Engines of democracy: Technology, society, and American Common Schools before the Civil War

This study examines the role of technology in structuring American Common Schools in the ante-bellum era. It argues that technology has played a key role in American thought, since before the Revolutionary War, in constructing the meanings of democracy and individualism. In the ante-bellum era, as reformers sought to recreate American institutions to combat what they perceived as increasing disorder in society, they attached to these institutions ideas drawn from the developing technology of the time. Procedures were routinized and mechanized so that they could be performed by anyone, thus divorcing external actions from the inner actor. Individuals were treated as interchangeable parts so that they could all receive the same treatment. School operations were made more efficient as reformers created the beginnings of hierarchical authority structures and rationalized techniques.; This study argues that the way institutions were created before the Civil War, using technological means as solutions to social and political problems, has informed the development of schooling ever since. Later generations of reformers, eager to counter the effects of what we call traditional schooling, have assumed that they can use contemporary technologies to advance their reforms. Instead, these reforms fail because they do not understand how technology has structured the institution of schooling. Thus, far from having failed in schools, technology has succeeded in embedding itself into schools' organization and thinking.; Technology is here defined as much more than a set of physical artifacts, encompassing also procedures and techniques, social organization, and ways of thinking about the world. From this perspective, it can be seen that in the Common School era technological artifacts succeeded in schools to the degree to which they matched the ways technology as a whole was structuring schools. Thus an understanding of the ante-bellum era is necessary for understanding the present and future roles of technology in American schools.