| This dissertation builds upon recent scholarship that explores the early twentieth century, or the "Progressive Era," as a foundational moment for distinctly modern and enduring forms of governance, political action, and social movements. Despite the breadth of existing literature, there has been virtually no comprehensive attempt to explore the nation-wide initiatives to reform the one public institution that arguably touched more peoples' lives in more systematic ways than any other at the birth of modern America: the public school. I argue that reformers from a variety of walks of life sought to define a "new education" in the early twentieth century to meet what they perceived to be needs of the individual and society in a new industrial age. In myriad, often contradictory efforts to modernize, standardize, and nationalize schooling, reformers transformed schools from local, voluntary supplements for home and community to compulsory, state-controlled institutions of public socialization aimed at preparing future workers and citizens for the challenges of modern life. In doing so, they fundamentally transformed the relationship between school, society, and state through the present day. Schooling, too often absent in accounts of progressive reform and state-building, was a central way in which Americans confronted and managed the challenges of modernity, particularly tensions between democracy and industrial capitalism. Furthermore, I argue that in ways seldom acknowledged, schools became major instruments of state policy and social policing as new forms of regulation, surveillance, and welfare were attached to children and their families in the compulsory school. |
