. In the South, however, with some exceptions such as North Carolina, common schools were not generally established until the Reconstruction period, 1865–1876, after the Civil War.

State legislatures typically established common schools in the following sequence: 1. First, they allowed residents to organize local school districts with the approval of local voters. 2. Second, they deliberately encouraged, but did not mandate, establishing school districts, electing school boards, and levying taxes to fund schools. 3. Third, they made common schools compulsory by mandating the establishment of districts, election of boards, and collecting taxes to support schools.

The common school movement did not proceed easily, however. Opponents argued that education was a private, not a public concern. Some individuals, especially in the Midwestern rural areas, supported schools as strictly local institutions but did not want the state involved in their governance, control, and funding. Despite this opposition, common schools were established and laid the foundation of the American public-school system. Later in the nineteenth century, the American educational ladder was completed as high schools connected elementary schools to state colleges and universities. Horace Mann was one of the most prominent common school leaders.

1791–1813 Professor of Medicine university of Pennsylvania

1798 Publishes Essays: Literary, Moral, and Philosophical

1790 1800 1810

1812 Publishes Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind

1813 Death