Public School Textbooks

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“Storehouses of Knowledge.” Nineteenth-century educators believed that textbooks were the “great storehouses of knowledge, and he who has the habit of using them intelligently has the key to all human knowledge.” Technological innovations had led to cheaper, mass-produced print, and textbooks—from grammar to Latin to algebra—helped define acceptable knowledge and shape instruction. Textbooks presumably democratized information, making specialized learning available to everyone. William T. Harris, a staunch friend of the high school and later U.S. commissioner of education (1889-1906), defended these books in 1880 against charges that they promoted “lifeless instruction” since most class work consisted of memorization of the text contents. Standard texts, he argued, enabled “the bright pupil, even under the worst methods of instruction, to participate in the recorded experience and wisdom of mankind,” and they also helped “even the dull and stupid, to some extent.”

Voices of Authority. The most famous authors of high school textbooks were usually New England-born, Protestant, white men who had attended college or other higher schools. Many taught in prominent northern academies or colleges. The scientist Alonzo Gray taught at Phillips Andover in Massachusetts. Emma Willard, founder of the Troy Female Seminary in New York, wrote a popular history and a geography text. John Hart, the author of prominent English-language readers and literature texts, was a principal at Philadelphia’s prestigious Central High School and later a professor at Princeton. Like many other textbook writers, he was an ordained minister whose faith was inextricable from his didactic voice. Books by these authors held common (and generally conservative) cultural views toward mankind, gender relations, nature, capital, labor, and America’s destiny. These voices of authority taught talented youth common intellectual and moral precepts. Whether in chemistry or natural philosophy classes, students learned that the power of God was all important. Zoological classification named man “the lord of the Animal Kingdom . . . and man alone is created in the image of God.” The Almighty demanded hard work and productivity through math problems that linked learning and life, as texts showed that those who were “shiftless” ended up poor. Grammar lessons promoted prevailing ideas about society and bourgeois taste.

Because textbooks were so ideologically selective, resentful southerners warned kinsmen to “beware of Yankee books.”

Science, Math, and Values. The school curriculum was dependent on what textbooks were widely available: mathematics, the sciences, English, history, moral philosophy and such practical classes as mensuration (the study of measurement), and astronomy. Science was central to secondary instruction, and larger schools offered physics, physiology, chemistry, botany, and sometimes geology and zoology. The laws of science helped legitimize a society whose economic system favored growth and man’s dominion over nature. High school chemistry texts, for example, promised practical education that would reveal the workings of a “beneficent God who always blessed a productive people.” In 1884 the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union officially endorsed a version of a physiology text by Dorman Steele that drew upon chemistry to attack alcohol, tobacco, and drug abuse. The God-given laws of science protected youth, Steele promised, but only if students mastered chemistry. He explained that alcohol was a stimulant, not a depressant (an incorrect, if widely held, view), and allowed “the animal instinets to assume the mastery of man.” The association between textbook knowledge and respectable behavior was clear. Educators argued that science also trained the mind, taught logic and reason, and sharpened the powers of observation. Many educational writers in the late 1800s embraced the importance of mathematics as providential. Mathematics was integral to the curriculum because it “contributed to the spread of Christian, republican, civilized views about man and society.” A nation enjoying geographical expansion needed mathematics to help build better roads, survey land, construct homes, and otherwise enhance commerce and human enterprise. “In the mines of the West, they will need geometry to aid them in mining and smelting,” one textbook of the 1880s warned. These textbooks of the nineteenth century became as familiar and as influential as William McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers (1836-1837) had been to the multitudes in the grammar schools.

Source

William J. Reese, The Origins of the American High School (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 103–122.