American Education: The National Experience, 1783–1876
by Lawrence A. Cremin
Summary
American Education: The National Experience, 1783 to 1876 is the second volume of Lawrence Cremin's three volume history of American education, following The Colonial Experience and preceding The Metropolitan Experience, and it carries the story from the end of the Revolutionary War to the Centennial year of 1876. Across the trilogy Cremin deliberately broadened the study of American educational history beyond the school centered analysis that had dominated earlier scholarship, examining the fuller range of agencies and institutions, family, church, apprenticeship, and the popular press among them, that actually shaped what Americans learned and believed during the young republic's first century.
Cremin uses that broader definition to build an argument about the whole system's effect on the country it served. He contended that American education, understood this widely, had done more to advance liberty, equality, and fraternity, and had liberated a greater range of human potential, than education had managed in most other eras or places, a position he set directly against nineteen sixties historians who read the same record as evidence of American education's failure to deliver on its democratic promises. The volume follows common schools, colleges, churches, and the expanding press as they multiplied across a rapidly growing nation, treating each as a genuine educational force rather than a backdrop to the schools alone.
Reading the book means following an exhaustively documented synthesis that ranges across institutions most single studies keep separate, closer to cultural history than to a narrow history of schooling. Not every reader has found the range persuasive: one reviewer, Sol Cohen, judged that the book covered too much ground, all of cultural history, too thinly. It suits a reader drawn to the deliberate breadth of Cremin's project rather than a tightly focused study of any one institution.
Historical Context & Significance
American Education: The National Experience won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for History; that year's finalists were David M. Kennedy's Over Here and Lyle Koehler's A Search for Power. It followed Cremin's 1962 Bancroft Prize, won for an earlier book, and extended a career devoted to arguing that American education deserved study on its own broad terms rather than as a footnote to political history.
Cremin taught at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he became the Frederick A. P. Barnard Professor of Education in 1961 and served as the college's president from 1974 to 1984, later leading the Spencer Foundation from 1985. His trilogy remains a standard reference for the field even where, as with Cohen's review of this volume, later scholars have questioned whether its enormous scope let any single institution receive sustained enough attention.