Education Reforms The Mentally Ill The Prison System Temperance Movement

1. Antebellum Reforms
1812-1860
Reforming Society

2. Education
 Not all reformers were motivated by religion. Many moved by
the suffering they saw.
 Most Americans taught at home.
 Noah Webster- The American Spelling Book
 1780s
 Most popular school book
 No public schools that required children to attend

3. Education
 Public School Movement
 Sough to establish a system of tax-supported public schools.
 Education would give Americans the knowledge and intellectual
tools to make decisions in a democracy.
 Promote economic growth by supplying knowledgeable workers
 Keep rich from oppressing the poor

4. Education
 Horace Mann
 Grew up poor…saw inadequate schooling
 Mass. Senate—creation of the first state board of education
 Free public schools that all children were required by law to
attend
 State oversight of local schools
 Standardized school calendars
 Adequate school funding
 Fight to abolish corporal punishment
 Establish training to create a body of well-educated, professional
teachers.

5. The Mentally Ill
 Dorothea Dix
 Discovered people suffering from mental illnesses were housed
along with criminals.
 Campaigned for humane hospitals for people with mental
illnesses.
 Lead directly to the creation of the first modern mental hospitals.
 Also helped reform and improve prisons.

6. The Prison System
 Most viewed prison as a place to punish criminals.
 Reformers thought that prisons should make criminals feel
penitence, or sorrow for their crimes.
 Penitentiary Movement
 Prison reform movement

7. The Prison System
 Two reform models
 1) Pennsylvania System
 Prisoners urged to repent while living in complete solitary confinement.
 Complete isolation came to be viewed as cruel
 Eastern State Penitentiary (Philly)
 2) Auburn Model
 Prisoners worked with one another during the day in strict silence but
slept in individual cells.
 Many prisons followed this model
 Auburn Prison (central NY)

8. Alcohol Abuse
 Widespread abuse of alcohol led to crime, sickness, poverty,
and neglected families and children.
 Temperance Movement
 Effort to end alcohol abuse and problems associated with it.
 Temperance-drinking in moderation
 Pamphlets and posters warning of wasting money on liquor and
how it led to violence and crime.
 American Temperance Society help meetings nationwide urging
people to pledge to refrain from drinking.
 Washington Temperance Society helped with dramatic public
confessions, discussion, and counseling.

9. Alcohol Abuse
 Neal Dow
 1851-Mayor of Portland, Maine
 Secured the passage of the so-called “Maine Law”
 Restricted the sale of alcohol
 Inspired many other states to pass similar laws.