Reform movements have been an important part of the United States history. Leaders of the Second Awakened believed that their followers had responsibility to improve life on earth, through reform. Not all reformers were influenced by religion.
Many were simply moved by the suffering they saw. One of the well known reform movements was in the education field. Americans who had no voice in how they were being treated were a special concern to many reformers, that was one of the reasons why reformed worked hard to help Americans who were imprisoned.Many Americans had their children taught from home by their parents.
In some communities there was school but still reformers saw education in America as a woeful situation. Because there wasn’t a law requiring kids to go to school, most children did not go to school. Reformers stared the public school movement, also called the common school movement, to establish such a system of tax supported public schools. They argued that expanding education would give Americans the knowledge and ability to understand difficult ideas.
Education would promote economic growth by supplying knowledgeable workers and help keep wealthy, educated people from oppressing the uneducated poor. Horace Mann leads the public school reform movement, as a leader of the Massachusetts Senate; Mann championed the creation of a state education board. He advanced the idea of free public schools that all children were required to attend by law. Mann also led the fight to abolish corporal, or physical, punishment.
He influenced state legislatures across the country to set aside funds to support free public schools.The reformers faced refusal from reluctant taxpayers and those who thought that education should include religious teaching. Despite opposition, the percentage of American children attending school doubled. Women played a good role in the school reform movement.
They petition the legislatures to support public education and became teachers in the new schools. One reformer who changed religious ideals in to action was Dorothea Dix. In 1841, she began teaching at Sunday school in a Massachusetts prison.She realizes that people suffering from mental illnesses were housed along with hardened criminals; she decided to act to change things.
Dix spent two years visiting prisons, she wrote to the state legislature the poor horrors she had seen. Dorothea Dix went on to campaign across the nation, encouraging the other communities to build hospitals for people with mental illnesses. Her campaign was successful and marked the creation of the first modern mental hospitals. Dix and other worked to improve the prisons.
Prison reformers thoughts that prisons should make criminals feel penitence, sorrow for their crimes.The prison reforms movement is called the penitentiary movement. Two types of penitentiaries were proposed by reformers. The Pennsylvania System, advocated by the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating and Miseries of Public Prison embodied in the Eastern State Penitentiary.
In the Eastern State prisoners can exercise in individual yards. Therefore, because of Horace Mann, Dorothea Dix, and other reformer changed the lives of children, prisoner, and the sick, they also change the economy and society as a whole.
