The Black Struggle for Public Schooling in Nineteenth-Century Illinois

The conventional historiography describing a strict public-private divide in United States schooling is misleading. The standard story claims that public schooling was a fuzzy concept 200 years ago; the division between public and private education for children thus developed largely over the nineteenth century. In the early nineteenth century, public funds went to many private schools and even large private systems, such as the New York Public School Society. In some instances, public funds went to parochial education, either explicitly or as part of an arrangement to allow for diverse religious instruction using public funds. However, the nineteenth century witnessed growing division between public and private, largely excluding religious education (or at least non-Protestant religious education). By the end of the nineteenth century, the standard educational historiography suggests, public schools meant public in several senses: funded from the public coffers, open to the public in general, and controlled by a public, democratically controlled process. Tacit in that definition was a relatively rigid dividing line between public and private school organizations. Historians know that this implicit definition of “public” omits key facts. First, the governance of public schools became less tied to electoral politics during the Progressive Era. Public schooling in nineteenth-century cities generally meant large school boards, intimately connected with urban political machines. By the 1920s, many city school systems had smaller boards in a more corporate-like structure. The consolidation of small rural school districts in the first half of the twentieth century completed this removal of school governance from more local politics. A second problem with the definition above is unequal access to quality education (however defined). Historically, the acceptance of all students was true only in a limited sense, either in access to schools at all (with the exclusion of many children with disabilities) or, more generally, to the resources and curriculum involved in the best public schooling of the early twentieth century (as with racial segregation).

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Oil Paintings

American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469655543.003.0005 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 108-151

Author(s):

Amanda Brickell Bellows

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

National Identity ◽

African Americans ◽

Urban Environment ◽

Military Service ◽

Public Schooling ◽

Art Exhibitions ◽

Oil Paintings ◽

American Artists ◽

Winslow Homer

After the abolition of serfdom and slavery, Russian and American artists created oil paintings of peasants and African Americans that revealed to viewers the complexity of their post-emancipation experiences. Russian painters from the Society of Traveling Art Exhibitions and American artists including Henry Ossawa Tanner, William Edouard Scott, and Winslow Homer created thematically similar works that depicted bondage, emancipation, military service, public schooling, and the urban environment. Their compositions shaped nineteenth-century viewers’ conceptions of freedpeople and peasants and molded Russians’ and Americans’ sense of national identity as the two countries reconstructed their societies during an era of substantial political and social reform.

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Imperial Reform and Internal Colonization

10.23943/princeton/9780691167787.003.0006 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Stefan Winter

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Ottoman Empire ◽

Social Engineering ◽

Political Community ◽

Public Schooling ◽

Imperial Authority ◽

Military Conscription ◽

Engineering Measures ◽

Local Officials ◽

First Time

This chapter highlights major trends in Ottoman and Syrian history affecting the ʻAlawi community in the nineteenth century. It begins by showing that the ʻAlawi notability increasingly came into conflict with semiautonomous local officials during the breakdown of Ottoman imperial authority at the start of the century, causing the community as a whole to be cast as heretics and outcasts from Ottoman society for the first time. Faced with increasing discrimination and abuse by provincial officials, ʻAlawi feudal leaders nonetheless continued to support the diffuse authority of the Ottoman Empire over the intrusive statism of the Egyptian regime between 1832 and 1840. The ʻAlawi community was then increasingly subjected to repressive social engineering measures under the Tanzimat and the reign of Abdülhamid II, including military conscription and conversion. At the same time, however, while resisting efforts at assimilation, the ʻAlawis also began to avail themselves of the benefits of modern public schooling and proportional representation on newly instituted municipal councils, thereby finding their voice as a political community for perhaps the first time.

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Civics in the Curricular Construction of the Loyal National Citizen: A Comparative View of Switzerland

Croatian Journal of Education - Hrvatski časopis za odgoj i obrazovanje ◽

10.15516/cje.v22i0.4121 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 22 ◽

Author(s):

Rebekka Horlacher

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Citizenship Education ◽

Nation Building ◽

Political Education ◽

Nation State ◽

Public Schooling ◽

Formal Organization ◽

Teaching Materials ◽

Common Culture ◽

History Of

The implementation of public schooling is usually understood as both an expressionand a means of nation-building. The formal organization of the school, i.e. thecurricula, teaching materials and the respective teacher’s education were interpretedas cultural-political arrangements deriving from assumed national convictionsabout the future of the particular nation-state and its ideal citizens. Against thisbackground, the entire learning arrangement of the curriculum can be seen asan instrument to educate pupils to become loyal national citizens. Of particularinterest is the curricular area which is explicitly dedicated to political education,i.e. civics. This paper focuses on precisely this area and its teaching materials oncivic education in a nation-state which comprises different nations organized bycantons, which cannot refer to a common religion, history or language and thusto a common culture. Examining two different cantons of Switzerland, this articledeals with the question of how nation-building may differ within the frameworkof one nation-state.Keywords: history of schooling; nineteenth century; textbooks; nation-building;citizenship education.

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