Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 3
Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950., Ed.

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[403] life had passed before the masses or even the leaders came to any general realization of the importance of public education to the new nation. During the second half century (1825– 1875), which may be termed the middle national period, education was nationalized, democratized, and made free. This necessitated the education of the masses of the new democracy to the significance of education in its political and social bearing; the conversion of the professional teacher to a revised form of schooling less aristocratic in control, content, and method; and the persuasion of the hard-headed, not to say close-fisted, taxpayer that the expense was a legitimate object of government, not simply a matter of individual inclination and ambition. Each was a difficult task, and each produced its own type of literature.

Periodical publications devoted to education made their appearance. In 1818-19 there was published in New York The academician, the first American educational periodical. Its standard was high, its appeal was made in no pettifogging spirit:

O ye, whom science choose to guide
     Her unpolluted stream along,
Adorn with flowers its cultured side
     And to its taste allure the young.

This was followed by The American journal of education (1826-30), making its appeal to the cultured classes and aiming to inform them on the subject of education and to persuade them of its fundamental importance. In the broadest social sense, not in the narrow technical one, it aimed to be educative. It proposed to diffuse enlarged and liberal views of education, to lay emphasis on physical education, moral education, domestic education, and personal education. Above all it considered the subject of ‘female education to be unspeakably important.’ The journal was continued in The American annals of education (1831-39), the editors of which were William C. Woodbridge and A. Bronson Alcott. Alcott's other contribution to educational literature, The records of a school, aroused to violent reaction the conservatives of his time, for in it were set forth educational doctrines which were not only radical after the type of Pestalozzi but revolutionary in the sense of the ‘modern ’