Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: In Conversation: An OUP Podcast
Episode: David Komline, "The Common School Awakening: Religion and the Transatlantic Roots of American Public Education" (Oxford UP, 2020)
Description: The origins of American public schools can help shed light on continued contemporary discussions around religion and education in American discourse. In The Common School Awakening: Religion and the Transatlantic Roots of American Public Education (Oxford UP, 2020), historian David Komline explores the rise of educational models that introduced professional teaching and systematic educational standards alongside a period of interdenominational Protestant cooperation. Some of the origins of American public education were linked to religious revivals in the early nineteenth century, though many of the educational innovations would outlive their religious movement that catalyzed them. Komline's study brings attention to the under-explored relig...