Education In The Second Great Awakening

The Second Great Awakening, beginning in about 1790, influenced a reform movement that encouraged mandatory, free, public education. In 1805, the New York Public School Society was created by wealthy businessmen and was intended to provide education for poor children. In 1817, a town meeting in Boston, Massachusetts called for establishment of free public primary schools. Many wage earners opposed this proposal. Josiah Quincy, mayor of Boston, supported the idea that education should be a priority by saying, “(By) 1820, an English classical school is established, having for its object to enable the mercantile and mechanical classes to obtain an education adapted for those children whom their parents wished to qualify for active life, and thus

It was called The Common School Period because education transformed from a completely private, costly thing to a luxury that was available to the common masses. With public education, social class separation was not as extreme as it had been in the past, but still continued to occur in some areas. The people in the lower classes originally gained minimal instruction, such as learning how to read and write, calculate, and receive religious instruction, while the upper classes were more entitled to pursuing a higher education in secondary schools and even continue their schooling at the university level. Though some social class separation still lingered, education was made mostly to fit common standards. In 1837, Horace Mann, one of the great education reformers, created grade levels, common standards to reach those said grade levels, and mandatory attendance. McGuffey readers, authored by William Holmes McGuffey, were used as textbooks. A standardization of American spelling was solidified by Noah Webster in 1828 with his American Dictionary of the English

The public schools’ content, discipline, and amount of religiosity differed due to the early influences, general demographics, and the three sections. All states in America had free public schools by 1870, but attendance was not completely mandatory. Into the twentieth century, as it became a known fact that the more educated a person was, the more productive they could be, laws were established that required all foreigners to be americanized so that American education was able to expand and be unified as one