As students across the country head back to school, it’s unlikely any of them feel the weight of a burgeoning democracy’s future on their shoulders. But a Farm-grown art exhibit is showing Americans of all ages just how much heavier the expectations of a maturing nation are than a backpack full of textbooks.

The exhibit, American ABC: Childhood in 19th-Century America, debuted last February at Stanford’s own Cantor Arts Center, a labor of love for American Art Curator Claire Perry. The show “graduated” from the Stanford campus last May and traveled to the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. for that gallery’s grand re-opening in July. Visitors to the D.C. museum for that month totaled over 140,000.

The exhibition takes Americans back to a school of art preoccupied with none other than school itself. More specifically, paintings by Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, George Catlin, Eastman Johnson and other famous 19th-century American artists tell of a country’s preoccupation with educating the future generation. Depictions of rural boys, young girls, rebellious youths and immigrant children demonstrate a struggle to define social ideals for different social strata.

Elizabeth Broun, director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, said that Perry’s clarity of organization makes the collection’s message clear. American ABC imbues the viewer with a sense of how and why these various categories of American children are subjected to disparate artistic treatments. Tease out the differences, she said, and “the future of the nation begins to fall into place.”

The Smithsonian American Art Museum strives to feature art that acts as a window into our nation’s history.

“This show helped me understand the difference between the generation that fought the Revolutionary War and the generation that had to build upon those ideals,” Broun continued.

Senior Gabe Recchia, who visited Cantor with his creative writing class, said the exhibit evokes comparisons between education in the 19th century and today.

“It made me reflect on the strong sense of history that comes with the American school system, and that’s really not something you think very much about anymore,” Recchia said.

In addition to paintings by numerous lauded American artists, the exhibit includes illustrated children’s books, like Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, Noah Webster’s Elementary Spelling Book, McGuffey’s readers and ABC primers. However, perhaps the most popular aspect of American ABC is its interactive school-room creation, “School’s In/School’s Out.”

Modeled after the 1873 Winslow Homer painting Country School, the meticulously fashioned room is a far cry from its two-dimensional inspiration and comes complete with various period actors playing historical figures. While at Stanford, Frederick Douglas, Mark Twain and Harriet Jacobs visited the schoolhouse.

The last figure, author of “Autobiography of a Slave Girl,” was played by Mary Hansen, an administrative associate in the School of Medicine. Hansen, who described her audience as a mixture of retired persons, tourists and schoolchildren, enjoyed being part of an exhibit not only presenting the facts of American history, “but also trying to give an appreciation of what it felt like to be a part of that time.”

Now at the Smithsonian, a strict country schoolmarm gives weekly lessons in the room.

According to Broun, the Smithsonian school-room has proven “enormously popular with families, parents and children who have loved the way the interactive educational components link them back to the artwork.”

Education is not only the subject of American ABC, but the purpose behind its cross-country travels.

“It is a way of disseminating our research elsewhere and making the projects accessible at places other than Stanford — all part of our educational mission” said Bernard Barryte, chief curator of the Cantor Arts Center. “Once we develop an exhibition and have a concept, we contact other institutes that we believe or hope will have an interest.”

The Smithsonian American Art Museum receives 120 or more such proposals each year, according to Broun, but can show only two or three.

Proposals are reviewed at numerous levels of administration, from the director to various curators, all of which weigh in with their opinion of the project.

“It is almost like American Idol,” Broun said, with the proposals “being voted in again and again.”

But Perry’s handling of Smithsonian exhibits at Cantor in the past, as well her impressive previous major exhibition, Pacific Arcadia, gave her a leg up among the administrators at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Broun admitted, “we were eager to hear about this project from the very beginning.”

American ABC will hit the road once more, ending its Washington D.C. run Oct. 1, and then traveling to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, where it will remain until January.