The Teacher Wars (3 page)

To understand those systems, we will begin our historical journey in Massachusetts during the first half of the nineteenth century. Advocates for universal public education, called common schoolers, were challenged by antitax activists. The détente between these two groups redefined American teaching as low-paid (or even volunteer) missionary work for women, a reality we have lived with for two
centuries—as the children of slaves and immigrants flooded into the classroom, as we struggled with and then gave up on desegregating our schools, and as we began, in the late twentieth century, to confront a future in which young Americans without college degrees were increasingly disadvantaged in the labor market and thus relied on schools and teachers, more than ever before, to help them access a middle-class life.

THE COMMON SCHOOLS MOVEMENT AND THE FEMINIZATION OF AMERICAN TEACHING

In 1815 a religious revival swept the Litchfield Female Academy, a private school in a genteel Connecticut town.

In those years, there were
few truly “public” schools in the United States. The U.S. Constitution did not mention education as a right (it still doesn't), and school attendance was not compulsory. Schools were generally organized by town councils, local churches, urban charitable societies, or—in more remote parts of the country—ad hoc groups of neighbors. A mix of tuition payments and local tax dollars supported the schools. Two-thirds of American students attended one-room schoolhouses, where as many as seventy children from age five through sixteen were educated together, usually by just one overwhelmed schoolteacher, who was nearly always male. School was held only twelve weeks per year, six in the summer and six in the winter. There were rarely any textbooks on hand, and the most frequent assignment was to memorize and recite Bible passages. Naughty children were whipped or made to sit in the corner wearing a dunce cap.

At Litchfield, a relative island of privilege, girl after girl loudly and publicly achieved the state of “conversion” expected of all fervent Calvinists, a transcendent, nearly manic period in which God's plan for one's life would be revealed, setting an individual upon her predestined path toward heaven. Conversion tended to be catching, like the flu. But fourteen-year-old Catharine Beecher refused to convert. This made her conspicuous, because she was the daughter of a celebrity preacher.

Her father, Lyman Beecher, first came to the public's attention after he delivered a passionate sermon against dueling in the wake of Alexander Hamilton's death in 1804 at the hands of Aaron Burr. He cast himself as a moral compass on matters both religious and secular. In sermons and articles, he opposed Catholic immigration and the spread of liberal Unitarianism, supported the gradual elimination of slavery and the “re-colonization” of black Americans to Africa, and celebrated American expansion into the West as a sign that God intended the Protestant United States to lead as “a light to the nations”—a phrase he borrowed from the prophet Isaiah. In 1830 he would speak out against President Andrew Jackson's brutal relocation of Native American families from the Southeast to land west of the Mississippi River.

Those views were fairly liberal for their time. Lyman Beecher's faith was not. He preached predestination, the doctrine that holds that a baby is fated from birth for either salvation or damnation, and that his deeds on earth can hardly change the outcome.
In riveting sermons, Beecher would sketch a vivid portrait of the death and perdition of sinners, their brows sweating and extremities growing cold as they sunk down to hell.

Catharine Beecher hated disappointing her father, to whom she was very close. He would even boast that Catharine was “the
best boy he had”—quite a statement coming from a man with seven sons! But she found Bible study “
irksome and disagreeable” and chafed against the notion of original sin. How could an unformed child be guilty of all of humanity's past corruptions? She was far more passionate about poetry than religion; several of her verses were published in journals while she was still a teenager. She earned every academic distinction and then took up the only job considered socially respectable for a young woman of her class: She worked as a finishing school teacher of the “domestic arts”—needlepoint, knitting, piano playing, and painting. In truth, Catharine hated those feminine pastimes. She would later lament the “
mournful, despairing hours” she had once devoted to such activities, which were thought to raise a girl's value on the marriage market. But for Catharine, wage earning was an important goal, at least until marriage. Her mother had died when she was sixteen, and Lyman Beecher
quickly remarried. The preacher had a dozen younger children to support, including the future author of
Uncle Tom's Cabin
, Harriet Beecher Stowe.

At a party in the spring of 1822, when Catharine Beecher was twenty-one years old, she met Horace Mann. He had grown up on a farm in Franklin, Massachusetts, southwest of Boston, and was at the time a twenty-six-year-old law student in Litchfield, rumored to have political ambitions. Mann had already heard of Beecher: She was the famous preacher's iconoclastic daughter, and a published poet, too. Up to this point in his life, Mann, though tall and handsome, had demonstrated almost no interest in women, even pretty ones. (His roommate at Brown University would recall Mann as someone so self-serious that he had committed “
not a single instance” of youthful misbehavior.) But Beecher was different. With tightly wound curls framing a square-jawed face, she conveyed a certain harshness, which she had inherited from her father. The young teacher was fascinating not because she was beautiful, but because she was intelligent.

Beecher and Mann traded thoughts that evening on the romantic novels of Sir Walter Scott; later Mann regretted that the conversation had produced only “truisms” on his part, nothing at all “tremendous” to demonstrate the depth of his ideas. But no matter, for Beecher was already engaged to a far more accomplished man: Alexander Metcalf Fisher, a math prodigy who at the age of twenty-four had become Yale's youngest-ever tenured professor, and had already written several well-regarded textbooks. Fisher had grown up a few farms away from Mann in Franklin, and Mann gossiped in a letter home to his sister that Beecher “
is reputed a lady of superior intellect” and would “probably make the Professor a very good help-mate.”

Impressed as he was with Beecher, Mann had underestimated her. She was destined not to be a housewife, but to assume her father's mantle as a leading public intellectual. Together, she and Horace Mann would define public education as America's new, more gentle church, and female teachers as the ministers of American morality.

Less than two weeks after Beecher met Mann, her fiancé drowned in a shipwreck off the coast of Ireland. Fisher had been on his way to Europe for a yearlong tour of the continent's universities, to study alongside the leading scientists of the day. They had planned to marry the following spring. Now Beecher's future was uncertain. “
I lie down in sorrow and awake in heaviness, and go mourning all day long,” she wrote. Following several months of confinement in her father's home, she fled to the Fisher family farm in Franklin. Alexander's parents asked if Beecher might tutor their younger children, a teenage boy and two small girls, who had lost not only their beloved eldest brother, but also their academic mentor.

Upon her arrival, a depressed Beecher retreated to the Fisher attic, where she searched obsessively through her dead fiancé's diaries and letters. She was surprised by what she found. The couple's courtship had been stilted and almost all their time together chaperoned. It turned out she had not known her fiancé very well at all. Alexander Fisher's diaries laid bare a tortured soul who, at the age of nineteen, endured a case of “delirium,” so torn was he between the obligations of religion and his attraction to his true passions, math and science. During this episode, Fisher suffered from delusions of grandiosity, believing he could deploy mathematical problem solving to save the universe from sudden destruction. When the mania passed, Fisher returned to his scientific studies at Yale, chiding himself for a lack of religious faith, which he described as “an incapacity … of making moral truth the subject of steady contemplation.” Like Beecher, Fisher had devoted years of tedious Sundays to devotional study, only to regretfully conclude in 1819, when he was a professor, that his spiritual life was “
a blank,” and he would never achieve conversion. Around this time, he stopped keeping a journal and devoted himself full-time to planning lessons, writing textbooks, and counseling his Yale students.

Beecher was moved by Fisher's frustrations with traditional religion—so similar to her own—and by his eventual decision to commit himself fully to a career as a scholar and teacher. She felt certain, for the first time in her young life, that predestination was false. Fisher had been a good man—a saved man—not because he had converted, but because he had done good in his life. Beecher
wrote to her father: “
The heart must have something to rest upon, and if it is not God, it will be the world.”

Beecher's new conviction that public works could serve society as well as private faith set her off on a career in education. As a girl, she had been denied the academic opportunities granted to Fisher to study classical languages, master higher-order mathematics, and immerse herself in contemporary political thought. The
Litchfield Female Academy had been organized around religious piety, public shaming, and social positioning. Each morning, the students would queue up to submit to a barrage of leading questions posed by the commanding headmistress:
Have you been patient in acquiring your lessons? Have you spoken any indecent word or by any action discovered a want of feminine delicacy? Have you combed your hair with a fine-tooth comb and cleaned your teeth every morning? Have you eaten any green fruit during the week?
Every girl was required to keep a daily journal of her spiritual faults; entries notable for either their righteousness or depravity were read aloud to a Saturday morning general assembly—with names attached. The school's pedagogical techniques were stultifying, and entirely typical of the era. In class, the headmistress merely read aloud to her pupils; for homework, the girls regurgitated in their journals all the trivia they could remember: the longitudes and latitudes of various countries, the dates of major battles, the lineages of British kings. Math instruction ceased before algebra or trigonometry, while chemistry and physics were neglected entirely.

Poring over Fisher's notebooks and lesson plans, Beecher was exposed for the first time to philosophy and logic. With guidance from her younger brother Edward, who had been educated at Andover and Yale, she was able to grasp the challenging material quickly and impart it to her pupils. Didn't all girls deserve the opportunity Beecher was now offering Fisher's sisters—to undertake broad intellectual pursuits? And if Beecher could successfully learn and teach serious subject matter—not just the “domestic arts”—why couldn't other smart young women?

Most crucially for the history of American education, Beecher
came to believe that women were likely to be the most effective teachers not only of girls, but of boys as well. A middle-class lady like herself, without immediate marriage prospects, faced a strictly limited landscape of opportunity. She could not enroll in college (Mount Holyoke and Oberlin did not become the first American colleges to admit women until the 1830s), nor study for the ministry (it was closed to women), nor train to become a doctor or lawyer (medical and law schools were male only), nor set out in business on her own (banks rarely lent to women). The more Beecher thought about it, the more it seemed that teaching was the one profession in which a woman could gain “
influence, respectability, and independence” without venturing outside “the prescribed boundaries of feminine modesty,” she wrote. Beecher was a lifelong opponent of women's suffrage; she thought politics a dirty game that would corrupt women's God-given virtue. But that virtue, she thought, made women the ideal educators. Beecher saw the home and the school as intertwined, two naturally feminine realms in which women could nurture the next generation. “
Woman, whatever are her relations in life, is necessarily the guardian of the nursery, the companion of childhood, and the constant model of imitation,” she wrote in her “Essay on the Education of Female Teachers.” “It is her hand that first stamps impressions on the immortal spirit, that must remain forever.” Historian Redding Sugg dubbed this the “motherteacher” ideal—the notion that teaching and mothering were much the same job, done in different settings.