Social Change, Discipline, and the Common School in Early Nineteenth-Century America

of the sharp rise in educators' attention to discipline and character formation in the nineteenth century, especially in the decades of school reform after 1840. This article relates the urgent concern for school discipline to other developments in early industrial America. It comments upon two explanations offered recently and proposes a broader explanation which at once supports and revises the functionalist framework as it is applied to the history of education.