Utopian Reformers

Early in the 19th century the new American nation seemed, to European visionaries, to offer endless possibilities for experiments in the fundamental reordering of human relations in society. Many of these experiments were communitarian, reacting against the social disruption of revolutions and industrialization through seeking to reproduce on a secular basis the cooperative spirit of religiously based communities. Education—notably the ideas associated with Swiss educator Heinrich Pestalozzi—played a key role in most of these schemes, offering the promise of remaking humanity, an ambition as old as Plato's Republic.

Among the Britons who tried, in various ways, to carry out such plans in the United States were William Maclure (1763–1840), Robert Owen (1771–1858), his son Robert Dale Owen (1801–1877), and Frances Wright (1795–1852). Bronson Alcott (1799–1888), an American educator, became for a time a favorite of British enthusiasts for this utopian program of a “New Moral World.”

Maclure was a successful businessman who became an American citizen, retiring early to devote himself to the first extensive geological survey of the United States. Interested in social reform, he became convinced that only an appropriate education of young children could produce fundamental change: “I have so far lost the little confidence I had in adults or parents that I believe no good system of education can have a fair trial but with orphans” (Bestor, 1948, p. 351). Concluding that the new methods of Pestalozzi could have the most powerful effect, he financed the move of several Pestalozzian educators to Philadelphia, where he had become president of the Academy of Natural Sciences. One of them, Joseph Neef, published in 1809 Sketch of a Plan and Method of Education, the first book on pedagogical method published in America.

Like Maclure, Robert Owen was a successful businessman who turned to social and educational reform. Owen managed for more than 20 years a cotton mill that his father-in-law had built in a sparsely populated area of Scotland, housing a labor force gathered from the Highlands and urban orphanages. New Lanark was thus an early “company town,” and Owen took advantage of his complete control to experiment in a variety of ways with improving the attitudes and habits of his workers. Widely admired by contemporary reformers was the significantly named Institution Established for the Formation of Character, in which children were enrolled as soon as they could walk since, “in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, parents are altogether ignorant of the right method of treating children” (Gilman, 1899, p. 52). Children under 10 were “trained collectively,” while those older and employed in the factory had an evening school. Owen insisted that “the children were not to be annoyed with books, but were to be taught the uses and nature or qualities of the common things around them” (Silver, 1969, pp. 55, 65). This was the crowning element of the “total institution” that Owen had created, in which all the residents were directly dependent on him and in which he sought to direct their lives both on and off the job.

Intoxicated with the celebrity of New Lanark, Owen distributed widely “A New View of Society” [Page 911](1816). “The fundamental principle,” he wrote, “on which all these Essays proceed is, that ‘Children collectively may be taught any sentiments and habits’; or, in other words, ‘trained to acquire any character'” (Silver, 1969, p. 130). Through state-controlled schooling, “the governing powers of any country may easily and economically give its subjects just sentiments, and the best habits” (p. 144). This would be the basis for a new social and economic order and for universal peace and progress; through the right sort of education, man would come to understand “that his individual happiness can be increased and extended only in proportion as he actively endeavours to increase and extend the happiness of all around him” (p. 73). The villages of Unity and Mutual Cooperation would create a surplus of production that would make all prosperous.

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