spent a year as a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Heidelberg. He has published essays in Religion and American Culture, Anglican and Episcopal History, and several edited collections.
Komline applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Common School Awakening: Religion and the Transatlantic Roots of American Public Education, and reported the following:
How do we best explain the rise of public education in the early United States? The Common School Awakening, the movement, culminated in the late 1830s when states across the country centralized oversight of their schools and began government-sponsored teacher training colleges. The Common School Awakening, the book, treats these famous developments in chapters five and six. But these reforms were decades in the making, as earlier chapters demonstrate. Page 99 comes towards the end of one of these chapters, chapter three, which treats failed efforts to introduce similar reforms in Massachusetts in the 1820s. Specifically, this page describes the founding of one enterprise that attempted to improve teaching: the American Institute of Instruction.Learn more about The Common School Awakening at the Oxford University Press website.
Does the Page 99 Test work? Yes and no.
In the middle of page 99 the following sentence appears: “The roster included major figures in education – Thomas Gallaudet and William Woodbridge; James Carter and Ebenezer Bailey; Nathan Guilford of Cincinnati and Roberts Vaux of Philadelphia.” By highlighting these particular people – each of whom appears elsewhere in the book, with Gallaudet appearing in every chapter after the introduction – this page does serve as a kind of microcosm of the whole.
This list also illustrates one way the book widens the frame of conventional scholarly conversations. Often, discussions of early American education center on one “great man” – Horace Mann. More critical historiography has emphasized how forces such as industrialization and urbanization affected educational policy. The Common School Awakening, by highlighting personal agency, turns our attention back to people – but not merely to one person. As page 99 notes later: “By gathering people from across the country, the institute solidified the networks of educational reformers that had already begun to develop …. It also helped to ensure that the Common School Awakening would be a national phenomenon, not merely a fad in the Northeast.”
But while this page picks up the book’s national emphasis, it gives no sign of the book’s transnational emphasis. The Common School Awakening argues that American reformers’ experiences with and understanding of education abroad strongly influenced them. As other parts of the book detail, reformers traversed the Atlantic frequently, bringing back ideas from Europe about how to improve education at home. A whole chapter focuses on how Americans engaged schooling in Prussia through a report authored by the Frenchman Victor Cousin and translated by the Englishwoman Sarah Austin. These transatlantic influences provided both material inspiration for reform and a way of advocating for it. But from page 99 alone, this transnational theme is not obvious.
The other major missing motif is religion. The opening paragraph of chapter three notes that the attempts at reform of the 1820s “serve as a foil for … later, more successful efforts.” Religion is absent from page 99, and indeed from action of this chapter. But its absence is one reason these initiatives largely failed. The religious rhetoric that reformers adopted in the 1830s carried the Common School Awakening to its height.
Page 99, then, gives a sense of the crucial role played by individual personalities across the nation in bringing about the Common School Awakening. But one must read further to see the transatlantic and religious currents that carried their work forward.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
