Dissertation Proposal Announcement Ph.D. in Education Program: Max Jacobs “Carceral Education: The Educationalization of Crime in Philadelphia, 1820-1860”

This study centers around the following questions: Why did reformers use schooling as a way to deal with and solve the problem of crime? Who was schooled in tax-funded institutions like public schools, houses of refuge, and the penitentiary? What was the relationship between educational and penal reform and administration? In what ways did the rhetoric of reformers differ from the institutional actions of administrators and teachers? How, if at all, did the educationalization of crime in antebellum Philadelphia function as a racial project? Philadelphia’s rich ethnic, racial, and economic diversity, which led to the creation of novel social control and welfare institutions, presents an exceptional case study to explore the relationship between educational and penal reform. While studies abound on Philadelphia’s educational and penal history, few place both in one analytical frame. I explore the relationship between educational and penological theory and practice by examining reformers and their rhetoric as well as institutional actors and their documented actions. This dissertation expands the social control thesis to better account for how schooling promotes white advantage. An integrated study, which considers class, race, gender, and religion in relation to schooling, adds a new way of seeing the history of educational and penal reform and practice in antebellum Philadelphia while reframing conventional understandings of the Common School Era.