Schools, Asylums, and Prison

What do they have in common?

Social Reform

• By the mid 19th century, thousands of Americans holding a variety of philosophical positions had joined together to fight the various social ills that troubled the young nation.

• Some social reformers focused their attention on schools, asylums, and prisons

Asylum and Prisons

• After Alexis de Tocqueville studied the penitentiary system, he called it a place of the most complete despotism.

• Dorothea Dix went to a house of correction and found out there was often filled with mentally ill people.

• She emphasized the idea of rehabilitation, treatment that might reform the sick or imprisoned person to a useful position in society.

School Reform

• Before the mid 1800’s there was no uniform educational policy.

• Massachusetts and Vermont were the only states before the Civil War to pass a compulsory school attendance law.

• No grades, few continued past 10

Opposition to Public Schools

• Taxes – Well to do families– No children

• Culture– Language and culture

Horace Mann

• FATHER OF PUBLIC EDUCATION– Teacher-training programs– Curriculum reforms– Doubled money spent on schools

“If we do not prepare children to become good citizens, .. if we do not enrich their minds with knowledge, then our republic must go down to destruction, as others have gone before it.”