Abstract
Current discussions of the effects of urbanization and industrialization on the bureaucratization of American public education in the later 19th century do not offer effective explanations of the expansion of the educational system in the first place. Enrollments were high much earlier than these explanations suggest and were probably higher in rural than in urban settings. We argue that the spread of public education, especially in the North and West, took place through a series of nation-building social movements having partly religious and partly political forms. We see these movements as reflecting the involvement and success of American society in the world exchange economy and the dominance of parallel religious ideologies. State-level data are used to show both the absence of positive effects of urban industrialism on enrollments and some suggestive effects of evangelical Protestantism and 19th-century Republicanism.
Keywords
BureaucracyIdeologyDominance (genetics)IndustrialisationPoliticsUrbanizationState (computer science)SociologyPolitical economyPolitical scienceEconomic growthEconomic historyEconomicsLaw
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Publication Info
- Year
- 1979
- Type
- article
- Volume
- 85
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 591-613
- Citations
- 218
- Access
- Closed
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Cite This
John W. Meyer,
David Tyack,
Joane Nagel
et al.
(1979).
Public Education as Nation-Building in America: Enrollments and Bureaucratization in the American States, 1870-1930.
American Journal of Sociology
, 85
(3)
, 591-613.
https://doi.org/10.1086/227051
Identifiers
- DOI
- 10.1086/227051