Article 8: Civic Learning Through County Fairs: Promoting the Useful and the Good in Nineteenth-Century Indiana

For most of the nineteenth century, county agricultural fairs had little to do with schools and schooling; nevertheless, they served as potent sources of learning. During the post-Civil War generation, most of the learning county agricultural fairs generated had little to do with livestock, crops, and cultivation; nevertheless, farmers and others learned a great deal about agriculture and its place in the rural community. These two propositions form the thrust of this paper.

The first proposition addresses methodological issues that are of longstanding interest to educational historians: What constitutes education— its aims, institutions, curricula, and outcomes—within historical contexts? And, why should educational historians consider their charge to be the terrain of education, as distinct from but encompassing schooling? The second proposition addresses the potential effects of historians’ expectations upon their inquiry. What propels historians to treat some institutions as educational and not others? How do the declared missions of institutions influence assessment of the learning generated by them? Addressing this issue, Bernard Bailyn pointed to the importance of the historian’s “capacity for surprise” when encountering “the dawning of ideas and the creation of forms” (Bailyn 1960, 10). Richard Storr warned of the dangers of a priori definitions and of the likelihood that hewing too closely to intentions might short-circuit the search for learning (Storr 1976). Following their leads, Donald Warren explored the methodological boundaries of educational history and invited others to consider experimenting with an inductive approach to historical inquiry (Warren 2005). This paper takes up Warren’s invitation.