The Common School: Neglected Content in the High School Social Studies Classroom?.

Abstract

tion among the reforms of the antebellum era, despite its role in creating an institution central to the experience of the students in our public schools. Neglected is the opportunity to explore the origins of public education, the accompanying debate, and its relationship to the forces and ideologies that energized the antebellum reform movement, one of the most powerful and complex in American history, but one that is also treated sparsely in the classroom. Neglected as well is the opportunity to evaluate the validity of historical arguments for common schools at a time when public education is again the subject of intense national debate. With this article, I wish to encourage [social studies] teachers and curriculum coordinators to consider the com-