Impact of Women's Movement on Teaching

The sectionalism of the American people in the formative years of the United States has been well documented. During the formative years of the republic, geographically based sectionalism was considered the "greatest danger to the Union forged at Philadelphia" (Miller, 1960, p. 124). Dyads such as the industrial North versus the agricultural South, embodied in Hamilton's vision of an industrial, centralized nation-state versus Jefferson's vision of multiple communities of agrarian yeoman farmers are commonplaces of post-revolutionary American politics, just as is the creation of the frontier as a region during the continental expansion of America in the early n

eir brothers' classical education. It was in the Middle Colonies that the structure of education transplanted from the English tradition of classical education appears to have taken strongest root. The Quaker culture in Pennsylvania, exemplary of the notion of religious freedom, influenced the pattern of educational development in that colony and in other colonies on the Middle Atlantic seaboard. Benjamin Franklin's proposals for the establishment in 1751 of what he called the Academy came to signify educational policies in the region. In a break with the English model of classical education, Franklin wanted to universalize education across classes and to emphasize history as the foundation of the system. "If history were 'made a constant Part' of the students' reading, he said, it would naturally lead to other subjects: Geography, Chronology, Ancient Customs, and Morality. By 'Morality' Franklin meant to convey something close to what we would now term 'good citizenship'" (Johanningmeier, 1980, p. 39). One result of this approach was the appearance of a number of grammar-school-type academies in the Middle Colonies, which eventually became models for public secondary schools and normal schools, or teacher-training academies of th