Republic of Taste. Catherine E. Kelly
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school, or the ambitious program of a college. Generally speaking, they were more catholic than grammar schools and more systematic and more permanent than venture schools.5
Predictably, access to any of these schools was mediated by the inequalities that structured Anglo-American society. The Virginia scion who devoted himself to the works of the Roman historian Sallust under the careful direction of a Princeton-trained tutor was far removed from the anonymous young men who labored at “Arithmetic and Book-keeping” at a Philadelphia night school. And women were, by definition, excluded from Latin grammar schools and colleges. Still, by the 1750s, children of the elite and the merely prosperous found it far easier to secure some form of advanced education than their parents would have. Although precise figures are elusive, the number of schools and students was increasing by the mid-eighteenth century. Why? A dynamic, complex economy rewarded men who possessed at least a modicum of learning. Protestant denominations, eager to secure their share of the faithful, looked to schools to inculcate piety. Political conflict, especially following the Stamp Act Crisis, increased interest in the public prints and sharpened colonists’ textual engagement with civic life. Finally, the pursuit of gentility encouraged some individuals to seek out more extensive schooling than the minimum demanded by market, church, or civil society.
If the war for American independence disrupted this energetic, diverse collection of institutions and strategies, the creation of the American republic famously reinvigorated it. The ideological commitment to a culture of learning, broadly defined, ran wide and deep. Benjamin Rush may have been remarkable in asserting that a national school system could “convert men into republican machines,” but he was downright pedestrian in believing that “the business of education has acquired a new complexion by the independence of our country.”6 Throughout the early national period, Americans manifested enormous faith in the capacity of learning to transform individuals and society. Countless essays, tracts, speeches, sermons, and letters affirmed that education, republican style, did more than create an informed citizenry. It also fostered a virtuous one. In Rush’s words, formal education could make a man “immutable in his character, inflexible in his honesty,” and prepare him to “feel the dignity of his nature and cheerfully obey the claims of duty.” Only education could free men and women from the shackles of self-interest, from the parochial and the particular.
The expansion of education in the decades following the Revolution took many forms, encompassing the creation of common schools and colleges, the organization of learned societies, and the proliferation of print culture. Yet no one form was as visible, either for contemporaries or subsequent scholars, as the academy. Numbers alone account for much of the academy’s prominence. By 1800, the United States boasted only twenty-five colleges, but it had launched literally hundreds of academies.7 Academies flourished because they were well suited to a nation that was simultaneously convinced of the urgent importance of schooling, uncertain about how to fund it, and divided over the extent to which it should create new opportunities or reinforce old hierarchies. Most depended on multiple revenue sources, confounding modern distinctions between private and public. Funding was secured through gifts, subscriptions, and, especially, tuition, which varied widely among schools. But many academies also looked to state legislatures for support, ranging from monies raised by the sale of confiscated and public lands to outright land grants to tax exemptions. Whatever form it took and however limited it might have been, state support forged powerful ideological connections between “public” and “education.”8
Conflicts over curricula, which quickly ballooned into ideologically charged debates over the kind of education most suited to a republic, also contributed to the notion that academies were central to the well-being of the republic as a whole. Consider the debate over classical languages. On one side were those who urged educators and students to eliminate or at least minimize the emphasis on Greek and Latin. As early as 1749, Benjamin Franklin had begun to champion a more utilitarian approach to education.9 Following the Revolution, other voices joined Franklin’s critique of the classics, inflecting it with the imperatives of postrevolutionary politics: Rush and Noah Webster, for example, advocated the careful study of English and condemned the classics as difficult, impractical, and altogether unsuited for a republic that demanded the diffusion of “universal knowledge.” And any number of wags published jokes about farm boys whose academy stints had bestowed a smattering of comically bad Latin while doing nothing to remove the rust from their English.10 On the other side of the debate, traditionalists like Joseph Dennie worried that, by “removing the foundations of intellect” from education, Americans were poised to “sacrifice intellect itself.” John Adams wrote that he “should as soon think of closing all my window shutters, to enable me to see,” as he would “banishing the Classicks, to improve Republican ideals.” Defenders of the classics insisted explicitly that ancient languages and texts were the building blocks of advanced education. Implicitly, they correlated learning with social class. All citizens may have needed an education, but they did not need the same education.11
Neither side prevailed. The virtuous learning advanced by early national academies never fit into a single mold. Most men’s academies managed to incorporate classical languages into their curricula. The pedagogy remained stultifying, and few students ever actually used the languages outside the academy or college. Instead, the persistent appeal of Latin, especially, testified to the political resonance and cultural cachet of all things connected to the ancient republics.12 But with the exception of a handful of schools like Phillips Academy (where well into the nineteenth century, students studied Latin, Latin, and more Latin), the ancient languages typically formed one optional component of a far more general curriculum. School catalogs and advertisements promised students a sort of intellectual smorgasbord: The classical program of study was balanced by an English one, which included instruction in reading, spelling, grammar, composition, and polite letters. Arithmetic, including the useful but tedious “rule of three,” was ubiquitous. History, which offered clues to the developmental trajectory of the American republic, and geography, which situated the nation in a global context while describing its vast and varied terrain, became common by the 1790s. By the turn of the nineteenth century, these standard offerings were often supplemented with modern languages; natural philosophy or natural history; music; a smattering of purely vocational skills including bookkeeping, surveying, and navigating; and an entire battery of “ornamentals.” Some schools required students to follow a set course of study. But far more offered them a series of choices: English or classical, with extras like French, geography, or music added on, usually for an additional fee.13 Withal, the precise course of study depended on both the competencies of available instructors and the expectations and desires of potential students. The options served up by early national academies derived less from a fervent commitment to the importance of, say, Latin, than to a complicated calculus of supply and demand.
If the much-ballyhooed debates over the classical curriculum in particular and truly republican cultures of learning in general did not determine what most academies actually offered, they did serve to amplify the political resonance of the curriculum as a whole. Academies could and did claim that their courses of study, regardless of their specific content, furthered the “diffusion of knowledge” and thus contributed to the “improvement of society.” Such claims were freighted with republican significance. As the Reverend Simeon Doggett intoned at the dedication of the Bristol Academy in Massachusetts, education did more than determine the shape of the state. It endowed citizens with a “knowledge of the rights of man, and the enjoyment of civil liberty.” Only education could forge a nation that was “happy at home and respectable abroad.”14 That said, institutions like the Bristol Academy granted students considerable latitude in deciding on the particular components of knowledge that were most desirable and, by extension, most republican.
This aura of civic importance extended from the curriculum to the students. It was not simply that an academy education could help initiate young men and women students into the ranks of a republican citizenry. Academies promised to extend that education—and all it represented—to an unprecedented number of students.15 White women were the most visible beneficiaries of the postrevolutionary expansion of higher education. Their access to education is evidenced through not only the founding of female and coeducational schools but also those schools’ rising enrollments.