Democracy's Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America by Johann N. Neem (review)

Johann N. Neem notes in the opening pages of Democracy's Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America that he undertook "a daunting task" by constructing a new social history of the expansion of America's public schools during the antebellum era (p. xii). The most recent synthesis covering this topic, Carl F. Kaestle's Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York, 1983), is thirty-five years old. Kaestle's generation of revisionists criticized earlier historians, who had interpreted the expansion of free schools under education reformers as an utter success for democracy. The revisionists instead contended that the nineteenth-century reformers unjustly undermined minority rights by imposing state-sanctioned curriculum and professional standards on local school districts. While Kaestle was sympathetic to the reformers' desire to encourage social uplift, even he concluded that their agenda's "'cultural cost'" was too high because it promoted uniformity rather than diversity (p. 175).

In Democracy's Schools, Neem builds on research and insights from the recent works of Geraldine J. Clifford, Hilary J. Moss, Robin L. Einhorn, and others to construct a postrevisionist narrative that challenges the anti-institutionalism of Kaestle's generation. While Neem shares the revisionists' empathy for the perspectives of the reformers' nineteenth-century opponents, he ultimately defends the reformers' ambition to unite Americans through the common experience of receiving a quality public education that stimulated independent thinking and community-mindedness. In Neem's words, "Education reformers were right. Democracy depends on underlying social bonds" in a diverse society (p. 168). For example, while Neem acknowledges that the reformers compelled Catholic children to attend public schools that upheld distinctly Protestant values, he asserts that racial segregation posed a greater threat to minorities' rights. He argues that "the costs of exclusion" from America's public schools were "higher than the challenges of inclusion" (p. 166). Neem likewise disagrees with the revisionists' claim that public schools generated class inequality by ingraining submissiveness in working-class children in order to create docile wage earners. He draws insight from the reformers' textbooks and pedagogies to infer that they instead aimed to "counteract the degrading tendencies of modern [industrial] work" through a curriculum that nurtured young people's "creative potential" and fostered "self-discipline, not obedience" (pp. 21, 35, 32).

The organization of Democracy's Schools reinforces Neem's goal to recast the education reformers' efforts in a positive light while stressing their shortfalls. The opening chapters identify the reformers' core objectives as instilling civic-mindedness and unleashing each child's potential by cultivating his or her self-understanding and creativity. In the later chapters, Neem analyzes the political and cultural compromises between the reformers and their opponents. The opponents included skeptical parents, who argued that schools should only teach basic reading and writing skills, and traditional educators, whose pedagogies encouraged rote memorization instead of critical thinking. In opponents' eyes, the reformers' hope to promote liberal education in state-supervised free schools was both elitist, because it ignored local values, and unneeded, because many Americans already had access to locally run common schools that charged nominal fees. Neem's contentions in these later chapters are his most insightful. He concludes that although the reformers' vision deeply divided communities, it "would never have been successful" if it "did not appeal to enough Americans," and therefore the momentum for education reform came as much from a popular groundswell as from an elite-imposed agenda (p. 93).

Neem's insights are timely in our twenty-first-century world. At a time when critics on both the Left and the Right advocate homeschooling and charter schools as alternatives to traditional public education, when activists question the benefits of a liberal education in a technology-driven age, and when our nation grapples with the effects of ever-increasing cultural diversity, it is worth contemplating the role public...