The Common School Awakening: Religion and the Transatlantic Roots of American Public Education. By David Komline Purchased

In The Common School Awakening, David Komline argues that the “common school awakening” in the early nineteenth century was “an international phenomenon” and “a thoroughly religious affair” (p. 3). Komline adds that “careful study of the origins of American common schools, then, reveals a forgotten side of American religion: that far from only spawning conflict, American religion is also a story of compromise and consensus” (p. 6).

Komline’s book is organized around a series of biographical chapters focused on prominent reformers, starting with Joseph Lancaster. All the important players show: Thomas Gallaudet, Samuel Gridley Howe, George Bancroft, Edward Everett, Emma Willard, James Carter, Horace Mann, Calvin Stowe, Lyman Beecher, Samuel Lewis. Komline does an excellent job introducing us to their ideas. However, most of what Komline writes is well known. It is no surprise that common school reformers were motivated by faith, that they learned from European educators, and that they sought to build professional tax-supported systems grounded in Protestantism.

Given that most of the information is not new, the real question is what Komline is asking us to make of it. It is not enough to point out that the leaders of the common school reform movement were motivated by faith. That is a bit like saying that fish wanted water. The reformers took for granted that education was a moral enterprise, and that morality depended on faith. Their challenge was religious pluralism, not religion. It was only once educators, and more generally Americans, could imagine secular schools—something that enters the horizon closer to the Civil War—that “religion” became a thing that you could analyze as a distinct social category. Religion was not yet “religion”—it was the taken-for-granted.

Komline’s primary contribution is to help us see how religion united reformers both across the Atlantic and at home in the United States. Reflecting on the impact of French observer Victor Cousin’s Report on Prussian education on American reformers, Komline writes that Americans were more likely to see nonsectarian religion as a source of unity—a bridge over divides—than a source of division. This echoes Steven K. Green’s work on nonsectarianism. I wish Komline had developed this thesis more: why and how did nonsectarian religion work as a unifier, not just divider? What do we learn from this fact about education reform and/or American culture? And why and how was the United States different from Europe?

Komline’s focus on ideas is refreshing. As he writes, none of the major reformers “pointed to industrialization, modernization, or any economic forces as factors influencing the Common School Awakening” (p. 124). Komline challenges the premise that education reform was the effect of deeper material causes rather than reformers’ genuine commitment to republicanism and religion. Yet, because Komline treats religion as “religion” rather than as water for fish, he leaves us with an unsatisfying conclusion. The common school reformers’ goal, he writes, was “to Christianize the country through its common schools,” which in turn spurred backlash from both Protestant sectarians and the growing number of Catholic immigrants (pp. 224–25). Komline’s book would have been stronger if he had situated how religion worked in the early republic more effectively and theorized his understanding of religion.

It is easy to find reformers in the first half of the nineteenth century talking about faith and worrying over how to ensure that education is compatible with religious pluralism. It is more difficult to distinguish between how they thought about religion and how we think about it today. They did not think about their work or their institutions as “faith-based,” because that presumes a modernity in which faith is optional. Yes, there were free thinkers and skeptics in the early American republic, but for most Americans, a world without religion was not really conceptualizable. Even today, we struggle with this question. Public schools did not become secular until after World War II, and that transformation continues to reverberate in American politics. Reading our understanding of religion back into time simplifies, and even distorts, what the reformers were trying to accomplish and what they meant when they used religious language.