Education+Reform

=** The Education Reform ** = 
 * Importance of Education **

-Reformers viewed education as the key to individual opportunity and the creation of an enlightened and responsible citizenry.

-Reformers also believed that public schooling could be an effective weapon in the fight against juvenile crime and an essential ingredient in the assimilation of immigrants.

**Before the Reform** 

-Before there were specialized teachers, children were taught at home by their parents using only the bible

-Before the reform, it was hard for teachers to teach their students because

-They were always forgetting what they had previously learned

-The students were all of different ages

-The teachers barely had the funds they needed to successfully run their school, extremely underpaid

-Children worked on their parent’s farms, so they barely went to school

-Over crowded, sometimes up to seventy children of all ages crammed into one-room schoolhouses 
 * Horace Man** 

-Led the fight for the government to support public schools

-Established a state board of educations

-His actions resulted in a doubling of state expenses on education

-Won state support for teacher training, an improved curriculum in schools, the grading of pupils by age and ability, and a lengthened school year

-Increasing state spending on schools, lengthening the school year, dividing the students into grades, and introducing standardized textbooks

-3 years after he left office to be in Congress, Massachusetts adopted the first school attendance law in American History

-Wanted to end corporal punishment in schools (whippings)

**Noah Webster** 

-“Father of American Scholarship and Education”

-“Blue-Backed Speller” books were used to teach spelling and reading to five generations of American children

-Believed that Americans should be learning from American books and not the English books they were using, so he wrote A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, which was split up into three parts, a speller, a reader, and a grammar

-Goal was to provide a uniquely American approach to training children

-The speller changed the way that Americans wrote many of their words, he took the British way and transformed into a way that we now use today

**Effects of the Reform** 

-Most northern cities excluded African America

-It was not until 1855 that Massachusetts became the first state to admit students without regard to “race, color, or religious opinions”

-Uniformed school so they were all teaching the same ideas

-People were afraid of this because they didn't want the federal government to control the education: they had the states decide what would be taught in schools, they teachers were educated by the states

-Women and religious minorities were also excluded

-Women had to go to special academies to learn skills beyond handicrafts and basic reading and writing

-Children started using American textbooks to learn


 * Powerpoint **

-this powerpoint is done using Google Docs so make sure when you looking at it you are using safari otherwise it will not work