#but this is why the presumption of legitimacy existed. which is that if a woman is married the baby is presumptively her husband’s even if

[lesbianlenas]

let us remember that marriage is intrinsically tied to capitalism and exists in its current form so that property could be passed through patrilineal lines. the only way a man could ensure that a woman was having HIS baby was to make her his property. and that was so important when wealth and status was tied to property so it was necessary to have a (male) heir to pass it down to. i am not against marriage as a concept but we need to remember that it IS an oppressive institution for women and women should consider it w that in mind. the patriarchal roots of our existing marriage institution have not been erased even with the progress that has been made.

[gravitascivics]

HOW ACADEMIC SHOULD PUBLIC SCHOOLS BE?

The last posting began this blog’s effort to relay a developmental description of how America, from its origins – its colonial past – to the years following World War II, held onto a version of federalism.  That version, this writer calls parochial/traditional federalism.  It held – more than any other perspective – on how Americans viewed governance and politics.

As any theoretical approach, this version promoted a set of values and beliefs that were not at all times consistent or even pristinely logical.  And, during its years of dominance, people varied in how exactly each interpreted its tenets.  Generally, the view upheld the values of cooperation, collaboration, and community.

         It is these values, among others, that one can detect underlying the principles of the US Constitution as the founding generation came together and formed the nation’s government.  In a public relations coup, the faction that proposed and argued for the ratification of the Constitution took on the name, the Federalists, even though the term today is associated with local or state governments.  This cast their opponents as the Anti-Federalists who argued for maintaining the bulk of power at the state level.  

But at its heart, the term federalist fit the national effort because what the new agreement was calling for was a federated relationship among the states and the people of the United States.  And to be federated means that those entities were committed to work toward cooperation, collaboration, and community.  But a problem remained:  who constituted “the people”?  Since the original settlers in the eastern seaboard first arrived, there were already a slew of “Others” who had arrived by 1800.  

Mostly, this consisted of voluntary immigrants, but some were forced.  By the time of the Constitution, many immigrants from a variety of European nations had made the trip over the Atlantic and the pure Anglo makeup of the American population already had become significantly mixed.  Of course, the forced element consisted of African slaves who began to be brought over in 1619 and by the time of the Constitutional Convention, the slave population was at 500,000, a significant number since the population of the nation was roughly 3.9 million.[1]

Americans – its original Anglo contingency – were more or less forced to accept the other European nationals and by the late 1700s, when several generations of this mixing had transpired, they defined the white population of the US. But this was their extent of inclusion. Even those who opposed slavery, by and large, saw the acceptance of blacks as an inclusionary step too far.  For them, one can detect a bigoted view of Africans which was extended against indigenous peoples and the Asians that began making their way here in the 1800s.  

Racism, under parochial/traditional federalist view was alive and well.  And one can to a degree see this racism being detrimental to the survival of this view. With the New Deal in the 1930s and its limited efforts to deracialize federal policy, then with the contributions of blacks during World War II, and desegregation of the armed forces under Truman’s administration, the undermining of legal segregation began.  

And these democratizing developments debased the legitimacy of the parochial/traditional federalist view and bolstered the popularization of the natural rights view.  But the challenges to this earlier version of federalism did not begin in the 1930s. One subplot of the American story, according to this writer, is this building criticism of federalism, some of it reflected in public policy, some of it in the form of social developments.

The effort here is to take note of the major events and the development of ideas that led to this shift.  And this blog has chosen a telling story concerning American public schools to initiate this effort.  The choice is not because this story happened first, although this writer has shared a Tocqueville account of 1830s America,[2] this story reflects America in the 1840s.  These accounts provide evidence of what is generally being claimed in this blog:  that federalism held strong till the years after World War II.

The last posting began that history with an introduction to Horace Mann and his work in Massachusetts to establish its public school system.  That posting related that under Mann’s leadership, that system encouraged and advanced defining the profession of teaching as one that should be “manned” by women.  At its base, the reasoning seems to have been motivated by funding considerations – simply stated, one could hire women at a cheaper rate than men.

Beyond funding, the policy also reflected Mann’s sexist beliefs that were described in that posting.  What should be mentioned, was that he was not alone in these beliefs, they were generally accepted to varying degrees among Americans, including women.  One of his main advisors was a woman by the name Catherine Beecher.  She promoted women’s role in education and, in time, was instrumental in getting women to go out west and fill teaching positions across the rough western communities in what is now considered the Midwest.

She supported Mann’s initiative to shift the occupation of teaching as being defined mostly as a female profession.  They fought against certain prejudices that held that if teaching was feminized it would lead to weaken academic standards and debasing school discipline especially among male students.  Mann defended his policy by various arguments, but somewhat central, beyond the $11,000 (worth $329, 334.94 today) female teacher corps saved Massachusetts’ taxpayers in an 1800s’ budget, by writing:

As a teacher of schools … how divinely does she come, her head encircled with a halo of heavenly light, her feet sweetening the earth on which she treads, and the celestial radiance of her benignity making vice begin its work of repentance through very envy of the beauty of virtue![3]

         As an ideal one can detect some biases and presumptions about teaching.  And these views reflect religious leanings.  To remind the reader, from the last posting, the connection was made between federalist thinking and Puritanical/Calvinistic beliefs. In all of this, while congregational thinking of this tradition affected constitutional thinking in all American states, it was strongest in the New England states.  And in this, there is an irony.

         Initially, Mann rebelled against Puritanical, religious thinking and adopted phrenology (a belief that physical features affect behavior).  By diminishing predestination, Mann saw phrenology as beliefs that led to proactive education to meet the shortcomings of young people.  But in this, which was ironic in of itself, he downgraded the importance of academic goals in educating the masses.

         His view of public education emphasized the social – congregational – qualities that led to a cooperative, collaborative, and communal population with a religious bent. The overall purpose of public schooling should promote students’ “affection outward in good-will towards men, and upward in reverence to God.”[4]  This stood in counter distinction to European public schooling.

         For example, Prussian schools – of which Mann saw through admiring eyes – upped teacher salaries to hold on to their male teachers and French schools promoted high academic standards with secular content (the French were prone to critique German school curricula as being too religious).  

         Next posting will look at what Mann’s contributions meant to the religious, parochial foundations of American federalism as it was considered in the early 1800s.  This writer hopes he is expressing that a culturally based idea with its associated ideals of governance and politics is not a well thought out ideology.  

It is instead a mixture of beliefs and emotions that are expressed in a more or less logically congruent argument about how and why a polity exists. But that level of coherence is enough to project a clear sense of what is considered politically legitimate. And in the 1800s it was securely considered legitimate for schools to promote a view of morality.

[1] “How Things Have Changed in Philadelphia Since the 1787 Convention,” Constitution Daily (May 25,2016), accessed January 21, 2021, https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/how-things-have-changed-since-1787#:~:text=The%20population%20of%20the%20United,were%20being%20held%20as%20slaves.

[2] Robert Gutierrez, Toward a Federated Nation: Implementing National Civics Standards (Tallahassee, FL:  Gravitas/Civics Books, 2020).  See pages 78-79.

[3] Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars:  A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession (New York, NY:  Doubleday, 2014), 27.  The historical information concerning Mann in this posting is drawn from this source.

[4] Ibid., 28.