Social vision, character, and academic excellence in nineteenth-century America: William Augustus Muhlenberg and the Church school movement, 1828--1877 (Lloyd Breck, Henry Coit, John Kerfoot)

The dissertation argues that William Augustus Muhlenberg (1796--1877) and his three most important school-making heirs were possessed of a unique philosophy and practice embodied in model secondary schools. While the Muhlenbergians were much admired for the high academic quality of their schools, they themselves assumed that the secret to their success was the unusual "Church school" program they established. They insisted that the crucial matter in education is the means and not only the ends. Calling himself an "Evangelical Catholic," Muhlenberg established a Church school concept built on a religious sensibility that was startling in Jacksonian America. If the Muhlenbergian movement represented a fundamental, though rarely considered, challenge to the scholastic vision of Horace Mann (1796--1859) and other champions of the putatively "non-sectarian" common school, it was also one phase of an international resistance to rationalism. The Muhlenbergians believed that rationalism or individualist self-reliance went hand-in-hand with both the growth of a fiercely competitive North Atlantic culture and the decline of moral education in the West. The argument is defended in the historical reconstructions, qualitative analyses, and interpretive essay provided in ten chapters and an introduction. Sufficient evidence is provided to support the argument and to show that the school-making projects of Muhlenberg, John Kerfoot (1816--81), Lloyd Breck (1818--76), and Henry Coit (1830--95) formed a single and important movement in the history of American education in the nineteenth century.