Modes of Discipline: Affective Individualism and Pedagogical Reform in New England, 1820-1850

Historians have long recognized the debate between Horace Mann and the Boston grammar school masters in the 1840s as a pivotal moment in the making of modern American pedagogy. Recent interpretations of this debate have tended to view it as a clash between modernity and traditionalism, or Unitarian enlightenment and Calvinist repression, or capitalism and paternalism. This paper argues that, far from being forward-looking capitalist modernizers, Horace Mann and other exponents of "the New England pedagogy" were deeply troubled by the menacing moral consequences of the market and Jacksonian revolutions and that, in response, they developed and deployed a "disciplinary" pedagogy that simultaneously reflected their faith in the ability of education to promote the development of the powers of the self and cultivate the capacity for "self-government" while at the same time preventing, or at least limiting, the commercialization of the school classroom.