The origins of the American school building: Boston public school architecture, 1800--1860

Boston's 1847 Quincy Grammar School was the first American purpose-built graded school building, and most subsequent urban American schools adopted its combination of an assembly hall and multiple, small, single-teacher classrooms serving students divided by age and ability. The graded school replaced diverse spatial models like one-room schools, schools with recitation rooms, and monitorial schools. I examine the local history of these school types to explain the failure of most and the success of the graded school, which built on existing educational traditions, values, and trends in Boston that proved nationally compelling. The graded school succeeded because it housed an expanding school population by increasing the capacity of individual schools; reduced costs by utilizing inexpensive female labor in classrooms; maintained a supervisory male authority figure in the assembly hall; promised solutions to the noise, discipline, and pedagogical shortcomings of the city's existing open classrooms; and worked within frameworks made familiar by the city's primary and grammar schools. Despite offering similar cost and capacity advantages, the monitorial system succumbed to poor popular opinion, inappropriate existing school buildings, the problems of open classrooms, and splintered governmental power structures.;Antebellum demographic, political, and economic changes fed Bostonians' continuing anxiety about the durability of republicanism and traditional socializing institutions like families and churches. Bostonians increasingly turned to schools to ensure that all children were taught the republican values that would sustain the social structure. They designed an education system to guide the proper development of children's innate characteristics through environmental influences, including school architecture. School buildings projected civic virtues like economy and gentility that Bostonians believed would influence students and neighborhoods. To compensate for perceived inadequacies of homes and religious observance, Bostonians incorporated aspects of domestic and religious architecture in their schools. Early primary schools resembled the modest domestic structures of their neighborhoods, while later primary schools adopted architectural elements from wealthier genteel houses, including similarities of size, site use, impressive facades, interior decor, quality materials, and attention to aesthetic proportions and ornament. Grammar schools also invoked the moral and religious traditions of the city's Puritan heritage by adopting architectural elements from early meetinghouses.