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ollowing the War of 1812, public concern over
schooling mounted. During the 1820s and 1830s, the urban population grew at a
rate of over 60 percent a decade, and then exploded in the 1840s, increasing 92
percent. The rapid growth of cities made middle-class citizens suddenly aware
of gangs of illiterate juvenile delinquents and vagrant children. By the
mid-1820s, increasing immigration heightened pressure for public schooling. Educator Calvin Stowe, husband of novelist
Harriet Beecher Stowe of Uncle Tom’s Cabin fame, warned:
Unless we educate
our immigrants they will be our ruin. It is no longer a question of
benevolence, of duty, or of enlightened self-interest…we are prompted to it by
the instinct of self-preservation.
Demands for schools, however, were not confined to those worried by rapid immigration and urban growth. There was also widespread demand for schooling from urban workers. Many skilled laborers called for schools that would mix wealthy children with those of the working class. Workers supported schools even though they depended on the wages of their children. In many working-class families, children under the age of 15 earned as much as 20 percent of the family’s income.
Here, Philadelphia's working men
call for free public education. But they note that even free schools might
still exclude the children of the very poor, who had to work to help to support
their families. To help these children, they propose "manual labor schools,"
where students will be able to earn money while they study.
Philadelphia Working Men's
Committee (1830)
...[Public] schools would, at least,
relieve, in a great measure, many indigent parents, from the care of children,
which in many cases occupies as much of their time as would be necessary to
earn the children a subsistence….
The original element of
a despotism is a monopoly of talent, which consigns the multitude to
comparative ignorance, and secures the balance of knowledge on the side of the
rich and the rulers.... The means of equal knowledge (the only security for
equal liberty) should be rendered, by legal provision, the common property of
all classes….
Very many of the poorest parents are totally unable to clothe and maintain their children while at school, and are compelled to employ their time, while yet very young, in aiding to procure a subsistence. In the city of New York, a much more efficient system of education exists than in this city...yet there are at the present time upwards of 24,000 children [in New York City] between the ages of 5 and 15 years, who attend no schools whatever.... It is evidently therefore of no avila how free the schools may be, while those children who stand most in need of them, are through the necessity of their parents, either retained from them altogether, or withdrawn at an improper age....
The committees,
therefore, believe that one school, at least, should be established...by which
the children may be enabled to procure [by manual labor while at school] a
liberal and scientific education.
Hundreds, perhaps
thousands of youth, who, between the ages of 14 and 21 are daily and nightly
seduced around or into the innumerable dens of vice, licensed and unlicensed,
that throng our suburbs....
Supporters of public schools faced intense opposition
from taxpayers fearful of higher taxes; from members of the clergy opposed to
schools that did not emphasize religious instruction; and from teachers who
feared that they would lose their jobs. Here, a Philadelphia newspaper
denounces the demand for tax supported public schools on the grounds that it
will unfairly redistribute wealth away from hard-working families.
Philadelphia National Gazette
(1830)
The scheme of Universal Equal
Education...would be a compulsory application of the means of the richer, for
the direct use of the poorer classes.... The declared object is...to elevate
the standard of education of the working classes, to equalize the standard for
all classes....
The more thriving members of the
"mechanical and other working classes" would...find that they had
toiled for the benefit of other families than their own. One of the chief
excitements to industry, among those classes, is the hope of earning the means
of educating their children respectably or liberally: that incentive would be
removed, and the scheme of state and equal education be thus a premium for
comparative idleness, to be taken out of the pockets of the laborious and
conscientious....