Education in North America - The Beginnings, The Revolution, The Nineteenth Century, Higher Education, The Future, Bibliography
development schooling lower universality
What distinguishes the development of education in North America has been its cautious, halting, but nevertheless relentless movement toward universality and inclusivity, an impulse that owes much to the progressive ideals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and to the consequent development of liberal democracy on the continent. In the early twenty-first-century Canada and in the United States, citizens expect to be able to pursue an education, often at state expense, limited only by their abilities, interests, and preferences. But, however powerful, the sentiment in favor of universal access to education has never meant that education, or its benefits, has been shared equally. It remains the case that racial discrimination, gender bias, and economic necessity force many to forego advanced schooling and to endure lower wages, episodic unemployment, and a generally lower standard of living.
How do we explain this seeming contradiction? Both the impulse to universality and the unequal distribution of education are artifacts of two centuries of developments in educational policy and practice that owe much to the seventeenth-century origins of schooling in North America.
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Three interacting forces shaped education in the North American colonies: religious fervor, early Enlightenment thought, and contact with native peoples and with the wilderness itself. The early settlers of North America, as distinguished from the mercantile explorers who worked the traps in Hudson Bay and planted the tobacco fields of Virginia, or the explorers and missionaries who controlled the…
The American Revolution deepened the North American affection for using education as a tool of social control. The creation of a liberal republican nation-state on the continent provided a new locus for policy-making and a new imperative for generating political solidarity. In the new United States, one of the few things that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams could…
The nineteenth century was a time of expansion and change on the North American continent. Expansion of the white population westward brought more and more native peoples into contact with settlers and their brand of civilization. Displacement, disease, and successive wars of conquest decimated the native peoples from Florida to Saskatchewan and brought those who survived into a strongly paternali…
Indeed, until the middle of the nineteenth century, higher education was off-limits to most women and to all but the most affluent of men. Female seminaries existed, and the end of the nineteenth century saw the development of specialized teacher training colleges for women. But the opportunities that existed for collegiate training remained the province of wealthy white men. That changed in the U…
Most obvious to these critics was the existence of a multitiered system of schooling, in which minority and immigrant groups
were channeled by the education they received into low-paying jobs and subservient positions in society while whites, including, to a lesser extent, white women, were provided an education that created opportunity for mobility and access to political power. In the United St…
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