ABSTRACT
In the introductory chapter some European influences on American common schooling were explored. Of particular interest was how these influences were accommodated to the exceptional circumstances of this first new nation. This accommodation was especially intense during the decades of the 1840s and 1850s, during which local communities felt the strains of economic changes that eroded traditional arrangements for the care and education of indigent and infirm members. These decades were a critical juncture in this economic and social transformation. These years were witness to the “common school revival,” an apt term for the religious motivation that informed and carried so many of the reform efforts seeking a broadened, universal public education. An important element of this motivation was an informed hesitancy toward institutions that would congregate the “dangerous and dependent” classes. An American compromise in the face of inexorable economic changes was the development of numerous intermediate arrangements that replicated the design and purpose of apprenticeship and avoided the large, impersonal institution. This network of foundling homes, children’s asylums, and other forms of semipublic “schools” for indigent and infirm youth established the initial foundations of a “tutelary complex.”
