This is a free Adult School class.
In the early 19th century, America’s sense of itself as exceptional and manifestly destined to bring democracy, capitalism, and godliness to the benighted peoples of the world was forged in the evangelicalism of the Great Awakening. Social reformers had identified three great dangers to the emerging American consensus – the threat of barbarism posed by an ever-expanding frontier, the threat of uneducated immigrants who did not share the Protestant ethos, and the always present tendency to moral declension (“You got trouble, folks, right here in River City”).
A host of voluntarist missions and benevolence associations were created to address every perceived threat – temperance unions, bible societies, libraries – but by mid-century the need for sustained, tax-supported, public institutions had become obvious, and the first identified beneficiary was the school. In the latter decades of the century, with mass immigration and urbanization, the task of the public school took on the responsibility of social assimilation and increasingly became “compulsory”.
The legacy of the public school, born in the effort to solve and resolve fundamental threats to the American way, is the battleground for every moral, political, and social issue.
Mon, May 06 | 10:00AM to 6:00PM |
Tue, May 07 | 10:00AM to 8:00PM |
Wed, May 08 | 10:00AM to 8:00PM |
Thu, May 09 | 10:00AM to 8:00PM |
Fri, May 10 | 10:00AM to 6:00PM |
Sat, May 11 | 10:00AM to 6:00PM |
Sun, May 12 | 1:00PM to 6:00PM |
50 South Fullerton Avenue
Montclair, NJ 07042
Tel: 973-744-0500
Email: reference@montclairlibrary.org
185 Bellevue Avenue
Montclair, NJ 07043
Tel: 973-744-0500 ext. 2283
Email: reference@montclairlibrary.org