The Teacher Wars Read Online Free Page A

was with Beecher, Mann had underestimated her. She was destined not to be a housewife, but to assume her father’s mantle as a leading public intellectual. Together, she and Horace Mann would define public education as America’s new, more gentle church, and female teachers as the ministers of American morality.

    Less than two weeks after Beecher met Mann, her fiancé drowned in a shipwreck off the coast of Ireland. Fisher had been on his way to Europe for a yearlong tour of the continent’s universities, to study alongside the leading scientists of the day. They had planned to marry the following spring. Now Beecher’s future was uncertain. “I lie down in sorrow and awake in heaviness, and go mourning all day long,” she wrote. Following several months of confinement in her father’s home, she fled to the Fisher family farm in Franklin. Alexander’s parents asked if Beecher might tutor their younger children, a teenage boy and two small girls, who had lost not only their beloved eldest brother, but also their academic mentor.
    Upon her arrival, a depressed Beecher retreated to the Fisher attic, where she searched obsessively through her dead fiancé’s diaries and letters. She was surprised by what she found. The couple’s courtship had been stilted and almost all their time together chaperoned. It turned out she had not known her fiancé very well at all. Alexander Fisher’s diaries laid bare a tortured soul who, at the age of nineteen, endured a case of “delirium,” so torn was he between the obligations of religion and his attraction to his true passions, math and science. During this episode, Fisher suffered from delusions of grandiosity, believing he could deploy mathematical problem solving to save the universe from sudden destruction. When the mania passed, Fisher returned to his scientific studies at Yale, chiding himself for a lack of religious faith, which he described as “an incapacity … of making moral truth the subject of steady contemplation.” Like Beecher, Fisher had devoted years of tedious Sundays to devotional study, only to regretfully conclude in 1819, when he was a professor, that his spiritual life was “a blank,” and he would never achieve conversion. Around this time, he stopped keeping a journal and devoted himself full-time to planning lessons, writing textbooks, and counseling his Yale students.
    Beecher was moved by Fisher’s frustrations with traditional religion—so similar to her own—and by his eventual decision to commit himself fully to a career as a scholar and teacher. She felt certain, for the first time in her young life, that predestination was false. Fisher had been a good man—a saved man—not because he had converted, but because he had done good in his life. Beecherwrote to her father: “The heart must have something to rest upon, and if it is not God, it will be the world.”
    Beecher’s new conviction that public works could serve society as well as private faith set her off on a career in education. As a girl, she had been denied the academic opportunities granted to Fisher to study classical languages, master higher-order mathematics, and immerse herself in contemporary political thought. TheLitchfield Female Academy had been organized around religious piety, public shaming, and social positioning. Each morning, the students would queue up to submit to a barrage of leading questions posed by the commanding headmistress:
Have you been patient in acquiring your lessons? Have you spoken any indecent word or by any action discovered a want of feminine delicacy? Have you combed your hair with a fine-tooth comb and cleaned your teeth every morning? Have you eaten any green fruit during the week?
Every girl was required to keep a daily journal of her spiritual faults; entries notable for either their righteousness or depravity were read aloud to a Saturday morning