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The Common School Awakening offers a new narrative that counters previous conceptions about the rise of public schools in America. In this book, David Komline tells how Christian reformers played a defining role in the movement to systematize and professionalize American education in the first half of the nineteenth century.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1. Joseph Lancaster, Monitorial Education, and Christianity without Sectarianism
- 2. "The Schoolmaster is Abroad": Early International Influences on American Education
- 3. Early Attempts at Revival in Massachusetts
- 4. The "Prussian System": Origins and Transmission
- 5. "The Educational Regeneration of New England": The Height of the Awakening in Massachusetts
- 6. The Common School Awakening in Ohio
- 7. An Awakening for Whom? Tensions in Ohio
- Epilogue- The End of the Awakening
- Acknowledgements
- Archives Consulted
- Notes
- Index
About the author
David Komline is Associate Professor of Church History at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan. He holds a PhD from the University of Notre Dame and spent a year as a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Heidelberg. He has published essays in Religion and American Culture, Anglican and Episcopal History, and several edited collections.
Summary
The Common School Awakening offers a new narrative that counters previous conceptions about the rise of public schools in America. In this book, David Komline tells how Christian reformers played a defining role in the movement to systematize and professionalize American education in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Additional text
The arrival of The Common School Awakening will give historians, education theorists, and policy scholars much to reconsider. Generally considered to have begun in the 1830s in Massachusetts, Komline shows that the common school movement actually had its origins across the Atlantic and at least a generation earlier, before the turn of the nineteenth century. Quite frankly, I am persuaded by the case he makes-and it will change the way I think and write about the rise of common schools in America. Given that debates over public schools in American have in many ways been debates over the nature of democracy and all that it entails, this is no small accomplishment.
