The Pedagogy of Love
Redding S. Sugg
Horace Mann made the feminization of the teaching corps an indispensable element of the common school revival in Massachusetts between 1837 and 1848 and set a pattern the effects of which still pervade American education. Given the patriarchal attitude of the 19th century, feminization was practicable only so long as it carried no hint of feminism; and it implied a moral rather than an intellectual or academic emphasis in teaching. Mann and his supporters were less concerned to revive or restore the schools, which had in fact been considerably improved since about 1820 under the leadership of James G. Carter and others, than to make the schools instrumental in the spiritual revival of society. This was to be accomplished, not according to Calvinist dogma, against which Mann was in revolt, but in the service of a species of moralism believed necessary in controlling the rambunctious Democracy. At its heart was the doctrine of human goodness and perfectibility, so gratifying to the very democratic predilections it was meant to regulate. It happened that the received, anti-feminist sex-typing of woman as definitively maternal fitted with the reformist, anti-Calvinist movement in education.
