American Education, Themes in the History of

Since the institution of schooling directly reflects a culture's essential characteristics, there are meaningful and recurrent patterns—persistent themes—in the history of American education. An understanding of these key themes, which are described in this entry, helps to explain the social and political issues that shape public schooling.

One defining theme is nationalism. Teaching children how to be “Americans”—and, indeed, defining what this means—has been a consistent fundamental purpose of public schooling. Since the early years of nationhood, influential Americans have viewed the school as a primary agency for training in citizenship, loyalty to the state, and personal identification with the national heritage, mythology, and interests. Early American intellectuals (such as Noah Webster and Benjamin Rush) realized that the United States lacked a traditional, distinctive culture, language, and historical identity, and had grown out of a national ideal or ideology that needed to be deliberately instilled in each new generation.

The common school initiatives of the mid-nineteenth century gained support in large part because the rise of immigration seemed to threaten this national identity. The launching of the Sputnik satellite by the Soviet Union in 1957 galvanized school reform in the interest of national defense, and the landmark 1983 report A Nation at Risk zealously restated this theme, charging public education with the task of safeguarding the very survival of the American nation.

Schooling has also been shaped significantly by the distinctive features of the economic system of capitalism. In essence, capitalism is a social order based on meritocracy—a presumably open competition in which winners achieve high status, wealth, and influence and losers are expected to accept the conditions of their roles as employees and consumers. Capitalism measures success primarily in economic terms (profit, income, gross national product, etc.) and tends to push aesthetic and spiritual concerns to the margins of the culture. Education is consequently defined in terms of effective management and productivity.

[Page 41]Since the 1840s, when Horace Mann persuaded the emerging industrialist elite to support public education because it would provide a supply of dependable, sober, disciplined factory workers, schools have been used to cultivate a compliant and productive workforce. Increasingly since the start of the twentieth century, business leaders and policy makers have steered education toward values of “social efficiency,” standardization, and management of what is often called “human capital.” The testing, grading, labeling, and ranking of students reflect a competitive, materialistic, production-oriented economic system. Many young people and their families value education above all else for the vocational opportunities it can open for them, if they are successful in school.

Historically, the rise of capitalism was linked to the modernist philosophy of scientific reductionism, which views the world from a materialist and utilitarian perspective. Nature is best understood, according to this perspective, through objective observation, measurement, and abstract reasoning. Complex, holistic processes are reduced to their most basic components and discrete functions. Through such analysis, modern society can develop powerful tools and technologies to manage natural resources, and human energies are viewed as such resources. In the early years of the twentieth century, social scientists and educators began to apply this technocratic approach to social institutions, especially schooling. Intelligence tests, behaviorist psychology, “scientific management,” and other presumably objective techniques were developed and increasingly used to provide more consistent control of teaching and learning.

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