As a libertarian, I believe that the role of government is to protect individual rights. Hence, I do not believe that providing a public school system is a proper role of government. When I talk to people, e.g., my own mother who has taught in both private and public schools, about this issue, they often state that if the government did not manage schools, not everyone would get educated, especially the poor. Before public schools existed, they say, only the "elite class" could be educated. The establishment of a public school system, they say, provided educational opportunity for everyone and gave people born into poor situations an opportunity to succeed. I also here the argument that since parents may not be concerned with their children's welfare, the government should take the place of the parents.
In this essay, I will explore the history of public schools in the first half of 19th Century America. I will look at what kind of private schools existed at the time. How accessible were they? Who attended them? And what was taught there? I will also explore the motives of people who advocated a government run educational system, review what kind of system was established, and try to determine the effects of it on American life, e.g., on parental responsibility.
American public schooling began in the Massachusetts Bay colony under inspiration form John Calvin. Calvin ruled Geneva in the in the mid-1500's and established compulsory public schools in the city. By the start of the next century Holland, under Calvin's influence, had established compulsory public schools. Calvin, in the same vein of Martin Luther and Germany, sought compulsory schooling as a means to suppress dissent against the government.
The Massachusetts Bay government established public schools within five years of this law's passing, and by 1789, Massachusetts mandated state wide public schools. The state determined the curricula, certified teachers eligible to follow the curricula, and made it illegal for children not to go to school. The history of other New England Colonies, with the exception of Rhode Island, founded by heretics of Calvinism, parallels that of Massachusetts Bay (Rothbard, 13-14).
Who supported this public and compulsory schooling that provided "free" education to all who were members of a state? Today, egalitarians claim that public schooling provides equal opportunity to all. Some even say it is a basic right. Public school advocates of the late 18th century did not bother to sound compassionate. Prominent Federalist merchants and lawyers of Boston, a group called the "Essex Junto," were the most vocal supporters of public and compulsory schooling. The held themselves as the natural leaders of society, and through public schools, they thought, they could teach children that the merchant/lawyer class was in charge of society and that they should be obeyed.
One aspect of the Federalist view that fits into today's common thought is the collectivist notion of Boston merchant Jonathan Jackson. He saw society as "one large family," where the government was the father, and citizens must learn their proper place in it (Rothbard, 15). This idea is prominent today, as people look to the government as parents, i.e., "It Takes a Village." Like the father as a great provider, the government will provide people the solutions to their problems.
North Carolina's public school system was founded upon similar ideals of obedience to the government. In 1816, Douglas Murphey, the judge and financier of North Carolina's government-funded school system, wrote that in schools children would form habits of subordination and obedience. Since parents do not know how to instruct their own children, he writes, "[t]he state, in the warmth of her affection and solicitude for their welfare, must take charge of those children and place them in school where their minds can be enlightened and their hearts trained to virtue. (Rothbard, 16)"
According to Murray Rothbard, socialists Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen were among the most prominent sources of ideological support for compulsory public education in the 1830's. If anyone stood for "equality" in the most literal sense, it was Wright and Owen. They sought "national, rational, republican education, free for all and at the expense of all, conducted under the guardianship of the state, and for the honor, the happiness, the virtue, the salvation of the state." The school would provide for the children at all times, and the students would dress in "simple clothing," to ensure that they can enter the adult world as equals.
Owen and Wright are true to their socialist roots, and newspapers of the time supported such ideas. These ideas, according to Rothbard, were also behind a well known report on education by a committee of Philadelphia workingmen. Rothbard does not report what committee this was, or what they publication was called. His references for Owen and Wright are The American Common School, by Lawrence Cremin, and Joseph Dorfman's The Economic Mind of American Civilization.
Another purpose in compulsory public education was to assimilate the growing immigrant population of the 19th Century into the culture of the United States. By 1852, children of immigrants comprised more than half of the students in Boston's primary schools. Churches were on the forefront of the assimilation crusade, as the handed out free copies of the Bible. Unitarian Joseph Tuckerman saw his mission as one of supplying poor urban immigrants with not only material needs, but those of means to build character. Yet, he opposed state interventions aimed at promoting moral reformation. He was convinced that "all reforms based on legal coercion were bound to entail greater evils that they were supposed to remedy (Glenn., 74-84)."
Some things never change. People did not see the impracticality of coercion in the 1830's anymore than they do today. Among these social engineers was James Carter. Reshaping immigrants into Americans required a total government monopoly on education.
"The ignorant must be allured to learn, by every motive which can be offered to them. And if they will not thus be allured, they must be taken by the strong arm of government and brought out, willing or unwilling, and made to learn, at last, enough to make them peaceable and good citizens."Carter, writing this in 1826, echoed Noah Webster's ideas of the early republic. Historian Charles Leslie Glenn, Jr. concludes that "[t]he objective of this state-controlled system of popular education had little to do with economic or egalitarian goals; it was to shape future citizens to a common pattern. (76)"
Murray Rothbard (1978) paints a more grim picture of public education's role in a country's cultural identity:
"One of the most common uses of compulsory public schooling has been to oppress and cripple national ethnic and linguistic minorities or colonized peoples-to force them to abandon their own language and culture on behalf of the language and culture of the ruling groups."Rothbard cites economist Ludwig von Misis, who notes the importance of the language chosen for a state's public education. The language will eventually determine the nationality of the area, as despite the diversity of the parent population, public education creates a homogeneous younger generation. School reform in 19th century America, according to Rothbard, was largely fueled by "the desire of the Anglo-Saxon majority to tame, channel, and restructure the immigrants, and in particular to smash the parochial school system of the Catholics." If in parochial school students are children of Jesus, then in public school they are taught to be children of the State.
Horace Mann was instrumental in the establishment of the paternalistic state we have today. Ten years after being elected to the Massachusetts legislator in 1827, he became secretary of the Board of Education he helped create. He saw children as malleable who "can most surely be trained in to a noble citizen ready to contend for the right and to die for the right." Defending the common school as "the nursery of piety," Mann asked where, if not in the Common School could children receive religious instruction, as "[t]hey hear it not from the lips of an ignorant and vicious parent"?
In 1827, the Secretary of the Board of Education, not just an average Joe, referred to parents as ignorant, vicious, and since they were "cast iron" adults, they would always be that way. Could Mann be making a self-fulfilling prophesy?
According to Glenn, the 19th century common school was so significant because "absent a national church, a monarchy, an external threat, there seemed little to hold the new nation together." People saw educational reform as "the reform from which all other reforms would flow." Horace Mann thought children to be as malleable as wax, and hence with "proper" training, the schools can alleviate crime and social divisions (Glenn, 84-5).
The common idea for the support of compulsory public education is the modern form of tribalism, i.e., nationalism. As Glenn wrote, there was no justification for the nation (the United States). Its legitimacy lay in the people's believing it to be so, and public schools were seen as a means to that end: to stifle dissent against those who could levy taxes. The ideas of the Declaration of Independence, that people have a right to pursue their own happiness, are inconsistent with those behind the establishment of public schools. The schools were established and used to save the children from allegedly stupid parents who would never raise their children the way the reformers wanted them to. As politicians and humanitarians have always done, the 19th Century American educational reformers placed "the good of the nation" as their standard for moral action.
A typical 1990's argument is that "since the free-market will not provide an education to everyone at a low enough price and at a quality I am happy with, then the government should do it." I do not think the truth of the "since" assertion necessitates the truth of the "then" assertion. Nonetheless, I find it valuable to investigate whether the statement about the free-market is true. One step to the answer is to investigate the state of education before the government stepped in.
Spring (1994) reports that "by 1689 Virginia had 6 reading and writing schools while Massachusetts had 23." He attributes this difference to the purposes of the colony's founders. Since Massachusetts Bay was founded on a religious basis, its schools were, as Spring euphemistically puts it, "a means of sustaining a well-ordered religious common wealth." Virginia was bound more by economics than religion, as Britain based companies invested in it. Spring implies the difference in what unified a state can explain the abundance of schools.
In the late 17th century, a variety of private schools were prevailed in what would become New York City. A "broad range of subjects, including the practical arts," were offered at these schools. The schools' diversity reflected that of its inhabitants, i.e., those of different ethnic and religious backgrounds. The diversity offered by market based school system made large conflicts over school curricula unnecessary (Spring, 15). Today's political conflicts over school curricula are nothing new. They germinated in the 1800's with the growth of public education.
People founded private schools in New York in an attempt to solve problems of crime and poverty. Spring notes that this early reform movement marks the first time education was looked at as such a panacea, and that people still view it as such today. People looked at these "charity schools" as a replacement of a weak family structure and as a means to decimate criminal associations. The reformers wanted to inculcate the correct moral values into children, as their parents had allegedly failed to do, that would prevent a child from living a life of crime. Since this was a private system, and it was legal for parents not to send their children to a charity school, these "unfit" parents still had to choose to contact out their own child's moral upbringing.
From my stand point, it appears inevitable that such charity schools would become public. The motives of the charity schools was not to provide a service its customers (parents) value, it was to replace parents on the grounds that they were unfit to do the job. I can think of no institution, save the Catholic Church, that can attract people be belittling them. The reformers soon realized that they could not persuade parents to let to others raise their own children. The strong arm of the law was the noble alternative.
The seeds of a public school system lie in the 1805 petition for the incorporation of the New York Free School Society. The petition declares that parents are either indifferent to their children's best interests, or are unable to pay for proper education. The petitioners blamed lack of education for "ignorance and vice, and all those manifold evils resulting from every species of immorality." By 1840 the government took over the New York Free School Society, out of which the New York public school system grew (Spring, 53).
Spring writes that the New York charity schools provided children with a "common system of education." I am not clear on what this means, but what ever this education consisted of, the students of diverse socio-economic backgrounds received it. Children of rich and poor parents attended these schools, which often adjusted tuition according to parental income. Spring cites Carl Kaestle's Evolution if an Urban School System.. In addition to what we would now call financial aid, Kaestle reported little difference in the percentage of children attending school in the pre-common school era of the 1790's and in the mid 19th century when parents could send their children to "free" public schools. The 19th century common school reformers, as I reported above, wanted to eliminate social class issues in education. Kaestle establishes that the people had solved this "problem" without coercive government intervention (Spring, 55).
Spring reports the "attempts in the 1790s to systematize private schools in New York City failed and that these schools were unable to accommodate the influx of immigrants." This resulted in the school's being restricted to the wealthy (Spring, 55). I do not know if Spring means that the government did the systematizing.
"As late as October 1989, the Association of California School Administrators, operating from a viewpoint of [traditional] thinking, announced, 'The purpose of the school system is not to provide students with an education.' Individual education is 'a means to the true end of education, which is to create a viable social order.' Here the leaders of one of the largest school systems in the world have declared that students can enter the twenty-first century supported by schools that do not have education as their central purpose?"
So things have not changed much. It would be a fallacy to cite the motives of the first educational reformers as a refutation to the argument that the market can not provide adequate education by modern egalitarian standards. Yet, New York's history showed that the formation of public schools, rather than accommodating the poor immigrants, made education available only to the rich.
The most important contribution of this study is not a history of public and private institutions, but the history of ideas. What effects to people's ideas have on a society? Specifically for this context, what effect does the idea that "parents are unfit to raise their own children" have on a society - when it is government officials, people of authority, who are saying this?
To answer this question, consider the effects of a parent's habitually saying to a child the he was "not responsible enough," or "too careless" to achieve a goal. Psychologists warn parents to be careful about what they say to children, because they may listen to them. Children do not want to make their parents wrong, so they often become what their parents tell them they are.
Jonathan Jackson saw the state as a family. If so, who are the parents, and who are the children, and the children's children? If the purpose of schools is to raise children, why should parents be responsible to raise their own? Further, the belief that compulsory schooling is necessary because parents are irresponsible perpetuates itself. Under compulsory schooling, people spend the first 18 years of their lives going to school because it is illegal for them not to do so. The biggest choices they, or their parents, have to make is what to eat for lunch everyday .
High school graduates, or today, college graduates, enter the "real world" and realize that the government is not there to make choices for them anymore. An American leaving an academia he did not choose to enter is in the same position Russians were when the Soviet Union collapsed: "What do I do now?" they ask, as if the choice is not fundamentally theirs. Some of these irresponsible people become parents.
the author, by comparing the several states with histories of compulsory schooling with other states which had it only recently adopted, shows that in per capita terms the former have six times the number of criminals, twice the number of paupers, twice the number of insane, and four times the number of suicides. He further shows, through an examination of ten different states, that criminality rose as expenditure on state-schooling increased.Montgomery used United States Census reports. The criminality study compared crime in 1850 to crime in 1880.