This book combines history with sociology to examines state-supported schools. A description of the pauper schools of the early 1800s shows how they became the foundation for the common schools that followed. The book focuses on the disciplinary and pedagogic practices that public schools utilized in their attempts to regulate and socialize immigrant and poor students. It shows how compulsory education sought to alleviate urban crime while assimilating the immigrants who flocked to the U.S. and explains how the militaristic schools of the late nineteenth century became more bureaucratic and set in their ways in spite of the new thinking in education represented by John Dewey. It also reveals how schools have functioned through specific forms of moral and social regulation to discipline, punish, and infantilize in the name of order, national identity, and cultural homogeneity. Contains a 29-item bibliography and an index. (GLR)