Schooling in capitalist America will make waves in the history of education, but it is only incidentally concerned with history. Rather, it is an effort to locate schooling in the social and economic context of capitalist society. The authors seek to offer a comprehensive account of the role schools have served in the American economic structure; they advance a critique of efforts to change or reform schools; and they suggest an alternative vision of how school reform should work.

In early 1892, Arthur MacDonald, a young docent in applied ethics from Clark University in Wocester, Massachusetts, traveled to Washington to assume the duties of specialist in education “as preventive of pauperism and crime” for the United States Bureau of Education. Hired by the Hegelian philosopher and Commissioner of Education, William T. Harris, he quickly won the approval and praise of his superiors. By the middle of the decade, however, Harris became aware of several disturbing tendencies in his new clerk-specialist. Instead of gathering material for use by educational experts, MacDonald was accumulating “laboratory instruments” for the study of anthropometrics (the measurement of physical characteristics and speculation about their effects upon psychology). Worse, some of the material MacDonald presented to the department, and some which he published in outside books and articles, showed that he was advocating controversial theories of criminology inspired by Cesare Lombroso in Italy and Alphonse Bertillon in France. MacDonald thought he had found a direct link between physical appearance and criminality, insanity, and poverty, in other words, a system of physical stigmata. On the basis of this, he proposed to reorient education from its traditional emphasis upon development toward considerations of hygiene.

The Committee of the Corporation and Overseers will observe in the view that the Professor of Mathematics had for many years a larger salary than the Professor of Divinity…. Perhaps the discrimination continued too long.