Every eighteenth-century republican knew that the formation of virtuous citizens lay at the heart of any durable project for political freedom. Education was more than just one political issue among many. For at least some thinkers it was a fundamental problem, one that no successful republican state could set to one side. Yet in comparison to some reformers’ rhetoric, efforts to reshape education during the long revolutionary era that created the United States were strangely half-hearted and markedly unrevolutionary. Mark Boonshoft's incisive and insightful first book explains why. More than just a history of education, it is an account of the political conflicts and compromises that shaped the early republic.

Aristocratic Education tells the story of academies: “privately run, but often state-sanctioned and -supported secondary schools” that, rather than educating the general population, “specialized in training elites” (2). Boonshoft begins with their emergence in the colonial era among the denominational struggles of the Great Awakening, and their role in fostering a self-confident cohort of leaders and intellectuals capable of challenging the authority of Parliament and Crown. The problem he sets out to solve is why, far from declining when the Revolution came, the academy model boomed long into the nineteenth century. Why did aristocratic education flourish in the heyday of revolution and democracy, not only during the Federalist ascendancy but in the age of Thomas Jefferson as well?

The first part of the answer, set out in the middle section of the book, is predictable in general terms to anyone acquainted with the Progressive, class-oriented critique of the new nation's founding elite. While the Revolution confirmed actual, hereditary aristocracy as untenable in America, it created opportunities to forge a new, more enlightened, “natural aristocracy,” one that drew its legitimacy from claims to merit rather than birth. Education was one way – not the only one – to distinguish the deserving rulers from the rabble. Of course, the wealthy retained privileged access to an academy education. But it was the education, not the wealth, that supposedly determined their status in the new republic. “Re-creating aristocracy through education was a clever strategy,” Boonshoft concludes (81), because it flattered Americans’ sense that they had achieved a rational and therefore just way to distribute social power.

By the time Jefferson and his allies overthrew Federalist dominance in 1800, the idea of natural aristocracy was already falling out of favour. In the final third of the book, Boonshoft takes on the problem of how, even in this moment of renewed democratic zeal, academies like the one in Morristown, New Jersey “continued to thrive” (121). This is where the book's clear-sighted focus on the politics of class conflict and accommodation pays off, in a sophisticated analysis of the morphology of Jeffersonian power. The simple version is that moderate Jeffersonians (142), some of them former Federalists, took up the mantle of protecting academies. By expanding lower-level public schooling, they sought to make academy education – and therefore a place in the nation's elite – more accessible to the children of ordinary families, thus entrenching academies’ democratic legitimacy. Meanwhile, “more radical Jeffersonians questioned whether well-educated people should have a greater claim to rule than anyone else” (152).

Helped along by the Panic of 1819, the struggle between moderate and radical Jeffersonians triggered what Boonshoft calls “the first era of school reform” (7) and the rise of tax-supported public schools in New York and across the North. Yet rather than replacing academies, the new common schools relied on them to supply qualified teachers. School reform “legitimized the academies, maintained their currency in American life, and kept alive the possibility of rule by an educated aristocracy of merit” (168). Whigs in the 1830s could preserve a vision of “merit-based social order,” so long as it rested upon “universal elementary education” (175). As Boonshoft points out, that's not so far from where things stand now, nearly two centuries later.

In these striking ironies, which illuminate the dialectical logic of historical development, Aristocratic Education resonates closely with Gordon Wood's half-century-old masterpiece The Creation of the American Revolution. Like Wood, too, Boonshoft depicts an American democracy that still bears the marks of a more exclusive, hierarchical social order. In a powerful epilogue, he speaks directly to our own times, asking readers to “confront the fact that any semblance of equal and common education is fast disappearing from the United States” (183). If the cunning of history should afford us a different way forward after all, interpretations of the past – including this book – will have had a part to play.