ABSTRACT
This chapter explores history and helps locate certain cultural narratives in time. It presents a history of people, events, ideas, and narratives that can help us place many educational texts into time in order to better interpret them. The chapter addresses four different moments of American history in which the discussion about education was particularly intense: Colonial period; Early National period; Mid-nineteenth century Common School reform movement; combined with the Progressive era. If the primary problem of the New England colonialists was physical and spiritual survival, the primary problem of the period following the successful American Revolution was how to forge a common and democratic nation out of thirteen former colonies of the British Crown. Public education grew first slowly and then rapidly during middle part of the nineteenth century in what has come to be known as the Common School Movement. During the colonial era and through the early 1800s, America was still a largely rural and agrarian country.
