Education In The 19th Century Essay

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, education became an overwhelmingly important weapon in the fight against ignorance and injustice of earlier times (Urban, 2009). With the spread of Enlightenment across several countries, the newly created world in America was one of hope, fear, and uncertainty of new ideas. Education and enlightenment were to become the keys to future of the new world and the building blocks for our modern society. Unbeknownst to many at the time, education was going to be the missing link between the present and the future. It would be the stepping stones from the ideas of Enlightenment to the actuality of newly developed philosophies, discoveries, and theories about a changing world. Progress was

to become inevitable—if the populace was educated to understand.
During the late eighteenth century, less than half of America’s population held fast to the ideals of Enlightenment and the Declaration of Independence in which the Enlightenment faith was expressed. Towards the end of the American Revolution, the Articles of Confederation were created and ratified by each state, ensuring each state’s sovereignty and independence. The citizens of America were citizens of their states first and the United States second (Urban, 2009). The individual states’ independence created distrust among each other and the importance of education resurfaced again. If there was to be a leadership class, the members had to be well educated. Many believed the new states would not have been able to survive and thrive long with an uneducated populace as the citizens would “[remain] ignorant of the ‘true’ laws of government and social order” that were quickly being discovered through Enlightenment (Urban, 2009, p. 79). After the war, the newly declared liberties and rights would be unattainable and all for naught if distrust, ignorance, and apathy were the consensus felt among the citizens. During this time, many spokesmen created political goals as well as voiced concerns for educational reforms—fusing educational theory with political theory.
As education became an important role among state citizens, those with political power and those without, education sequentially became just as important to the individual.

Education was believed to have also been a key to self-advancement in this society. Education then became important for political means, the social good, and the individual good of citizens, states, and the United States as a whole. With the creation of a new education bill and the building of new schools, Thomas Jefferson strongly believed that providing education was “the most certain, and the most legitimate engine of government” as the people are “the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty” (Urban, 2009, p. 83). While many theories of educational systems were proposed during this time, schools were ultimately created at the local level by small groups of individuals.
While the progression of education was ever-spreading across states and within the new nation, the need for a uniform and consistent language developed. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Noah Webster created dictionaries, spellers, and other texts to teach the correct rules of grammar and pronunciation in order to bind Americans together and break further away from European culture. Textbooks were created that showed America in the brightest light. Education continued into the nineteenth century, and with it, Americanism was instilled among the educated

populace.