Aristocratic Education and the Making of the American Republic - Historical Book on Elite Education in Early America | Perfect for History Students & Educators
$54.45
$99
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Aristocratic Education and the Making of the American Republic - Historical Book on Elite Education in Early America | Perfect for History Students & Educators
$54.45
$99
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Description
Following the American Revolution, it was a cliche that the new republic's future depended on widespread, informed citizenship. However, instead of immediately creating the common schools--accessible, elementary education--that seemed necessary to create such a citizenry, the Federalists in power founded one of the most ubiquitous but forgotten institutions of early American life: academies, privately run but state-chartered secondary schools that offered European-style education primarily for elites. By 1800, academies had become the most widely incorporated institutions besides churches and transportation projects in nearly every state.In this book, Mark Boonshoft shows how many Americans saw the academy as a caricature of aristocratic European education and how their political reaction against the academy led to a first era of school reform in the United States, helping transform education from a tool of elite privilege into a key component of self-government. And yet the very anti-aristocratic critique that propelled democratic education was conspicuously silent on the persistence of racial and gender inequality in public schooling. By tracing the history of academies in the revolutionary era, Boonshoft offers a new understanding of political power and the origins of public education and segregation in the United States.
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In this fascinating and well written book, Mark Boonshoft explores how, over the course of the long revolutionary era, education went from being a birthright of the elite few to a privilege of citizenship in the new republic. The author uncovers the importance of the new state-chartered but privately run academies that sprang up in the wake of the Revolution. He chronicles how the contexts of a new republic led to public critiques of these exclusive academies at a time when education came to be understood as necessary to the survival of a republic. The author argues that it was partly the reaction against these elitist institutions in the early national period that led to the creation of the more democratized form of education that emerged in the nineteenth century as the origins of the American public school system. Yet, the author also shows how the necessity of more inclusive access to education had embedded in it its own forms of exclusion, particularly regarding race. This is a timely and important book that offers deep and necessary historical context to our current debates about charter schools, public education, racial and class-based inequities in the classroom, and the civic importance of education.
