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After 1900 demands for a more functional education in the secondary schools were argued with growing fervor as efforts to extend and perfect the ideal of universal educational opportunity were intensified. In pamphlets, at association meetings, and through a variety of other media, one proponent after another reiterated the traditional arguments: universal education would minimize social cleavage and keep equality of opportunity open; it would bring enlightenment to the republic; it would reduce crime; and it would serve to induct an increasingly heterogeneous and growing immigrant population into American society. These arguments reflected an increasing effort to expand the common school ideal to meet the changing needs of American life.
A rumor early in 1799 brought together briefly the lives of Lord Castlereagh (1769–1822) and Dr. George Miller (1764–1848). Lord Castlereagh was then a newly prominent British statesman, later to become eminent as his majesty's Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs during the Napoleonic wars; Dr. Miller was a distinguished Irish clergyman, historian, and professor. This relationship, arising from the rumor that the British government would establish a new college at Armagh in northeastern Ireland, produced a remarkable but largely forgotten exposition of the problems of higher education in the late eighteenth century.
“As to writing, I confess to being sceptical as to its value. In at least one great institution, the knowledge of how to write has led to great difficulties in managing high grade cases, the men and women communicating with each other by means of notes.”
James G. Carter (1795–1849) is remembered as a champion of free schools. His writings and his work in the Massachusetts legislature furthered their cause. Histories of education tell of his efforts on behalf of the establishment of public institutions for teacher education. A neglected aspect of Carter's thought is his conception of the inductive method of Francis Bacon and his application of it to the subject of education.