Reimagining Public Education: Insights From the Catholic Institution's "Publicness" in Mid-19th-Century New Orleans

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: Reimagining Public Education: Critical Geographies and Border Pedagogies

Abstract

In New Orleans, public schools started in 1841, but were open only to white children. It was not until 1848 when the Catholic Institution was founded that the free people of color seized an opportunity to educate the children of their own race, and the free-colored community considered the school a public one. This paper considers the meaning of publicness attached to the Institution as a way to reimagine public education. The author examines the Institution’s publicness in relation to: 1) the “vernacular” discourse of equality existent in the free-colored community, guided by Habermas’s notion of the public sphere; 2) the theoretical underpinnings of Horace Mann’s common school movement, guided by Foucault’s notion of discipline.

Author

• Kaori Shimizu, Louisiana State University