A
Liberal Dose
July
28, 2022
Troy
D. Smith
“A
very brief history of public education in America”
This week I want to talk a little more about public
education in general, and give you some historical context. Let’s say “American
history”, in the sense of the U.S., started in the early 1600s with the
establishment of English colonies in Jamestown, Virginia (1607) and Plymouth,
Massachusetts (1620). Looking at it that way, for the entire first half of
American history there was little to no public education at all. If you wanted
your child educated, you had three options: teach them yourself (which means
you had to be able to do that), hire a tutor, or pay to send them to a private
school. If you were poor, or even poor-ish, you lacked the resources for the
latter two options, and it is entirely possible that no one in your family
history had ever had the resources to equip them to get an education and “pass
it down.” In colonial America, and for the first half-century of the republic,
only upper middle-class and wealthy people had a good education. A large number
of poor people were illiterate; a surprising number, though, had what we would
today call a third-or-fourth grade education -but very few went beyond that,
unless (like Alexander Hamilton) there were wealthy people in their community
who saw their potential and helped pay for their education. The result was
predictable: only wealthy people had good educations, and only wealthy people
ran the country, from the local to the national level. Of the 55 delegates to
the Constitutional Convention in 1787, more than 50% had a college education;
in America overall, only 0.1% of citizens had one.
That situation meant that working class people were a
lot easier to fool, and a lot easier to control.
Many of the Founding Fathers wanted things to be
different. John Adams said: “The whole people must take upon themselves the
education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expenses of it.
There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not
founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the
people themselves.”
From Thomas Jefferson: “If a nation expects to be
ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never
will be.” He said to “educate and inform the whole mass of the people,” for
“They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.” How? By
establishing elementary schools, and taking from those schools students “of the
most promising genius, whose parents are too poor to give them further
education, to be carried at public expense through the college and university.”
He called such poor students a “mass of talents which lies buried in poverty in
every country.”
I could never have afforded an education on my own.
Without public K-12 schools, a public state university, and government grants
and loans, I would still be mopping floors instead of being a university
professor.
The first local public schools were established in
Boston in the 1600s. The first state-supported public schools were established
in Massachusetts in 1820, and made mandatory by 1852. Other northern states
followed suit.
Know when the first public schools opened in the
South? After the Civil War, during Reconstruction. The South has a long,
shameful history of reluctance to invest in education for EVERYONE. A cynic
might think that politicians and elites in the Southern past wanted to keep
voters from becoming too sophisticated, to make them easier to control. Maybe I
should have said “a realist.”
There was an antebellum exception: “The Five Civilized
Tribes” of the South. Tribal governments paid the tuition of all children, and
paid for the smartest ones to go to college. This is why Cherokees in the 1830s
had a higher literacy rate than their white Southern neighbors. This is NOT the same, by the way, as the system in place in the U.S. from the late 1800s to just a few short decades ago, when the U.S. government forced Native children into residential schools where an attempt was made to hammer their culture out of them- that is a story for a different day, probably soon.
But what does all this mean for today? Stay tuned.
--Troy D.
Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at
Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.
You can find all previous entries in this weekly column HERE
A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE
Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com
