The Teacher Wars Read Online Free Page B

general assembly—with names attached. The school’s pedagogical techniques were stultifying, and entirely typical of the era. In class, the headmistress merely read aloud to her pupils; for homework, the girls regurgitated in their journals all the trivia they could remember: the longitudes and latitudes of various countries, the dates of major battles, the lineages of British kings. Math instruction ceased before algebra or trigonometry, while chemistry and physics were neglected entirely.
    Poring over Fisher’s notebooks and lesson plans, Beecher was exposed for the first time to philosophy and logic. With guidance from her younger brother Edward, who had been educated at Andover and Yale, she was able to grasp the challenging material quickly and impart it to her pupils. Didn’t all girls deserve the opportunity Beecher was now offering Fisher’s sisters—to undertake broad intellectual pursuits? And if Beecher could successfully learn and teach serious subject matter—not just the “domestic arts”—why couldn’t other smart young women?
    Most crucially for the history of American education, Beechercame to believe that women were likely to be the most effective teachers not only of girls, but of boys as well. A middle-class lady like herself, without immediate marriage prospects, faced a strictly limited landscape of opportunity. She could not enroll in college (Mount Holyoke and Oberlin did not become the first American colleges to admit women until the 1830s), nor study for the ministry (it was closed to women), nor train to become a doctor or lawyer (medical and law schools were male only), nor set out in business on her own (banks rarely lent to women). The more Beecher thought about it, the more it seemed that teaching was the one profession in which a woman could gain “influence, respectability, and independence” without venturing outside “the prescribed boundaries of feminine modesty,” she wrote. Beecher was a lifelong opponent of women’s suffrage; she thought politics a dirty game that would corrupt women’s God-given virtue. But that virtue, she thought, made women the ideal educators. Beecher saw the home and the school as intertwined, two naturally feminine realms in which women could nurture the next generation. “Woman, whatever are her relations in life, is necessarily the guardian of the nursery, the companion of childhood, and the constant model of imitation,” she wrote in her “Essay on the Education of Female Teachers.” “It is her hand that first stamps impressions on the immortal spirit, that must remain forever.” Historian Redding Sugg dubbed this the “motherteacher” ideal—the notion that teaching and mothering were much the same job, done in different settings.
    Just a year after her fiancé’s death, Beecher began to put her new theories into practice. In 1823 she deployed her father’s social connections to establish the Hartford Female Seminary, and within a year had attracted a hundred students from throughout the eastern United States and as far away as Canada, many of whom hoped to become teachers. Beecher’s school embraced a level of academic rigor unheard of at elite girls’ academies of the period; students took classes in Latin, Greek, algebra, chemistry, modern languages, and moral and political philosophy. Beecher opposed rote memorization and overt academic competition; her school gave out no awards, which she believed inflated students’ vanity when they should be motivated to learn by simple love for God, their parents, and theircountry. Beecher believed in hands-on learning, through field trips and science experiments. Her educational philosophy was far ahead of its time. It would be another seventy years before John Dewey would famously articulate similar notions about teaching the “whole child.” Some of the school’s graduates