Dialogue: Response to Angus’s “Conflict, Class, and the Nineteenth-Century Public High School in the Cities of the Midwest, 1845–1900” †

Critiques of social control theorists as well as some proponents of social control theories often focus on the intent of those in power. Angus argues that many school boards in the midwest delayed the opening of secondary schools in the interests of providing mass education and thereby in the long run favored the interests of the working class and poor. Angus presumes that theory, instead of guiding the scholar, constrains him or her. Without theory, the scholar has little guide to how to contextualize data and interpret it. To state that social control theories are useless because the scholar ends up blind to demographics or ignores underclass demand for education is to state that a different set of theories—perhaps in this instance, free market theories of supply and demand—best guide the scholar and explain how schooling came to develop the way it did.