By 1850 American educational reformers, led by Horace Mann, had succeeded in convincing many leading citizens of the merits of establishing a system of publicly supported "common schools." Inspired by newly developed European models of public education, the common-schools crusade had been initiated in the 1830s and won its first enthusiastic supporters in the larger, established towns of New England. From the beginning these schools were conceived not only as centers for learning, but as important vehicles for projecting the moral values considered essential to the American social order. Mann himself had stressed the importance of "moral education" in canvassing support for the common schools, and in the hands of New England descendants of the Puritans, this morality came to be closely identified with Protestantism and with the values of industriousness, frugality, and personal responsibility. Although by midcentury the common-school crusade had begun to win adherents.....
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