1840s American Education

Education throughout history has never stopped changing. Primitive education focused mainly on preparing children to enter their society, but formal education in early civilization, like egypt, was only provided for the wealthy and only taught by priests. For new world civilization education was a way to train for future life, develop the morals and characters of children, and a way to control children's cultural belief.

By the 1840s public education had been accepted in the Northern states, but not by most people in the South. People in the South didn’t as quickly accept public schools because they believed that state shouldn’t be concerned by education and that education is private, that education should prepare children for the world they will be entering, that knowledge is power and can’t be entrusted to slaves, and their different religious beliefs. Because of people's belief that education should prepare children for the world they're about to enter girls and boys were educated separately. Girls were learning how to properly fit in on the plantations while boy were learning how to properly run the plantations. Since in the South there was no middle class and people viewed knowledge as power, people believed that the wealthy plantation owners …show more content…
Most people in the south believed that education private and that the state shouldn’t be concerned by it. They also believed that the purpose of education was to prepare children for the world they would be entering. People in the south also saw knowledge as power, so couldn’t entrust knowledge with slaves. Another thing that kept the southern people from viewing public the same was as people from the north did was the difference in religious beliefs. Through time more people from the south accepted the idea of public education, but it wasn’t until after the Civil War that the south implemented public