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Cyphers
Thinking they could order ourselves, early teachers mapped good and evil into textbook geographies, plotting America as God’s bounty, pre-colonial societies as a void. They curated a literary canon of honesty and virtue, diligence and patriotism, hard work: Washington Irving and Hamlet’s soliloquy and the Sermon on the Mount. Not to mention arithmetic, hefty word problems meditating on frugality, the benefits of saving for old age; and history, which told of the goodness of the Pilgrims, Franklin, Washington, and Jefferson, the pioneers. Complications could be chalked up to disloyalty (see Benedict Arnold, Native Americans, Catholics). This is not to mention the timepieces placed on the wall of each classroom as admonition for youth’s wasting of it, teachers at poor country schools striking cowbells to announce the hour. This is not to mention that they did not know how to love them, only how to press children into the shape of the people teachers had somehow failed to be. People who were moral and orderly, and also afraid, soldiers out of formless clay.
Reformists introduced the common school at a dynamic time in American history. In 1845, an influx of immigrants and rising wealth among an elite few widened the divisions between social classes. In cities, riots and public disorder were routine. A common school — which would educate not just the few, but the many — promised to restore social harmony, shaping the character…
