Parents and Schools: The 150 Year Struggle for Control in American Education (review)

In the epilogue to William Cutler’s new book on the history of the “struggle” between parents and schools over control of children’s education, he applauds James Comer’s recent attempts in New Haven to engage parents, teachers, and school administrators in a meaningful partnership to better children’s education. Comer’s belief—and he is not the only advocate of this position—is that the proper aim of education is not simply schooling but healthy child development. Education thus construed represents a kind of enlightened, respectful intervention into family life. Yet the origins of this approach were less benign, reaching back to the middle decades of the nineteenth century when educators asserted both that schooling could do a better job at training children in essential skills and that society’s need to instill particular values in future generations was far too important to be left to parents “too poor,” “too lacking in character,” or “too foreign” to carry on the work of American democracy.

One-hundred and thirty years ago, another New Haven educator, on the eve of the passage of Connecticut’s compulsory school attendance law, cast the imminent decision to force children into the schools as an unhappy if inescapable paradox: On one hand, relations between parents and children and the authority of the parent, he argued, is “more sacred than human law” and the preservation of personal and parental rights provide the very “foundation of a free government.” On the other hand, he allowed that the “natural” authority of parents could at times abrade the civil right of children to receive “adequate instruction,” thus conjuring the authority of the state to override that of the parent. ¹ Once it knew its mind the state conveniently ignored laws sacred and profane, willingly undermining the bases of free government to support the emerging civil rights of the child. If the rights of parents and children were set at odds, so too was the view of the child deeply contradictory. For the nineteenth century witnessed the most exploitative uses of children’s labor alongside the sentimentalization of the child and the identification of childhood as a protected, “sacred” time of life. ²

Parents and Schools suggests a topic as broad as it is deep: How have parents and schools, from each side, negotiated this often unwelcome intercession into children’s development, socialization, and vocational training and how has this changed over time? How have the fissures of ethnicity, race, gender, and socioeconomic status over the last 150 years figured into the relative regard for schooling by parents? Have parents, given the varying outcomes of schooling for their children’s social and economic prospects, felt that the imposition of the values of the “official culture” of American schooling has been worth the strain on family resources and the sacrifice of their own folkways? As important and far-ranging as these questions are, Cutler’s project is narrower in scope than so immodest an undertaking. His history is of more conventional, institutionalized expressions of the ongoing contest over the lives and minds of school-age children—namely, the history of parent-teacher organizations and attendant school-sponored welfare initiatives directed toward the uplift of schoolchildren’s families. Cutler examines this often rocky relationship as it evolved from an early recognition of the implicit tension between parents and schools. He traces an arising affinity of interests between mothers and the growing cadre of female grade school teachers from the end of the Common School era to the calcification of parent-teacher relations into interest group politics during the 1970s and early 1980s.

While public school systems formed during the latter half of the nineteenth century, “home-school associations” burgeoned too, as parents and teachers defined common aims and discerned the advantages of cooperation. During this brief honeymoon phase of their relations it was often argued that parents and teachers should stand shoulder-to-shoulder on...