HIST 210 - Educating Americans in the Long Nineteenth Century

What does it mean to be educated? Is education a system of social control or a pathway to liberation? Should schooling cultivate collective values and traditions, nurture democratic citizens, or encourage economic productivity? What is the relationship between “education” and “school”? In this course, we will investigate how Americans from the revolution to the end of the nineteenth century grappled with these questions. We will examine a variety of educational institutions (such as chartered academies, female seminaries, Native American boarding schools, and freedpeople’s schools), but we will give special attention to the rise of public education (the common school system), considering both why some Americans in the early republic thought that mandatory public schooling was essential and why others resisted it. We will also study the myriad ways that Americans were educated outside formal schooling, including apprenticeship and the “binding out” of children, the lyceum and Chautauqua movements, libraries and reading societies, Sunday schools, settlement houses, and clandestine education under slavery. Along the way, we will pay particular attention to the ways in which educational practices and philosophies in the United States either exacerbated or mitigated social inequalities along the lines of gender, race, and class. By closely considering how education worked (and didn’t) in the nineteenth century, we will aim to develop greater insights into what we want from education-on an individual and societal level-in the twenty-first century.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group II
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Evaluate data and/or sources.
Analyze institutions, formations, languages, structures, or processes, whether social, political, religious, economic, cultural, intellectual or other.
Think in sophisticated ways about causation, social and/or historical change, human cognition, or the relationship between individuals and society, or engage with social, political, religious or economic theory in other areas.