Templeton's Academy

The academy was a highly popular educational model in the early national era, appealing particularly to young rural males who desired more than an elementary education. To lure a wide, paying clientele, rural academies offered both basic English and more demanding Latin tracks using what educators called the amalgamation model. In the early national period, key contributing factors to academies' increasing popularity were rapidly shifting economic forces, the advent of childhood as a discrete life stage, and the entrepreneurial spirit that accompanied industrial capitalism. Relatedly, the waning of English-style craft apprenticeship necessitated new institutions for young males to transition into adulthood and economic self-sufficiency. Without the assurance of this indentured craft apprenticeship to help them transition, young white middle-class males often entered the academy to undertake a metamorphosis that was no longer so easily defined.¹ For many such boys, that transformation was delivered by new and constantly changing means of remaking oneself in the image of the new republic. At the same time, burgeoning republican educational ideals loosely coincided with an "emerging normative view of childhood" that encountered "an imagined child, akin but not identical to the middle-class child."²

Such early national developments structured and were partially structured by academies, which existed at the very centers of many frontier villages. A village's deliberate planning constituted a commercial strategy to integrate dispersed farms into the geographic syntax of republican life (BF, 67). Childhood studies scholar Steven Mintz writes, "Convinced that the stability of the new republic depended on a virtuous citizenry, the postrevolutionary generation called for more intensive styles of childrearing and more prolonged and systematic forms of education."³ For "republican essayists" of that time, virtue "meant discipline, sacrifice, simplicity, and intelligence, and they called upon teachers, ministers, and parents to aid in the creation and ministry of a virtuous citizenry."⁴ Detractors alleged that, despite these institutions' inconsistent curricula and rudimentary studies, academies' proponents overpromised scholastic achievement, social mobility, and economic opportunity. Though some academies served as nothing more than "glorified elementary schools,"⁵ the academy nonetheless offered a influential model that addressed local needs while aiming to integrate locally rooted youth into the national fold. In contrast to lesser school structures, academies used durable building materials that entailed a major communal investment.

Parallel composites: cooper's architectural, literary, and educational orders

Because an academy is both an ideologically imbued educational model and a specific material structure, James Fenimore Cooper's close attention to Templeton's academy in The Pioneers (1823) allows the author to engage with contemporary educational debates—those surrounding formal schooling—that parallel emerging republican ideals. Cooper's detailed consideration of the academy's architecture and curricula also puts the institution in dialogue with the aesthetics of his frontier romance. Scholars have noted the continuity between Cooper's descriptions of the architectural style called the Composite order, which fused Ionic and Corinthian features, and the grand American project of integrating a diverse population.⁶ Instead of employing the European style of joinery called scribe rule in Templeton's construction, Cooper fuses the Composite order to the American style of joinery called the square rule.⁷ Although The Pioneers is partially derisive toward the Composite order, the author nonetheless celebrates it "as uniquely suited to allow the future to dialog with the past without having to dismantle its structural inheritances."⁸ Cooper's specification of the square rule is particularly relevant in this light. Philip Fisher writes that "the historical novel is a device for practicing how to meet a certain but postponed future."⁹ Because the academy model is concerned with both preservation and futurity, nationalism and localism, it is thematically and narratively significant to Cooper's romance.

Foregrounding Templeton's academy enriches our understanding of the social complexities in The Pioneers. The academy both addressed demand for and facilitated standardized, formal educational approaches. Since the nation's founding, republican-minded schooling has been crucial to developing American cohesion. Expressing a Revolutionary ideal that attempted to straddle individual liberties and social order, luminaries such as Noah Webster, Benjamin Rush, and Thomas Jefferson regarded education as central...