Lucy Stone's Argumentative Essay: Educating Young America

Educating Young America

The victory won for America’s independence marked the birth of a nation, and subsequently the birth of an educational system. When America was formed, we didn’t have a way to educate our citizens. This was a huge problem since without a properly educated population democracy falls apart, so America had to act fast. The way that America handled education can be divided into the following four topics which are, where they learned, what they learned, the decline of village schools, and the advent of educational opportunity for women. Today we directly benefit from the reformer’s movements.

As a young boy in early America, your educational choices were very limited and based upon your family’s economic status. You would

probably have found yourself either unable to attend, because your family’s inability to afford school, or, at the very best, in a village school. Village schools had one teacher who would teach a small group of students from the local area. This method was expensive, and thus was unavailable to many children. Englishman Joseph Lancaster set out to change this. His idea was to put a lot more children into one room (as much as 1,000!), line them up in orderly rows, and maintain an atmosphere of strictly enforced rules that ensured quiet and discipline amongst the pupils. Additionally, Lancaster envisioned his model classroom as “employing” older students as unpaid monitors. These monitors armed with a highly organized manual of instruction which facilitated the successful educational coaching of such a large mass of students. This system blended well with the American ideology of the equality and importance of education.

If you were to be sent to one of Lancaster’s model schools, use of Biblical Scripture would have provided a majority of your learning material. Books like, Trimmer’s Introduction to the Knowledge of Nature and Reading the Scriptures, Martinet’s Catechism of Nature, and Watt’s Hymns for Children, would have supplemented the Bible. In a common school each student had a book and at their turn would read or spell to their teacher while the other students would read silently. If they looked as if they were working on school material they wouldn’t be bothered. Lancaster saw a problem in this; he expected that some of the students were just putting on a face to lead the teacher to believe that they were working. As a result, Lancaster had every student that was not currently spelling the word out to the teacher, spelled the word on their slates. Instead of simply sitting idle, they were expected to spell, read and write at the same instant as each other. Despite the large class sizes Lancaster’s model was quite successful.

A third important occurrence was the decline of village schools. During the 1820’s and 1830’sthe great awakening filled America. During this era many new religious groups were formed that had different views on the Bible. Many of these religious groups thought that the principles that village schools taught were dull and inefficacious. An even greater threat that village schools encountered was the immigration of Roman Catholics. The Bible translation that village schools used was the King James translation which was Protestant. Catholic’s had three unsuitable choices for their child’s education, either to attempt to change Americas educating method, send their child to a school that teaches Protestant moralities or not send your child to a school at all. Reformers, including Horace Mann set out to change this by creating free public schools. These public schools kept with the basic principles like the Ten Commandments, but left out any religious ideas that caused divergence. Most people appreciated a free education, some strong believers disliked Mann’s compromise, but found it hard to refuse the opportunity.

If you wanted to become a doctor and were a male things were pretty straightforward, you would go to most likely a one room school house get good grades, then apply for a college, graduate, and get a job at a clinic.

But for women, things were much more complicated. Women also could not vote, hold office, or own their own money, their husband could treat them any way they wanted to. It was clear that women didn’t have the same rights as men at this time. Women like Lucy Stone and Elizabeth Blackwell refused to be treated this way and decided to speak up for their rights. When Lucy Stone graduated from Oberlin College in 1847, the facility requested her to write a speech. Stone however, wasn’t allowed to present it because they had a rule against women speaking in public so a man would have to give the speech for her. Others would join Stone in propelling the cause of equal education for women. Stone’s sister-in-law Elizabeth Blackwell, who was the first woman to receive a medical degree although graduated top of her class, was unable to find a hospital or doctor to work with her. These women and others like them decided that for things to get any better, they would have to act together. These people were known women reformers. One women reformer Emma Willard in 1814 opened up a boarding school in Vermont where girls could learn math, science and/or history. Educational equality, by broadening the educated base served to enrich and nurture a prospering

America.

When the war for independence was won and America was birthed many new problems arose, education being one of them. But we have come a long way from a nearly education-less America, all thanks to the reformers movements. Movements that materialized from the initial flaws and inadequacies observed by the reformers themselves. Early education was revolutionized and improved in the areas of the school locale, curriculum content, decline of the Village School, and the advent of education for women. Today we are the direct beneficiaries of so many forward thinking are impassionate visionaries.