“Republican Machines” or Pestalozzian
Bildung?
Two Visions of Moral Education in the Early Republic
- “Republican Machines” or Pestalozzian Bildung? Two Visions of Moral Education in the Early Republic
Eve Kornfeld is assistant professor of history at San Diego State University. She has published essays on women and on the female Bildungsroman in nineteenth-century America in the Journal of American Culture (1984, 1987) and on the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia in Pennsylvania History (1984), on women in post-Revolutionary America, and has an essay forthcoming on David Ramsay in the Journal of the Early Republic.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Donald Fleming, John Clive and Franklin Ford for their encouragmeent at the outset of this investigation, as well as colleagues at the annual conference of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (July 1987) and the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association (August 1988) for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. She also acknowledges the generous support of the Krupp Foundation for initial research in European archives in 1981–1982.
Notes
1. The traditional interpretation, in its most sophisticated form, can be found in Rush Welter, Popular Education and Democratic Thought in America (New York, 1962). One of the first and strongest statements of the revisionist critique appeared in Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Cambridge, 1968); see also David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (New York, 1971), and T.J. Jackson Lears, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities,” The American Historical Review 90 (June, 1985).
Curiously, some of the central issues of this historiographical debate have resonated in American public discourse on education in the past year or two—without any significant recognition of the long historical context. I refer, of course, to the controversy surrounding the suggestions about moral education made in the bestseller by Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York, 1987), as well as to the efforts of Stanford University to reform its introductory curriculum (which in the spring of 1988 drew the fire of then United States Secretary of Education William Bennett). I seek to demonstrate in this paper that, historically, “the search for truth and the good life [has not been] the exclusive property of the Right” and that moral education can take pluralistic forms. (See Stanley Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux, “Schooling, Culture, and Literacy in the Age of Broken Dreams: A Review of Bloom and Hirsch,” Harvard Educational Review 58:2 (May, 1988), 179.)
2. Rush was a 1760 graduate of The College of New Jersey and a statesman, physician and educator in Philadelphia until his death in 1813.
3. The famous phrase is from Benjamin Rush, A Plan for the Establishment of Public Schools and the Diffusion of Knowledge in Pennsylvania, to Which are Added Thoughts upon the Mode of Education, Proper in a Republic (Philadelphia, 1786). For a fuller discussion of the themes discussed in this paragraph, see Eve Kornfeld, “Making an American Culture, 1775–1815” (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1983). A lively and fascinating discussion about the shape and importance, of American republicanism was opened by Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, 1967); Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969); and J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975). See Lance Banning, “Jeffersonian Ideology Revisited: Liberal and Classical Ideas in the New American Republic,” and Joyce Appleby, “Republicanism in Old and New Contexts,” both in William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd. series, XLIII (January, 1986); and John P. Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism (New York, 1984), for very recent turns in the debate over American republicanism.
4. They are, in order, Samuel Harrison Smith, Samuel Knox, Noah Webster, Robert Coram, Benjamin Rush and Thomas Jefferson. George Washington was also interested in fostering republican education, and bequeathed a small endowment for the establishment of a national university.
5. Thomas Jefferson to George...
