Search

In this article, I discuss seldom-acknowledged ways in which university teacher preparation has served the common good throughout its history. I focus on the U.S., where teacher education has contr...

Review of: All in One Room: A History of Country Schools in Johnson County, Iowa, by Franklin L. Yoder.

Histories of teachers’ experiences in the United States between the 1880s and the 1930s argue that teaching restrained and often debilitated teachers’ bodies. The emerging theory of constraint is limited, however, because the historiography of American teachers focuses for the most part only on the months when school was in session. This examination of publications in which education leaders discussed how teachers should spend their summers and teachers’ memoirs, diaries, and letters, reveals a full quarter of the year during which the focus was on the rejuvenation of teachers’ bodies. As administrative efforts to control teachers’ bodies extended into the summer months, leaders expressed their concern by prescribing rest. The meaning of “rest”, however, soon evolved into reinvigoration through breathing fresh air and physical activity. Full of vitality, teachers’ own accounts reveal how their summer activities released them from the restraints of teaching. Rural teachers engaged in agricultural work and other outdoor activities, and urban teachers communed with nature and exercised in the open air. These activities had important gender ramifications: they allowed women to challenge boundaries by demonstrating the robustness of a “new woman” and men to reinforce boundaries by demonstrating rugged masculinity. In both cases, teachers used the summer months to revitalise bodies worn down by the physical restrictions of teaching, as administrators directed.

Progressive Era advocates of spelling reform argued that adopting “simplified” word forms would increase the efficiency of American schools. National education leaders and administrators sustained the movement as they discussed simplified spelling extensively in meetings of the National Education Association and state teachers’ associations as well as in education journals. While emphasizing saving money and time, their arguments for spelling reform also infused social justice into social efficiency, and efficiency into child-centered pedagogy. Although leaders saw schoolteachers as the torchbearers for simplified spelling, teachers’ subtle resistance undermined the movement. Teachers and the few administrators who opposed spelling reform occasionally voiced objections to efficiency itself, but their concerns about public scrutiny most influenced their opposition and thus the movement's ultimate demise. This examination of the public education sector's relationship to the simplified spelling movement illustrates the complexity of education leaders’ relationship with efficiency as well as their vulnerability to teacher resistance and public censure.

In March 1887, Eva Moll wrote about the previous summer in her diary: “The season was fall of rich things of course. Heard some fine violin and harp playing by two Italians. I never expect to hear ‘Nearer my God to Thee’ sweeter on this earth, than it was played by the violinist. We first went to Niagara, visiting all the points.” Moll was not a wealthy person of leisure. She was a single Kansas schoolteacher in her late twenties who struggled to make ends meet, and yet had spent nine weeks at the quintessentially middle-class Chautauqua Institution in western New York State. A slice of my larger investigation of the history of teachers' “summers off,” this essay will explore the social-class dimensions of their summertime activities during a distinctive period for both the middle class and the teaching force in the United States, the decades of the 1880s through the 1930s.

Scott M. Gelber opens Courtrooms and Classrooms: A Legal History of College Access, 1860–1960 with a discussion of judicial deference toward colleges and universities in the United States, in which...

This chapter focuses on student organizations and the social sphere at state normal schools from the 1870s through the 1900s. The majority of normal-school students, or “normalites,” were female, members of racial/ethnic minority groups, and/or from the lower end of the social-class scale. While these students generally missed out on the fraternity and sorority life and culture of many universities, they created a vibrant campus life at normal schools. After briefly outlining normalites’ backgrounds, Ogren demonstrates how campus life at state normal schools enhanced students’ intellectual and professional growth, welcomed all students into middle-class society, and invited women students into public life. The enthusiastic and mutually confident student life at state normal schools contradicted the rigid system at private colleges and flagship universities.

The final chapter of this book, written by the editors, summarizes the collective contributions of this book’s various chapters. It considers what this anthology tells us about what it meant to be a college student and how students experienced college. The Conclusion explores common themes and strands in campus life across chronological periods, diverse student groups, and institutional types, and it discusses how the collection refines, challenges, expands, and/or critiques Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz’s 1987 Campus Life. Finally, it looks toward the future with questions still to be answered and avenues for research that remain unexplored.

The Introduction, written by the editors, identifies the key areas of new research that the chapters in the book explore. It emphasizes the importance of considering campus life from a broad perspective that includes diverse groups of students and an array of institutions beyond the prestigious northern institutions that historians have traditionally emphasized. It considers briefly how the subsequent chapters add richness to our understanding of campus life among diverse groups of students at multiple and different types of institutions.

(2003). Rethinking the “Nontraditional” Student from a Historical Perspective. The Journal of Higher Education: Vol. 74, No. 6, pp. 640-664.

Review of: "Bright Epoch: Women & Coeducation in the American West," by Andrea G. Radke-Moss.

Although one of higher education’s oldest functions, teacher preparation is peripheral in scholarship on the history of colleges and universities. This chapter highlights the collective richness of and identifies gaps that remain in the historiography of three distinct time periods in the history of teacher preparation: “Beginnings” from the 1820s through the 1880s, “Transitions” from the 1890s through the 1930s, and “Upgrading Amid Disfavor” from the 1940s into the twenty-first century. The chapter then interrogates the marginal position of teacher education in the historiography of higher education, demonstrating that looking seriously at teacher preparation is essential for advancing scholarship on underrepresented groups of students, and on the roles of the variety of nineteenth-century institutions and the twentieth-century institutional hierarchy in American higher education. Teacher education has been a core element of higher education since its inception in the USA; it must come in from the historiographical periphery.

As in the larger field of history of education, revisionism in the 1970s and into the early 1980s profoundly affected the historiography of higher education. The focus of higher education revisionist critique was traditional accounts of nineteenth-century colleges and universities, which Marilyn Tobias argued adhered to an “evolutionary, linear schema” and presented: merely a descriptive chronicle of official actions, usually from the perspective of the college president. These studies suffer from a paucity of analysis. Their analysis is usually gratuitous as the process of change is neglected, and the relationship between the college and the larger community is ignored … Moreover, our knowledge and understanding of higher learning in nineteenth-century America have too frequently been the result of those who write from the perspective of the ascendancy of the university. These retrospective studies view change as inevitable, assume a uniform intellectual and social matrix, and see university “reformers” as the sole agents of change. Within the darkness-to-light framework of this historical type, nineteenth-century colleges have been used as foils to dramatize the directions of the new universities or have been dismissed as subjects for serious inquiry.

The status of teaching in the professional culture that took hold and dominated American middle-class society by the 1870s was ambiguous. The requisite professional associations, advanced studies, and licensing requirements appeared in the field, yet education leaders and the public were unwilling to grant teachers autonomy or authority. Historians of teacher education traditionally have attributed teachers’ problematic professional status mainly to a failure on the part of the normal schools to balance liberal and technical elements in teacher education; according to Merle Borrowman, “an excessively technical concept of the professional sequence” caused the normals to instruct future teachers in little more than “tricks of the trade.” Jurgen Herbst argues that by the late nineteenth century normal schools abandoned the cause of professionalizing elementary-school teaching and instead helped administrators to become “the professionals in public education.”1 Such analyses, however, sell short the normal schools of the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, and 1900s. They prepared students for a vocation with a long history of ignominy, the most recent development in which had been the arrival of large numbers of women. The work of historians who examine the professions and teaching through the lens of gender suggests that larger social structures, norms, and expectations overshadowed anything the normal schools were or were not doing in preparing teachers.

Attending any form of “higher” education was a stretch for the types of students who populated nineteenth-century state normal schools throughout the United States; normalites’ gender, race, or families’ financial struggles in many cases prohibited them from traveling to prestigious high schools, academies, or colleges. Affordable and accessible, normal-school training for teaching was within their reach. Because many students in the latter part of the nineteenth century—like those in the previous decades—arrived with little more than a common-school education, normal-school leaders found it necessary to continue to offer instruction in academic subjects. While this situation frustrated some normal-school principals, others looked upon academic instruction as another means of producing well-prepared teachers, even as increasing numbers of normalites were high-school graduates by the turn of the twentieth century. In 1904, Principal William E. Wilson at the state normal in Ellensburg, Washington advocated educating teachers through “general scholarship and broad culture.” He explained

At the beginning of the twentieth century, state normal schools thrived throughout the United States. A century later, most of these institutions had higher stature as state colleges or regional universities, and yet had lost much of their distinctive identity. In November 2000, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that, as mere “lesser versions of their states’ flagship universities,” many state colleges were again “looking for a makeover.” In such recent discussions of program expansion and name changes at these institutions, reporters and scholars have invoked the term “mission creep.”1 The history of the American state normal school suggests that “mission creep” more accurately characterizes much of the early decades of many regional public colleges and universities, and actually helped to create their distinctive identity. Education reformers of the early nineteenth century and state legislators, education leaders, and normal-school principals of the middle and late nineteenth century intended to establish and maintain single-purpose institutions focused on teacher preparation. After a few decades in which they did little more than instill the notion of teaching as a calling, state normal schools did create a strong professional spirit through teacher-education coursework, observation and practice teaching, and student activities. While teacher preparation remained their official purpose, however, the normal schools were never really single-purpose institutions.

Nearly five decades ago, David Riesman lamented “institutional homogenization” in higher education in the United States. He presented a “concededly oversimplified picture” of “a snake-like procession—the head of which is often turning back on itself … while the middle part seeks to catch up with where the head once was.” He explained, “The assumption is that every decent university will offer courses in archeology, in Tudor history, or in the sociology of small groups, whether or not there exist topflight people to fill these lines, and even if to get them filled means sacrificing the possibility of building up a uniquely exhilarating department out of offerings not currently regarded as among the blue chips of academia.” In the tail of the snake, Riesman located some denominational colleges, technical schools, and teachers colleges, which he called “colleges only by grace of semantic generosity.”1

Marshall Conant was principal in the 1850s of the Bridgewater State Normal School in Massachusetts, one of only a handful of such institutions. A former district-school teacher and head of a private school, Conant had also run the topographical department of the Boston Water Works and served as a consulting engineer for both a railroad and cotton gin company. While his route to the principalship had been circuitous, Conant’s sense of the normal-school mission was straightforward; he explained, “I have sought to awaken the conscience to feel the responsibilities and duties that devolve upon the teacher …”1 In this statement, Conant captured the spirit of the preceding three decades of advocacy for teacher education. Education reformers of the early to middle nineteenth century sought to awaken the conscience of the public and state legislators to the importance of teaching and teacher training, and to establish state normal schools as the primary vehicle for shaping a professional teaching force. For more than a quarter-century following the establishment of the first one in 1839, however, state normal schools did little more than “awaken the conscience.” They remained an unpopular option among many for the education of teachers, and their methods of teacher training lacked substance. Early state normal schools did succeed in instilling future teachers with the sense that they were undertaking a consecrated mission and, in the process, they also awakened students’ consciousness of the wider world.

During their first three decades of existence, state normal schools were on shaky ground. They struggled against public skepticism and scrutiny, limited state funding, and the popularity of teacher education in other types of institutions. Making only small advances toward developing and teaching educational theory, normals were successful in fulfilling their intention to instill their students with a sense of teaching as a calling. They also began—for the most part unintentionally—to expose their students, many of whom would not otherwise have had access to advanced education, to a wider intellectual world. Beginning in the 1870s, these intentional and unintentional successes of the early years became defining characteristics of the state normal schools. Between the 1870s and the 1900s, state normals found themselves on much firmer ground as they gained in number and size and their opposition faded somewhat. In many ways, this 40-year period would be the heyday of the state normal schools, when they offered a unique educational environment for a distinct student body. The normals not only attracted students who a century later would have earned the label “nontraditional,” but they also served these students quite effectively. S. Y. Gillan, who graduated from Illinois State Normal University, summed up the “democratic spirit” of the normal: “it was a school of the people existing for and representing the masses and not the classes.”1

The men and women who attended state normal schools between the 1870s and the 1900s shared an extraordinary experience. As these institutions accommodated students’ nontraditional backgrounds, normalites enjoyed a lively intellectual life and the opportunity to develop a professional spirit. Another important dimension of normal schools was the public sphere that extended beyond the formal curriculum and academic and pre-professional student activities; students became involved in the community life of the local towns and created their own social sphere on campus. In the process, they socialized themselves for participation in middle-class society through observation, emulation, and the formation of extensive webs of personal connections, or social capital.1

More than two decades of interest in the history of American women as college students have recently culminated in a trio of notable books. Barbara Miller Solomon's In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz's Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present, and Lynn D. Gordon's Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era all use a rich variety of sources to bring to life the experiences of generations of women undergraduate students, mainly at prestigious colleges and large state universities. While the authors have different emphases, they share a commitment to making sense of college experiences through alumnae memoirs, letters, yearbooks, and works of fiction, as well as more conventional sources. Their inquiries intersect in their analyses of life for women on coeducational campuses during the Progressive Era and earlier years. Together, Solomon, Horowitz, and Gordon present a cohesive picture of “coeds” whose lives were entirely controlled by the Victorian notion of separate gender spheres. The “outsiders” of the first generation espoused traditional values, studied hard, and remained on the sidelines during extracurricular activities. Beginning in the 1890s, women of the second generation proclaimed that, like men, they could devote themselves to “college” life; adhering to a separate spheres ideology, they created student government, clubs, and activity groups for women only. Solomon, Horowitz, and Gordon portray a form of education in which male and female students stayed entirely apart—education that did not warrant the prefix “co.”