The virtuous curriculum: Schoolbooks and American culture, 1785-1830

Popular educational literature played an important role in the decades following the American Revolution in shaping the nation politically, socially, and morally. The literature used in the schools during this period was a mixture of traditional English texts and new American texts apparently designed to promote a distinctive American culture. A new and significant type of schoolbook, the reader, emerged during this period. Intended for students who knew how to read, its content included extracts from major literary sources and its educational purpose was as much socialization as skills development. Popular readers demonstrate how in the dissemination of Enlightenment political principles that were the intellectual foundation of the American Revolution, a traditional nonsectarian Protestant value system replaced individualism with the culture of virtue imbued with nationalism. Content-analysis of the eighteen most popular readers in use during the early national period demonstrates the existence of key cultural values. With educational opportunity and literacy expanding rapidly beginning in the 1970s, readers reached a wide audience that included the broad Anglo-American middle class and a significant proportion of women. The culture of virtue was communicated through a standardized literature drawn from a definable set of sources; it was expressed with little variation across subject areas that included personal and social behavior, religion, ethics, history, and literature. It required of its participants adherence to cultural values of self-abnegation, obedience to authority, and a strong social conscience. Nationalistic ideology was incorporated into this culture in both British- and American-compiled texts and, in American compilations, American political rhetoric replaced a largely similar British ideology. American students, studying texts of either British or American origin, were taught to be personally humble, dutiful, obedient, considerate, and temperate. Their understanding of a divinely conceived universe and their place within it engendered social conformity and a respect for nature. There was a concomitant antipathy toward ambition and the human vanities of power, wealth, and fame. These compliant values of Protestant virtue were universal except when the textbooks dealt with issues of war and nationhood. Here the new political ideology of self-determination fostered individual aggression and accomplishment in the name of national rights, democracy, and republicanism