It wasn’t for the benefit of the children, but the state
Why Government Schooling Came to America.
In the first two essays in this series on the relationship between government and the education of children (“How the Redneck Intellectual Discovered Educational Freedom—and How You Can, Too” and “The New Abolitionism: A Manifesto for a Movement”), I established, first, how and why the principle of “Separation of School and State” is both a logical and moral necessity grounded in the rights of nature, and then I demonstrated how and why America’s government schools should be abolished as logical and moral necessities.
In this essay, I’d like to drill down more deeply into the nature and purposes of government schooling in order to further demonstrate how and why a system of government-run education is anathema to the tradition of American freedom and therefore immoral. Let me be clear (if I haven’t been so already): I regard the government school system to be the single worst and most destructive institution in America. It cannot be “reformed,” and it cannot be tolerated. Period. It must, therefore, be abolished.
To that end, it is important to understand how and why government schooling came to the United States in the first place. Most Americans today assume that the “public” school system is as American as apple pie, that it has been around since the first foundings of Britain’s North American colonies in the seventeenth century or at least since the founding of the United States of American in 1788. But this is not true.
In the longue durée of American history from the early seventeenth century to the present, the government school system is actually a relatively recent phenomenon. A system of nation-wide government schools was not fully implemented in this country until about 100 years ago.
Let’s begin with a brief journey through the early history of American education to see when, why, and how the American people gave up their unalienable right to educate their children and turned it over to government officials.
Early America’s System of Education
For almost 250 years, the education of children, first in England’s North American colonies and then in the United States of America up until the Civil War, was almost an entirely private affair. Parents had the freedom to choose the education, ideas, and values that they wanted for their children. The government was not involved in educating children. This is the great forgotten story of American history.
During this quarter millennium, children were typically educated in one of four ways. They were either homeschooled or they attended one of three different kinds of schools: 1) tuition-charging private schools; 2) charitable or “free” private schools established by philanthropists and religious societies; or 3) semi-public “district” schools (later known in the nineteenth century as “common schools”).
The so-called “district” schools of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries are held up today by proponents of government schooling to suggest that government-run education has existed in America since the seventeenth century. But this is not true.
Existing mostly in New England, these “district” schools were what we might call “neighborhood” schools that were built and monitored by the parents of the children who attended them, and they were financed by a combination of tuition charges, local taxes, and mutual-aid societies. These neighborhood schools were controlled entirely by parents, who chose and supplied the textbooks and who hired and fired teachers. Though partially funded by local taxes, these neighborhood schools were not government schools in any meaningful way. The government did not determine who was hired, nor did it determine what was taught.
In all instances, schooling in America until the twentieth century was highly decentralized. Many if not most of the tuition-charging or “free” schools, particularly those in more populous areas, were run by individual men or women who simply hung out a shingle, advertised for students, and ran a school out of their home. Some of these schools taught only the Three R’s, while others offered classical curricula where students were taught classical Greek and Latin. It was in one of these “home” schools that John Adams first learned the ancient languages.
This decentralized, parent-driven form of schooling was how the generation of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison was educated. Not a single one of America’s founding fathers attended a government school. The very idea is and was anathema to a free society.
It is therefore imperative that we understand why government schools were ever established in the United States.
One thing is certain: America’s system of government schooling was not established because the extant system of private schooling was failing to educate America’s children. Quite the opposite.
American schooling in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was highly democratic, in the sense that virtually all children received some kind or degree of education. They did so because that’s what their parents wanted for them, thereby dispelling the calumny that parents won’t do whatever it takes to make sure their children are educated in a free-market system of education or schooling. In economic terms, the supply met the demand.
Not surprisingly, Americans educated their children to a very high degree—indeed, to such a high degree that America had the highest literacy rates of any country in the world! European visitors to the United States were astonished by the levels of education achieved in the United States. In his National Education in the United States (1812) published forty years before the introduction of government schooling, Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours expressed his astonishment at the extraordinary literacy rate he saw amongst ordinary Americans.
Likewise, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America that the Americans were “the most enlightened people on earth.” Even on the frontier where schools and libraries were in short supply, Tocqueville noted that one-room cabins hidden deep in the woods typically contained a copy of the Bible and multiple newspapers.
All of this was achieved without government schools.
And then, everything changed.
Government Schooling Comes to America
America’s experiment with universal compulsory education (i.e., government schooling), which began in earnest in the years immediately before the Civil War and picked up steam in the postbellum period, was created with different purposes in mind than just teaching children the Three R’s and a body of historical, moral, and literary knowledge to help them live productive, self-governing lives.
The early proponents of government schooling in nineteenth-century America imagined new and different goals for educating children. The advocates for forced schooling took the highly authoritarian, nineteenth-century Prussian model as their beau idéal.
The leading proponent of government schooling in Prussia and the man from whom the Americans learned the most was the philosopher Johann Fichte (1762-1814), who, in his Addresses to the German Nation (1807), called for “a total change of the existing system of education” in order to preserve “the existence of the German nation.” The goal of this new education system was to “mould the Germans into a corporate body, which shall be stimulated and animated in all its individual members by the same interest.” This new national system of education, Fichte argued, must apply “to every German without exception” and every child must be taken from parents and “separated altogether from the community.” Fichte recommended that the German schools “must fashion [the student], and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than you wish him to will,” so that the pupil might go “forth at the proper time as a fixed and unchangeable machine.” Children should therefore be taught “a love of order” and the “system of government must be arranged in such a way that the individual must . . . work and act, for the sake of the community.”
The highest purpose of Prussian education was summed up by one of its later proponents, Franz de Hovre:
The prime fundamental of German education is that it is based on a national principle. Kulture is the great capital of the German nation. . . . A fundamental feature of German education; Education to the State, Education for the State, Education by the State. The Volkschule is a direct result of a national principle aimed at the national unity. The State is the supreme end in view.
This kind of education was virtually unknown to Americans until the nineteenth century, and it was anathema to everything that the founders’ liberalism stood for.
We know America’s earliest proponents of government schooling were enamored with the Prussian model because they were explicit in saying so. Some of them went to Germany to see exactly what the Germans were doing, and they became advocates of Prussian schooling when they returned to America.
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