NURTURING THE SOULS OF OUR CHILDREN

The concept of education as a public trust has dominated the 250-year history of public education in the United States. In the twentieth century, the primary emphases of education have been on the acquisition of pragmatic knowledge and utilitarian skills. However, during the late colonial period of the eighteenth, and throughout the nineteenth, century the primary emphasis of the public trust of public education was on acculturation—emphasizing the assimilation, into the individual personality, of a common, self-conscious national-cultural identity.

The cultural identity, itself, evolved out of the cultural identities of nativist Americans. They were Western European colonists who arrived on the continent between the re-establishment of the colony at Jamestown, in 1607, and the Declaration of Independence, in 1776.  Those colonists were primarily Protestants from England, Scotland, Ireland, Holland, Germany, and Sweden who later adopted the term nativist in order to distinguish themselves from the Native American Indians and from immigrants who arrived after the Revolutionary War.  By this definition, the term nativist also applies to African slaves brought to colonial America to serve their European masters. Initially, nativist Americans settled in separate colonies, where they retained the cultural identities of their European homelands.

Then, in the 1750’s, a conflict arose between the German- and English-speaking colonists over choosing a dominant language for colonial America. The result was the adoption of English as the common language in public affairs. A universal educational system was necessary to draw the various European colonialists together into a common American identity, and English also became the official language in the schools. The emerging common identity of the American colonies was categorically defined, and the first objective of universal education was acculturation: teaching young people the self-conscious tenets of that common cultural identity and its assimilation into the individual personality. After the Revolutionary War, public education became a primary means of perpetuating the national-cultural identity of the newly formed United States. That system ferreted-out a select group of male students who were further educated in the established universities. Thus, an elite corps of intellectual and political leaders was culled from the general populace, with the primary function of debating and preserving the tenets of the common cultural identity and guiding its further evolution.

That identity emerged out of the general cultural characteristics common to the European nativists. African slaves and American Indians were not completely excluded from representation in the formation of the common culture, but, rather than affect a syncretistic cultural fusion that included European, African, and Native American cultural influences—as was closer to the case in Mexico—the emerging common culture in the United States was Eurocentric and, essentially, reactive against the cultural influences of African slaves and Native Americans.

In order to properly appreciate the roots of this national-cultural identity it is profitable to examine six fundamental influences that shaped it:  1) the European Renaissance, 2) the Reformation theology of Protestantism, 3) an intellectualism grounded in the European Age of Enlightenment, 4) a social economy that evolved out of the British mercantile and capitalist systems, 5) a revolutionary fervor stoked by the fires of the republican philosophy of government, and 6) the myth of the United States as the “New Jerusalem.” Together these influences gave definition to the common cultural identity of the nation. They also shaped the psychological, pedagogical, and curricular foundations that defined the individual assimilation of a cultural identity through the public trust of public education.