Today we’re going to delve a little bit into the back story of how we got from 1635 Boston, when the first public school, known as the Boston Latin School, which was designed for boys who came from socioeconomically advantaged families was established, to 2022, when public schooling is a compulsory institution serving all children ages 6-16 across the land.
Before I begin with what I think are valid criticisms of our current public school system, I want to emphasize that I am not a person who advocates for abolishing it. On the contrary, I believe very strongly in the idea that a well-informed populace is critical for the success of a democratic republic, such as ours. But there’s the rub, right? The children who are exiting the vast majority of our public schools are, in fact, not well-informed. On much of anything, really, except perhaps what the educational testing system conglomerate dictates, which is in turn what’s in the school’s texts and on the mandated examinations that each student must take.
This begs the question. What are kids learning and why? What, or who, is behind what the children are being taught? Does this still serve the best interests of the American Republic?
A Brief History
In the very early days of the American colonies, Puritan children were taught the basics of reading and math, mostly so they were able to read the Bible and be arbiters of the gospel in the new world, but also to assist their families in whatever forms of commerce they developed based on their home industries. I’d like to pause here and ask you to please pay close attention to that word, commerce. It, in conjunction with the word economics, quickly became the touchstone for all that follows in American education, up to the present time.
Because the settlers in Boston were overwhelmingly of English descent, the schools in early America were necessarily designed after the English model, which was, in turn, meant to educate the most socioeconomically advantaged members of that society. This meant white males with the occasional white female thrown in the mix for what seem to be arbitrary reasons.
This model continued for decades, until a group of concerned citizens that we now think of as progressives in the early 19th century decided that they had had enough and wanted some change. Following in the footsteps of Thomas Jefferson who had advocated for a non-religiously based, doctrine free mode of learning, they began to work for reform in the classrooms.
Now they wanted to educate more children for longer and for different reasons. They wanted the focus on religious doctrine removed. Recognizing that not everyone was going to stay on the homestead and farm and that the young nation required more citizens to be involved in the skills of a rapidly growing and changing society, they began the arduous work of convincing the newly developing education system that it was necessary and, in fact patriotic, to change what, and how students were learning. It became clear to even those outside the system, that the needs of the growing and diverse populace of immigrants were becoming correspondingly complex. Thus, school reforms began in the late 1700 and early 1800s and continue to this day.
But those early reforms were for what exactly? Well, hindsight being what it is, we now understand that the kinds of reforms that progressives were fighting for had been thwarted and the ones they were going to actually get were not really to support the wellbeing of family and community or to expand the knowledge base of a growing colonies youth, but were, in fact, to create bodies for a prescribed economic order that was quickly being determined by people in the highest levels of American business, government and private associations. The progressives who had worked so hard for reforms had only gotten so far before running smack into the tier of society who cared most about making money.
Progressive Principles Take Hold
To be fair, the best of these people, those with the least sinister motives, were tired of the surprises of history and were looking to create a more manageable economy and society. They really did want to create a society that was defined by doing what created the most happiness for the most people; this was Utilitarianism. Fewer destitute people seeking assistance from their impoverished, young government would be of benefit to everyone in the nation. They assumed that educating a working class, individuals who could fulfill the needs of industry, was the way to achieve that goal. To some extent, they were right, but it’s not the whole picture.
As the population grew more diverse in the 1890s, those early progressive principles of education began to take hold. In theory, this approach was meant to teach critical thinking skills to an engaged and informed citizenry who would then move on to be civically involved adults. In addition, child-centered curricula were devised to address the artistic, imaginative and creative aspects of the students. Traditional academic learning combined with vocational training would produce citizens better prepared to understand and participate in community life. This all sounds great. What happened next, predictably, laid the groundwork for the current situation we find ourselves in.
People who had their eye on the profit and loss balance sheets of the new American economy took it upon themselves to determine, for the entire nation, that trained and certified “experts” were the only ones who were capable of defining happiness for a people and, naturally, those experts were plucked from those with the largest fortunes, because those families were able to afford to send their sons to places like Boston Latin School and Harvard University where they received that training. Thus, the Meritocracy was born. We live under its shadow to this day.
To say that there was a conspiracy among what some refer to as the elite classes, to pluck likely candidates from the underclasses and bring them up into their rarefied air as a means of refreshing their own, may sound like a crackpot conspiracy, but it does have some historical support in the writings of Sir Henry James Sumner Maine book, Popular Government in which he details his ideas that civilization can only exist through a forceful thwarting of the public will.
The Ruling Class, a book by Italian intellectual, Oaetano Mosca, reveals that the secret to keeping the elites in power is to selectively “feed on the brains and courage of the lesser classes”. Yep. He really said it.
This sounds eerily similar to the early Anglo-Saxon method of plucking the best looking children from their homes and villages during their raids; they had no sentimentality about children whatsoever, they were simply a commodity to keep their own societies going. Mosca outlines a format for the education of the masses that follow, unquestioningly, to this day.
- Constant surveillance of the children.
- Schools should become a behavioral training ground; intellectual training should not be encouraged.
- Control could only be maintained with strict hierarchies.
- External, public rewards and punishments should be offered.
It’s horrific to consider that we might be living under the centuries old plan of a small, very determined group of people whose sole goal was to maintain their power structure and eliminate the ideology of freedom and democracy, but I believe that we must consider this fact very carefully as we explore what to do about our current crisis in education.
As more entrepreneurs and businessmen gained vast amounts of wealth from their successful forays into the world of commerce, a new income tax code attached to the federal reserve system came into being. At this time the Rockefellers, Carnegies and Edisons began paying more toward the public education system through their taxes than the government was, and their influence was felt from the top right down to the classroom. The influence of money and power has been the nemesis of education reform, and indeed, societal reforms since the founding of this nation. It has enabled a small, in many cases generationally wealthy, group of people to determine the what, when, where and why of what takes place in our schools. What we see happening in our schools today is no different from what we see happening in our government. These are important institutions which have been sold to the highest bidder. I believe that to create a new model for all children, we have to tear down the old one and rebuild. This will be painful and difficult, but I sincerely think we can finish what the progressives of the early 1800s set out to do; create an educational system that serves the needs of children, families and the country.
In my next article I’ll explore the influence of 20th century reformists on the system and what the consequences of those reforms are for schools today.
– Heidi Liscomb