and community colleges during the 1960s; compensatory education; and the changing standards of equality that began in the 1970s.
Church and Sedlak (1976) report that the Common School Movement was one of the most dramatic changes in the educational system of the nineteenth century. The authors define the movement as:
...a series of state movements for reform of elementary education; it can be considered a national movement only because these individual state movements were roughly congruent in time and goals and because the various state reform leaders communicated with and learned from one another. (p. 55)
The movement had three objectives: (1) provide free elementary level education to white children regardless of their parents status or wealth; (2) turn out well-trained professional educators; and (3) establish state control over local schools.
Relevant to the two themes of the social history of education provided by Church and Sedlak (1976), is the fact that, as noted by Conforti (1985), these schools were sectarian in nature. Indeed, Conforti (1985) stated that the common schools were the institutional embodiment of the Protestant ethic second only to the church itself. Nonetheless, as--over time--the third objective of the common school movement was attained (the establishment of state control), schools slowly began to grow more secular.
It can be noted that this sectarian/secular dichotomy is not without relevance for the expansion of the student base that characterizes the social history of American Education. In this regard, it was religious notions that bred the idea of expanding the student base. In this regard, the object of education was viewed as moral in nature with the ultimate goal of "saving" souls.
Given the Bible mandate to evangelize the world, the expansion of the student base, to sectarian teachers, was akin to a moral imperative. As the schools came more and more under secular c...