Chapter 12, The Bourgeois Republic Summary and Analysis

Now that political forces within the United States are balanced between the democratic and the capitalistic, new social and economic ideas and practices arise to extend this compound vision of liberal democratic capitalism and to resolve its contradictions. The old cultural forces behind the Moderate Light continue their onward march of cultural imperialism, this time through creating and expanding the public school system. Modern readers will be surprised at the often fierce resistance to public school on the grounds that it is anti-democratic because it will centralize education in the hands of the state. However, the public school system nonetheless expands with the activism of figures like Horace Mann.

Precipitating the rise of the public school system is the rise of literacy in the United States. Literacy in the United States is largely confined to...