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“Producing a Reconciliation of Disinterestedness and Commerce”: The Political Rhetoric of Education in the Early Republic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Rita Koganzon
Rita Koganzon*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

One of the vexing ambiguities in the historiography of the civic republican tradition has been just when and how republicanism ended. The American Revolution itself, according to Gordon Wood and J. G. A. Pocock, was waged for republican principles, but the government established in its wake represented what Wood called “the end of classical politics,” abandoning virtue in the name of commerce and liberal individualism. By the close of the eighteenth century, Pocock writes, “A condition of thought … in which a bourgeois ideology, a civic morality for the market man, was ardently desired but apparently not to be found.” Later historians sought to extend republicanism's life into the nineteenth century, identifying figures and institutions who held fast to the tradition against the prevailing commercial and industrial winds, while others have taken the ambiguity of republicanism's end to suggest that no such coherent worldview existed in the United States, which was from the outset a liberal project employing only an occasional and misleading republican vocabulary. Even Wood, whose Radicalism of the American Revolution specifically set out to narrate the transformation of American political ideology from the Revolution to the ascent of the Jeffersonians, offers a general account of shifting rhetorical emphases—from virtue to equality, the common good to self-interest—but not the contours of this shift in any specific realm of American life.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , August 2012 , pp. 403 - 429
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 History of Education Society 

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References

1 Pocock, J. G. A., The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 686–94; Wood, Gordon, The Creation of the American Republic (New York: Norton, 1972), 606–18. See also Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1991).Google Scholar

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4 Rush, Benjamin, “Thoughts Upon the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic,” in Essays on Education in the Early Republic, ed. Rudolph, Frederick (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1965), 9. While many of the essays discussed in this study are included in Rudolph's collection, where possible, I cite the original publications. Rush later collected this particular essay with his other education writings in Essays Literary, Moral, and Philosophical Philadelphia: Thomas, and Bradford, Samuel, 1798), but with important excisions, discussed below.Google Scholar

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18 Pangle, Lorraine has a more extensive discussion connecting Franklin's mutual benefit associations with Tocqueville's analysis of American individualism and “self-interest rightly understood.” See Pangle, Lorraine, The Political Philosophy of Benjamin Franklin (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 94–8.Google Scholar

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40 Robert Middlekauff argues that Franklin's suggestions were rejected, especially in New England, because he did not “employ the republican vocabulary” or “address republican problems.” However, I will try to show that his themes were eagerly picked up by subsequent writers on education, and corresponded very closely to the dilemmas of the 1780s and 1990s. This is particularly the case with the Autobiography, which Franklin put together during precisely this era. Middlekauff, , Ancients and Axioms: Secondary Education in Eighteenth-Century New England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 126.Google Scholar

41 Franklin lamented the limited extent to which his own ideas for practical education were implemented in the Academy in “Tract Relative to the English School in Philadelphia,” 21 May 1790. Much earlier, Franklin had written a satiric attack on Harvard College's elitism and useless curriculum in his first Silence Dogood essay, and its democratic themes are echoed in his later writings and in those of the early national educational thinkers. See “Silence Dogood, No. 1,” 2 April 1722. Franklin was also interested in the education of women, a topic which received much popular attention in the early national period, but which is too broad to cover in this study. For more on this topic, see Mulford, Carla, “Benjamin Franklin, Traditions of Liberalism, and Women's Learning in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” in The Good Education of Youth: Worlds of Learning in the Age of Franklin, ed. Pollack, John (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2009), 686–94.Google Scholar

42 Bearing in mind Moroney's criticism that the essays that have formed the “canon” of early educational writings were selected on the basis of their support for universal public schooling, it is nonetheless important to point out that many essays that never made it into this canon voice the same position, whereas none that I could find oppose it.Google Scholar

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54 The problem of tracing European influences is a somewhat vexed one. There is no doubt that Locke's writings on psychology and education were widely read in America and are cited explicitly by Franklin, Rush, Webster, Knox, and Smith, while Rousseau's educational writings were in more limited circulation (although Franklin had read Entile, as evidenced in his “Letter to George Whatley,” 23 May 1785). Milton, John, who did advocate public but highly religious schooling was also occasionally cited. For a discussion of Locke's and Milton's influences, see Pangle, , The Learning of Liberty, 43–72, 76; Jacqueline Reinier, “Rearing the Republican Child: Attitudes and Practices in Post-Revolutionary Philadelphia,” The William and Mary Quarterly 39 (1982): 686–94. Although other European writers on education like William Godwin had been published in the United States by the late 1790s, there is little record of their influence on this generation of American educational writers. Rush says of Godwin only that “On the subject of religion, he writes like a madman.” See Letters of Benjamin Rush, 784.Google Scholar

55 Rush, , “Thoughts Upon the Mode of Education,” 10.Google Scholar

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59 The potential threat of antagonistic frontiersmen to the union was made abundantly clear by such shocking events as the Whiskey Rebellion. Franklin had much longer experience of such dangers, having served in the colonial Pennsylvania legislature during the frontier unrest of the 1760s and the Paxton Boys’ riot See Edmund Morgan, Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 686–94.Google Scholar

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62 Ely, , A Plan to Render our Militia Formidable, 10–12.Google Scholar

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66 See Rush's “Thoughts Upon the Mode of Education” for the connection between Spartan military discipline and American school regimens, 15–16. See also Ely, , A Plan to Render our Militia Formidable, 10.Google Scholar

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74 Rush, , Thoughts Upon the Mode of Education, 21. This passage is missing from the later edition.Google Scholar

75 This shift reflects the influence of seventeenth century educational theorists on ideas about psychology. For a fuller discussion, see Aries, Philippe, Centuries of Childhood, trans. ed. Baldick, Robert (New York: Vintage, 1965). It is exemplified in Webster's suggestion that, “The tender shrub is easily bent to any figure, but the tree which has acquired its full growth resists all impressions,” 15.Google Scholar

76 Education: The practice of employing low and vicious…, 211.Google Scholar

77 Webster, , “On the Education of Youth in America”, 15–17; Rush, , “Thoughts Upon the Mode of Education“, 16. The idea of substituted wills is explicitly Lockean, and although this section is also missing from the 1798 printing of Rush's essay, the later book includes a new essay specifically on punishment in schools in which Rush recommends Lockean discipline through shame and praise rather than corporal punishment. It is possible that he removed this passage because of its ambiguous attitude toward physical discipline, but his basic position did not change. See Rush, , “Thoughts Upon Amusements and Punishments which are Proper for Schools,” Essays Literary, Moral, and Philosophical, 57–74.Google Scholar

78 Hansen argues mat the prevalent view of school authority in this period dictated that “the teacher must follow the pupil and not the pupil follow the teacher,” but this assertion has little basis in even the evidence he provides, and it appears that he is confusing changes in pedagogy (i.e., that children should be dealt with gently and encouragingly rather than cruelly) with the ongoing belief that teachers should possess authority over their pupils, 17.Google Scholar

79 Arendt, Hannah, “The Crisis in Education,” in Between the Past and Future (New York: Viking, 1961), 686–94.Google Scholar

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81 Self-discipline is one of the major themes of the Autobiography, where the destructive potential of childhood is suggested in an anecdote about Franklin's “early projecting spirit,” which manifested itself in an attempt to build a wharf with his friends by stealing stones set aside for the construction of a house. See Autobiography, 574.Google Scholar

82 For example, see Webster's explanation of the stages of knowledge in On the Education of Youth, 9–10.Google Scholar

83 Middlekauff, , Ancients and Axioms, 120–23. Middlekauff's sole defender of the “ancient” learning is an anonymous letter writer to the New Haven Gazette. Few of the prominent men of the period seemed willing to take that position, with the exception of John Adams, who wrote to Rush in response to his essay against Greek and Latin that, “I should as soon think of closing all my window shutters, to enable me to see as of banishing the classics to improve republican ideas.” Quoted in Lawrence Cremin, American Education: The National Experience, 1783–1876 (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), 126.Google Scholar

84 Coram, , Political Inquiries, 101.Google Scholar

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86 Hansen, , Liberalism and American Education, 52. For other instances of opposition to Greek and Latin, see Citizen of Philadelphia, “An enquiry into the utility of the knowledge of the Greek and Latin languages,” The American Museum June (1789): 686–94; Philanthropos, “Mr. Wheeler, If You Think the following Sentiments Worthy of Notice….” United States Chronicle, 19 October 1786, 1; “Thoughts on Education,” The Independent Gazetteer, 20 December 1786.Google Scholar

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98 Edmund Burke discusses this problem in the French National Assembly in 1789, which he complained had been usurped by “a handful of country clowns… some of whom are said not to be able to read and write, and by not a greater number of traders, who… had never known anything beyond their counting-house.” The problem with such petty professionals, Burke reasoned, was that they were not even taken seriously by their own countrymen, and “the degree of estimation in which any profession is held becomes the standard of the estimation in which the professors hold themselves.” Men thrust into positions of political power who were “not taught habitually to respect themselves” could be easily flattered and bought off, to the great detriment of the state with whose safety they had been entrusted. See Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Pocock, J.G.A (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1987), 38.Google Scholar

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102 Ibid., 23.Google Scholar

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104 Ibid., 14.Google Scholar

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108 This is not to say that Franklin was a stranger to military affairs—he helped to provision the British in the French and Indian War, and organized and trained with the Pennsylvania militia. However, he was never a soldier.Google Scholar

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112 Nancy Beadie offers a useful discussion of the logistical obstacles to funding a system of public schools in New York in Education and the Creation of Capital in the Early American Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 686–94.Google Scholar

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