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Abstract

This dissertation suggests an alternative way of thinking about American public schools and school reform in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the scholarship on schools and schooling in Progressive Era is extensive, most studies approach the subject in the context of concurrent social and cultural changes—focusing on the role schools played in helping to assimilate immigrants and discipline a growing population of industrial workers. Themes such as nationalism, and Americanization figure prominently in the historiography, which emphasizes the state building that occurred in tandem with the systematization of education on the United States and the professionalization of the teaching profession. I examine a different aspect of formal education by considering the school environment—the classrooms, corridors, and schoolyards where pupils spent their days—as sites of political socialization. Focusing on the project of a small coterie of political activists and good-government reformers who hoped to revolutionize citizenship education through civic role-play in schools, I describe the emergence and spread of a student self-government movement, examining the letters and published words of its leaders and its supporters among progressives generally, written accounts of teachers and principals who applied self-government methods, and the testimonies of pupils themselves, who wrote both about their experiences as “citizens” in their schools and about what they learned from those experiences. I argue that the theatrical democratization of American classrooms in the Progressive Era—a precursor to the student governments and student councils that remain a part of the school scene today—constituted an attempt by progressive civic reformers to create an ideal public, one that was embedded with may of the same problematic characteristics of the adult public that sprang out of the Progressive Era.

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