When the Frontier Became Periphery: Images of US Frontier Education in the Early Progressive Era

In the complex array of phenomena connected with “frontier schooling”, we will deal here with the contradictions of the frontier and rural schooling myth, both in dismissive and celebrative terms, roughly from the 1890s to the 1910s. Frontier schooling and the one-room-school model, decades after the common school movement and going towards the Progressive Era, was considered bygone and peripheral, even in its nostalgic celebration, and for this reason, we consider the subject consistent with the theme “pedagogical peripheries”. In this article, the aim is to analyse how the frontier education model, its culture and narratives survived the passage from being hailed as the core experience of “Americanness” to being considered as a peripheral and backward situation, and how it influenced the very movement which aimed at going over it – the Progressive idea of professional schooling and the affirmation of urban education as the “One Best System”.