Project Education Renovation

10: America's Schools - Kidnapped By The Collectivists at Birth

Number Ten in the History of American Education series describing how American education went over the edge of the cliff. When the history of American education is completed, other issues such as pedagogy, subject matter, who should be responsible for education, etc. will be put up for discussion.

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"Let us, then take the infant mind: let us seclude it from the temptations that corrupt its tender virtue...Who doubts the omnipotence of National Education? Let him read of Sparta...[l]et us learn of Lycurgus - of him who molded a nation's character to his will -let us learn of him the secret of government. Let us, like him, resolve the whole business of legislation into the bringing up of youth..." - Robert Dale Owen

So many of us are complaining about it; the nation's schools are the plaything of the Left. They have such a strong Leftist bias that half our population now see things from a collectivist point of view. We hear about activist Leftist university students shouting down speakers invited by their classmates; we hear stories of college students having points taken off their work because they do not share their Leftists professors' attitudes; we hear about Leftist catechisms being taught in grade school; we hear about high-school students being sent to conferences on "social justice;" we read about schools where the teachers actively teach the "evils" of private ownership of property. We weary of Political Correctness, multiculturalism, diversity, and moral equivalency. It goes on and on and on.

A lot of parents today think that all this Leftist influence started in the sixties, when flower children and hippies attended Woodstock, and anarchists flooded our city streets.

A lot of parents today also think that our entire public school system has been in place since the founding.

Neither is true.

Horace Mann, having settled on his vision of a utopian society in the early 1800s, decided that he would bring his vision into reality by being certain that he and his followers could seize control of what children were taught from an early age. They did this by bringing education under government control, enabling them to compel attendance and prescribe curriculum.

Mann's Puritan New England ancestors had admired the government-controlled schools of Luther (although they despised most other things Lutheran), and imported it to the New World. Like Luther, the Puritans assumed that the schools would forever remain under the influence of the clergy, but like Luther, they were wrong. By the time of the American Revolution, the number of Puritan schools had diminished so drastically that the laws of compulsory attendance and prescribed currucula had fallen by the wayside. The Industrial Revolution, which was already well underway as the American Revolution began, had changed the composition of the population, bringing in many different beliefs who had educational requirements that exceeded those taught in the Puritan schools. Private schools - even the "charity" schools were run by private associations - blossomed, and as the Industrial  Revolution made literacy more valuable than ever, it became increasingly sought by their customers, the parents who sent their children to them.

The private schools were responsive to their customers' desires, and rapidly increased in number. Before Mann began his efforts to persuade the American people that only a government system could erase widespread ignorance, over 90% of school age children already atttended school.

By the time Mann arrived on the educational scene in 1837, he had rejected his ancestral Puritanism and adopted Unitarianism; his new belief system, heavily influenced by the Romantic Movement, formed the foundation of his utopian vision. He believed that human beings were "perfectable," and that this "perfection" included a shared belief system (his - a stripped down version of Protestant Christianity). Just as his Puritan ancestors had believed, Mann thought that a stable society could result only after the elimination of competing beliefs, and that a government-controlled compulsory educational system was the only means by which this process could take place. There, not only would education eliminate ignorance, and therefore poverty, and therefore crime, but it would instill what he regarded as the essential single belief system required for social stability.

Such was his confidence in his vision that he thought that once everyone had seen it, it would be freely adopted by all citizens, and forever thereafter teach the moral virtues he valued. But alas; other Protestant sects and the Catholics disagreed with him, and bickering soon began to tear the system apart. Lutherans, Episcopalians and Presbyterians had already begun to establish their own schools, and the Catholics weren't far behind. Mann's premiere goal of "Social stability" began to evaporate as parents were forced to submit their children to a compulsory system that taught beliefs and values in conflict with their own.

But that wasn't all; there was another player lurking in the background, and it was soon to hijack Mann's new-born government system. Just as Luther had earlier lost his government-controlled Lutheran system to the Prussian nationalists, Mann was about to lose his government-controlled Protestant system to the socialists.

Of course, the term "socialist" had not yet been invented, but the concept which was soon to be given that name had been in place for a long time before Mann went to all the work of creating a government educational system that would be hijacked by it.

Robert Owen, born in Wales in 1791, became wealthy as the manager of a spinning mill operation in rural New Lanark, Scotland. Like his contemporary Horace Mann in the United States, he also had a vision of a Utopia, and like Mann, he believed that the sole source of character was the environment. He and some business partners bought the mill, and Owen began to work to prove his point by creating improved conditions in the community of employees that had grown up around the the mill.   

He had a lot of material to work with, since the availability of jobs created by the mill had enticed a large number of poorly educated people, eager for work, converged in the area. The mill had been established near a waterfall that was its power source, and the location had been quite isolated until the it was established. Little in the way of life's enjoyments were available at the time. Not too surprisingly, within about 8 years of Owen's intense efforts to improve conditions, a general improvement in the quality of life in the community around the mill was seen.

However, like Mann, who would later leave his law practice and political work because he was frustrated at the lack of response of adults to his ideas, Owen was also frustrated that the adults of the New Lanark Mill hadn't responded better to his efforts. Just as Mann (and Luther before him) would conclude that he needed to work with children in order for his ideas to take hold, so Owen decided that he needed to establish schools to teach his views to young children.

Mann had referred to children as "wax," and Owen referred to children as "...passive and wonderfully contrived compounds, which...may be formed collectively to have any human character...they partake of that plastic quality...which...may be be ultimately molded..."

By 1813, Owen had worked out his design for a school, and wrote about it as "A New View of Society, or Essays on the Formation of the Human Character." He made sure that it was sent around to all the most influential people of the day, and since the Prussian ambassador was one of them, he even credited himself with inspiring the latest iteration of the Prussian system in 1819. It was certainly consistent with the Prussian view, holding that "...the best governed state will be that which shall possess the best national system of education...education may be formed to become the most ...easy, effectual, and economical instrument of government that can be devised."  The King of Prussia wrote to him, thanking him for the copy of his work.

Owen's own school opened in 1816, and was called the "Institution for the Formation of Character." Like Mann, Owen wanted his school to be a model for the entire world to copy.

It wasn't just the Prussians who were impressed; Owen's collection of essays was also sent to the governors of every state in the United States and to the Boston Unitarians soon after its publication. The Unitarians found Owen's concept that children could be molded through education very appealing, and in complete agreement with their own thinking.

In 1825, just 12 years before Mann was appointed as head of the Massachusetts Board of Education, Robert Owen came to the United States to establish an experimental socialist colony in New Harmony, Indiana. The United States was just 49 years old, and Karl Marx was just 7 years old, when the first American socialist community was formed, ahead even of Russia's "noble experiment" a hundred years later.

The community was established on property bought by Owen in Harmonie, Indiana, and was renamed "New Harmony." It came with an existing village, and had its own newspaper, the New Harmony Gazette, and in its first issue, it proudly proclaimed "...we purpose developing more fully the principles of the Social System...that individuality detracts largely from the sum of human happiness..."

While the term "socialist" hadn't yet been devised, Owen described in the New Harmony Gazette just what he meant by "social system:"

"...I come to this country to introduce an entire new state of society...which shall gradually unite all interests into one...[U]ntil the individual system shall be entirely abandoned, it will be useless to expect any...improvement in the condition of the human race; for this system ever has been, and must ever remain, directly opposed to universal charity, benevolence and kindness...These...can be obtained only under a social system...until now, hidden from man...[N]o man has had any will, or power, or control in creating himself... He is a being, then, whose individual...nature...or character, have been formed for him.  He cannot therefore become a proper subject for praise or blame, nor for artificial reward or punishment...he cannot therefore become a[n]...object for anger or displeasure of any kind... But to change from the individual to the social system; from single families with separate interests, to communities of many families with one interest, cannot be accomplished at once...nor can it be effected...except by those who have been long acquainted with each other, and whose habits, condition, and sentiments are similar...it becomes necessary...to enable all parties...to change their individual, selfish habits, and to acquire the superior habits requisite to a social state..."

Later the same year, in the spring of 1825, Owen returned to Britain to manage his business there. While he was gone, New Harmony became the destination of many "progressive thinkers" from the United States and Europe. Owen soon returned to the United States with his sons Robert Dale and William, and arrived back in New Harmony in Janurary of 1826.

It was now that Owen established a fully communist community (a "community of common property") in New Harmony. Despite the enthusiasm with which its new constitution was received, it failed less than a year later. Robert Dale Owen wrote in his autobiography, "...a little more than a year after the Community experiment commenced, came official acknowledgment of its failure...Our opinion is that Robert Owen ascribed too little influence to the early anti-social circumstances that had surrounded many of the quickly collected inhabitants of New Harmony before their arrival there."

Robert Dale Owen's conclusion was that education had to precede and lead to the implementation of a communist social system. Like Mann, he was convinced that unless educated from the earliest years, people were "too selfish, too uncooperative, too incorrigible" to accept a communist society. From the time of the failure of New Harmony, it became obvious to Owen, his sons, and his followers that a national system of government controlled education was essential to the successful creation of a communist society, and it was to that end that they worked tirelessly.

So, it wasn't in the 1960s that the Left got its tentacles into the schools of the United States and the minds of our children; it was over a hundred years earlier, at the very birth of the system, in the 1830s-1850s.

Collectivism in all its forms was only able to establish itself in the nation's schools from K-12 because of it had been made vulnerable by coming under the control of the government; there would have been no way for the socialists to have gained entrance into the system had they had to each and every private school to persuade all the parents, each of the staff, the entire administration, and all the students individually to adopt their utopian vision.

But how did they manage to infuse the newly established government-controlled educational system of Horace Mann with their Leftist ideas?  After all, the early government of the United States wasn't socialist; what was it that allowed the Left to gain such enormous influence in virtually every government-run school in the entire country? 

9: Mann's Impossible Dream - "Abortion Inevitable"

Number Nine in the History of American Education series describing how American education went over the edge of the cliff. When the history of American education is completed, other issues such as pedagogy, subject matter, who should be responsible for education, etc. will be put up for discussion.

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"What if families could choose any school they wanted? What if there were no rules on what or how teachers taught? Would society be drawn together or blown apart? ... The answers have been right behind us all along." - Andrew Coulson, Market Education, The Unknown History

The medical term for the stage of a spontaneous abortion that has progressed beyond all hope of salvaging the fetus is "abortion inevitable."

"Abortion inevitable" accurately describes the outcome of Mann's attempt to unite the entire population of the United States in a utopian society of his own design. It was destined to fail even before his intensive P.R. machine got it off the ground. His dream that societal unity could be achieved based on the idea that all human beings could forever hold identical, unchanging views flew in the face of reality.

Mann's view was that people could not form a stable society and live side by side in peace if they did not share a single belief. His answer to the perceived problem of differences in points of view was his conviction that people could, and should be, "molded" through education to subscribe to his views; in order to believe that, he also had to believe that his views represented the final refinement of thought, that no further improvements or discoveries could possibly be made, and that people had virtually no capacity for independent thinking; this being the case, everyone who went through his educational system would inevitably "see the light" in just the same way he, the ultimate elitist, did.

His dedication to the concept of a "perfect" society where, through education, the entire population would adopt his belief system and the result would be the end of ignorance, poverty, and crime, served to create conflicts that continue to grow to the present day, and put the very survival of our nation at risk .

Mann's goal was to re-create the basic Puritan concept of a "city on the hill;" it was only the details that would be different, consistent with his own changed point of view. It was ironic that he should disagree with the strict Calvinism of his own family and change to the Unitarianism of his adulthood, while at the same time apparently in denial that others might also desire to change.

While Mann rejected his own family religion in favor of one he considered to be better, he did not change his view of the tool by which he would create his Utopia: education, with compulsory attendance and a fixed curriculum, would be the means by which his vision would be carried out. Just as his own Puritan ancestors did, he envisioned a society without any deviation of thinking and no competion of ideas, thus creating a stable, conflict-free society.

It is also ironic that he did not consider that since the use of education for that purpose had failed then, it might also fail now. Just as Martin Luther had assumed that his vision of a tax-supported, compulsory, single-curriculum system of education would forever be under the control of the clergy, Horace Mann believed so ardently in his system that he was sure it would be universally and enthusiastically adopted and last forever. Such was not the case in Germany in Martin Luther's day, nor was it the case in America, in Horace Mann's day.

Mann's belief that his system represented the ultimate ideal was not different in principle from the contention of a Congressman who, not much later, thought that the Patent Office should be closed "because everything had already been invented."

Mann's special concern, again like that of his Puritan ancestors, was how to create a "moral society;" he understood the human requirement for a moral code, but he could not conceive of any valid moral code stemming from any source other than Christianity, and in particular, from his version of Christianity.

Mann, as a Unitarian, was considered a "liberal" Protestant; he hoped to infuse the educational system with a "non-sectarian" version of Protestant belief, stripped of all features that distinguished one sect from another.

There was an immediate problem with this concept; the liberal Protestants thought that a basic framework of Protestant Christian belief, cleaned up, as it were, of all such distinguishing features, could be taught without conflict and without violating the concept of separation of church and state. The orthodox Protestants did not.

Herein lay the first hint of the conflicts that were to wrack the public school system from its inception to the present day.

The orthodox Protestants were unwilling to have the details of their beliefs omitted, fearing that a non-sectarian Protestant curriculum would weaken the religious faith of their children. In 1848, the very year that Mann published the last of his famous "reports," a meeting was called by the General Association of Massachusetts, a coalition of various Protestant denominations, to try to work out the intramural Protestant differences, and a committee was formed to seek a solution.

The committee's conclusions were published in 1849, with the liberal Protestant view prevailing, but with an "escape clause" available for the orthodox Protestants. The liberal concept would be used "experimentally," and if it turned out that there were threats to the religious faith of the children of the orthodox factions, they could withdraw and implement "Plan B" - the establishment of a private system of their own, suffusing their curricula with their own views. So, for the time being, it seemed that the conflict had been resolved.

But then, there was the "Catholic Problem" yet to be solved.   

Mann and his orthodox colleagues alike saw in the immigration of millions of Catholics as a serious threat to their utopian goal of unity and stability under a common belief system.

Edward Beecher, the head of the General Association of Massachusetts, the very group of Protestants that had tried to resolve the differences between orthodox and liberal Protestants re: teaching religion in the schools, now had much bigger fish to fry. Beecher's father, Rev. Lyman Beecher of  Cincinnati, Ohio, had written a book in 1835 called A Plea for the West, which contained a stern warning to Protestants about a "Popish Conspiracy" that threatened a takeover of the entire Mississippi Valley. Calvin Stowe, one of Beecher's colleagues, called for the Protestants to put aside their differences in order to stem the "Roman tide," and unite to defend Protestant America against "Romish designs."

The conflict grew worse. There were anti-Catholic riots in New York, and in 1850, Catholic Bishop John Hughes (aka "Dagger John") responded with a statement that defended Catholics and simultaneously deliberately provoked the Protestants. The Bishop spoke of converting the entire United States to Catholicism - "...the people of the cities, the people of the country, the officers of the Navy and the Marines, commanders of the Army, and Legislatures, and Senate, the Cabinet, the President and all."

Two days later, the Protestants responded. Catholics were called "...irreligious idol worshippers, bent on the murder of all Protestants and the subjugation of all democracies..."

By 1855, the argument continued; the Rev. Edward Beecher published his rejoinder with the publication of yet another book, The Papal Conspiracy Exposed.

And so it went.

Then ante was upped; an entire political party was formed to answer the "Catholic Problem." It was called the "Know Nothing" party, and it grew in influence and political power prior to the Civil War, fueled largely by the conflicts that were already rife in the newborn government schools. In 1854, the Know Nothings won the governorship and both houses in Massachusetts.

The initial solution attempted by the Catholics to what they saw as a threat to the faith of their children was to try to work from the inside, by asking that Catholic teachers be allowed to teach Catholic children in the public school system; that was unacceptable, so the next move by the Catholics was to ask that funding be granted to support their own schools. That was met with a very frank rejection on the part of the newly elected Know Nothing legislature of Massachusetts, which had just adopted an amendment to the Massachusetts constitution barring any public money to be appropriated that would be used by any particular sect to maintain its own schools. In justifying the decision, a statement by one of the supporters of the amendment was "...I want all our children of our Catholic and Protestant population to be educated together in our public schools...if...the resolution has a strong leaning towards Catholics, and is intended to have special reference to them, I am not disposed to deny that it admits of such interpretation."

The "Bible War" even went so far as to include a "nunnery inspection law" passed by the Know Nothings; committees were formed to investigate certain unnamed practices that allegedly took place in Catholic institutions, including "white slavery" in the convents, where young nuns were said to be kept against their will by young priests. The investigations into these and a host of other complaints found nothing incriminating.   

The distress created in so many Protestant and Catholic parents by Mann's attempt to impose his utopian system on everyone in the population grew so intense that it very nearly destroyed his concept of a government school system, the very system he had specifically designed to unify the population, before it had become universally adopted. The Lutherans had already created their own parochial system, and similar plans by the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians were in progress.

The weakening of support by various religious groups was so serious that the idea of a government-run system was salvaged only by a last-minute compromise that effectively left the teaching of religion per se to private parties such as Sunday schools. The reading of the King James version of the Bible would continue, however.

This temporarily mollifed the Protestants, particularly those who had planned to establish their own parochial schools; the movement by Episcopalians and Presbyterians ceased for the time being, and would not re-emerge until nearly a hundred years later, when numerous and increasing conflicts over curriculum issues, both religious and academic, could no longer be ignored.

However, the compromise was not enough to satisfy Catholic parents; in addition to not being able to teach their religion as an integral part of the public school curriculum, they would be required to surrender many of their parental rights to the power of a branch of government that was deliberately trying to undermine their religious beliefs through classroom practices such as the insistence on the use of the "non-sectarian" King's James version of the Bible as the sole religious text in school.   

In addition to the differences that various religious groups had with a system that did not teach their own children their own views, the public, both Protestant and Catholic, almost uniformly objected to paying taxes to support such a conflicted system. The argument put forth by the educationists to salvage their idea was to assure the public that a government system of education was necessary both for civilization and the survival of the country.

It was too late for the Catholics; the problem was deemed insoluble from their point of view, and so they undertook to establish their own separate school system that survives to this day.

The division between Protestant and Catholic, with the Catholics characterizing the government schools as "Protestant schools," and abandoning them to establish a separate system of their own, was only the beginning of the end of Mann's Quixotic, unnecessary, and counterproductive dream of unifying the entire population under a single belief system.

But this was not the end; more - much more - was to come to further divide the population.

Perhaps you thought you had seen the last of Owens and Wright...

8: Crossing Education's Rubicon With Horace Mann

Number Eight in the History of American Education series describing how American education went over the edge of the cliff. When the history of American education is completed, other issues such as pedagogy, subject matter, who should be responsible for education, etc. will be put up for discussion.

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"Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed." - Joseph Stalin

When the legislature of the state of Massachusetts created its "exploratory committee" in the form of the Board of Education, education in the United States stood at a crossroad; would we continue with the private system that was the prevailing one at the time, or convert to a government-run system?

We were not without lessons in history to guide us. In the 4th and 5th centuries B.C.E., Sparta had a government controlled system, while Athens' system was private.

The goal of the Spartan government was to create a class of citizens totally devoted to warfare, and virtually nothing else. Marriages between suitable young people were arranged. At birth, the infant was examined by a government official who determined whether it would be allowed to live. At seven, boys were taken from their parents and sent to a school that was nothing short of a military barracks; there, he got minimal training in letters, and apparently, none in numbers. There was no literature, art, mathematics or science. An ancient Greek critic of the Spartan system said that the Spartans were the least literate people in all of Greece, perhaps in all the world.

The result was that while Sparta is briefly mentioned in the history books, it left no lasting legacy.

Athens, on the other hand, with its private system, was the birthplace of a revolution in human thinking, a paradigm shift that produced the Golden Age. Athens' legacy was to alter the entire history of mankind forever.

When the pagan Greek philosophers were expelled from Christian Constantinople in 529 C.E., they re-established schools in the still pagan lands of Persia and Mesopotamia. As had happened in Greece and the lands conquered by Alexander the Great, great centers of learning arose. By the time Islam was invented in the early 7th century and went on to conquer these territories, the conquerers found scholarly communities that had been thriving for nearly three hundred years.

Initially there was no resistence to intellectual activity by Islam; private Muslim schools were set up, and before long, the "Golden Age" of Muslim intellectual achievement was underway. That all ended soon after the Koran was written down in the 9th century.  Private education was replaced by mosque schools run by the fundamentalist religious authorities, and any threat to the status quo of Islam, such as innovation in thinking, was forbidden. Within about two hundred years, the Golden Age was over, with Islam descending into a Dark Age from which it has yet to emerge.

And so it went; wherever the freedom to think, to innovate, and to change to accommodate new discoveries and knowledge is limited by the efforts of any one group to force its views on others, competition in the realm of ideas, and human progress, slows and even stops.

Before the Declaration of Independence, the ability to read in the Colonies was already commonplace. Revolutionary hero Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" sold 100,000 copies in the Colonies, and since books were relatively expensive, these copies were passed around and read by many others.

By the time the Revolution began in 1776, the Industrial Revolution was under way, and competence in literacy and numeracy had become more valuable than ever. By the time the Constitution was drafted in 1787, literacy among free males was already at 65%, and in 1779, Noah Webster wrote his famouns "spelling book," which soon replaced the New England Primer as the textbook of choice. Webster wrote two other books in addition to the speller (a grammar and a reader), and by 1801, over one and a half million copies had been sold.

By 1831, with the Industrial Revolution running at speed, and just 6 years before the creation of the Massachusetts Board of Education, enrollment in school had increased significantly, especially among girls. Alexis de Tocqueville commented that it was rare to find anyone in New England who had not had at least an elementary education or who was not familiar with the history and Constitution of the United States. Even in his travels in the west, he remarked that even the modest homes of the pioneers usually had a few volumes of Shakespeare.

In 1837, the year Mann was appointed Secretary of the Massachusetts Board, Francis Grund made a comparison between the highly admired German schools of the time and the results obtained by the Americans' private system. The Americans were superior in reading and speaking, although they usually lacked the classical and philosophical curriculum typical of the German schools. For those Americans wishing such exposure, there were private academies in many cities and towns that specialized in these and other subjects to prepare students for classical University programs.

Between the private school system, including the charity system and a few "district" schools (which combined private with some public support such as land grants in the towns set aside for schools), the majority of children attended school without the need for the coercive mandatory attendance laws.

The private system was thriving by the time Mann was made secretary of the Massachusetts Board, with high attendance rates, high literacy rates, and high levels of parental satisfaction. The private schools offered a virtual banquet of choices for learning, and underwent rapid changes to keep up with the changing demands of the Industrial Revolution.

All of this notwithstanding, the new breed of "educationists" could not be deterred from their efforts to establish a government-controlled school system with mandatory attendance and a curriculum that advanced their vision.

And just what was this vision that they were so eager to promote, that stimulated them to displace the private system with a compulsory system?

To begin with, the first prominant educationists were from New England, and like their Puritan predecessors, had a utopian vision of a "good society" to which they were dedicated. Like Martin Luther before them, they saw education as a means to achieve their ends, their vision of a "good society," and like Luther, education was a tool. Through a universal mandatory system with a curriculum of their design, they could instill in entire generations support for their utopia.

All the educationists favored a compulsory government-run system - and they all favored the submission of the people to a ruling elite. In New England, a population already existed that had experienced an authoritarian compulsory system for nearly two centuries, so it was logical (and easy) for the educationists to begin their project there.

Shortly after the Revolution, in 1780, Massachusetts gave itself the authority to enforce compulsory attendance in its schools, and in 1789, it revamped its Colonial laws by enacting the first general school law in the country to mandate state-wide public schools. It also certified teachers and specified the content of the curriculum.

Supporters of the government schools argued, as Benjamin Rush had done, that the children were the property of the state. So said the Reverend Jeremy Belknap of New Hampsire in 1785, stating that children belonged to the state, not their parents.

The same views were expressed by a group of prominent merchants from Essex County in Massachusetts (hence called "Essexmen"). "...the people must be taught to confide in and reverence their rulers," said Steven Higginson. Johnathon Jackson wanted "habits of subordination" to a government of elite, in which he believed all political power should be lodged. He viewed society as a "family" in which the "father" should firmly rule, with each citizen "learning his proper place and keeping to it."  He was distressed by the fact that the privately owned press was dependent on its readership, and advocated instead a government owned newspaper that would be independent of its readers and inculcate the "proper" virtues in them.

The "Essexmen" also thought that government intrusion into the economy was a good idea, provided that they were administered by the elite, the "natural leaders" of society. They favored tariffs, subsidies, prohibitions, licenses and more.

In 1816, Judge Archibald Douglas Murphey carried the government school idea to North Carolina, saying "...habits of subordination and obedience [should] be formed...their parents know not how to instruct them..."

Similarly, soldier-politician Samuel Smith, another voice in support of forced education, said "It is the duty of a nation to superintend and even coerce the education of children...[H]igh considerations of expediency not only justify but dictate the establishment of a system which shall place under a control, independent of and superior to parental authority, the education of children." He even proposed that it be made a crime for parents to withhold their children from government schools.

Also in 1816, Scottish-born socialists Robert Dale Owen and Frances ("Fanny") Wright advocated a "state guardianship" system of education that bore an eerie resemblance to the system of ancient Sparta. Their program said that the government schools should have the children twenty-four hours a day, year round, from ages two to sixteen. They proposed "...that all children...should receive the same food; should be dressed in the same simple clothing; should experience the same kind tretment; should be taught...in the same branches; in a word, tht nothing savoring of inequality, nothing reminding them of the pride of riches or the contempt of poverty, should be suffered to enter these republican safeguards of a young nation of equals."

Owen and Wright, like the Communists who were to follow them, saw "equality" not as equality under the law or equality of opportunity, but rather, as equality of property and wealth, and they hoped that if this kind of school could be implemented, they would achieve these goals. Frances Wright in particular was active in the "Workingmen's Party," through which association she lobbied for that goal. In 1829, newspapers published the conclusions of a committee of the Workingmen's Party of Philadelphia which repeated much of the Owen/Wright plan.

The socialist idea of "equality" was very different from that of the Framers of the Constitution; as so aptly stated by Alexis de Tocqueville, "Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: "equality." But notice the difference; while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equaliy in restraint and servitude."

By the 1830s, in direct opposition to the central idea of the American Revolution, James G. Carter, a Massachusets congressman, wrote "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..." Carter argued that the government shhould seize the reigns of education for its own self-preservation.

Like the other educationists, Carter's motives were very clear, and it should not surprise anyone to learn that he was one of the state legislators who lobbied for the creation of the Massachusetts Board of Education, the very one that Mann served on as secretary, to address the "problem" of education.

It was no secret to the Board and other supporters of the idea of state-coerced education that the majority of the public was happy with things as they were, and that the vast majority of people received an education. To remedy the problem - the "problem" being lack of public support for government schooling - the educationists instituted a massive campaign to win them over, often riding rough-shod over the facts.

Given the lack of citizen support and the outright distrust held by citizens for government intervention into their lives, it should be no surprise that government schooling was seen as a potential threat to liberty and the takeover by the government of what was properly the responsibility of parents. Opponents of government schooling were considered opponents of progress and promoters of immorality and destitution.

Even the education subcommittee of the Massachusetts legislature criticized the educationists' proposal for a government school system, concluding "The establishment of the Board of Education seems to be the commencement of a system of centralization and monopoly of power in a few hands, contrary in every respect to the true spirit of our democratical institutions, and which, unless speedily checked, may lead to unlooked-for and dangerous results." The majority of the committee, which was bipartisan, was convinced that a government education bureaucracy would lose touch with the people it was supposed to serve, and could easily become a tool of state-control over the political and religious thought of citizens. This being so, they called for the abolition of the Board, a measure which was narrowly defeated. Mann's response to the supporters of the measure to abolish the Board was to call them "bigots and vandals."

The educationists' campaign to gather public support was relentless. It included the establishment of a network of organizations with the intent to dominate local boards of education, an unceasing letter-writing campaign, lectures, press releases, pamphleteering, meetings, and legislative lobbying. Hundreds of associations around the country were formed to serve as "clearing houses" and discussion centers to promote their ideas, and the educationists' theories and arguments were featured in many publications such as the American Journal of Education (later the American Annals of Education), the Common School Assistant (Orville J. Taylor, editor), the Connecticut Common School Journal (Henry Barnard, editor), the Common School Journal (Horace Mann, editor), Mann's own Annual Reports and, of course, through highly-placed influential people who held positions in the schools.

Henry Barnard became secretary of the Connecticut Board of Education; another supporter, Calvin Wiley, became head of the public schools in North Carolina; supporter Caleb Mills did the same in Indiana, while another supporter, Samuel Lewis, held that position in Ohio.

The educationists did not openly call for universal attendance in government schools; that would have alienated already suspicious citizens. However, they came close, and frequently stressed the Owen and Wright ideas of "equality and uniformity." J. Orville Tayler wrote in his Common School Assistant, "Let the common school be made fit to educate all, and let all send to it."

In addition to the barrage of efforts to persuade people to adopt government schooling, the educationists never lost an opportunity to criticize, fairly or not, the private schools; such criticisms appeared almost universally in educationist writings.

Under this unremitting assault, the public slowly began to favor the establishment of "free" government-run schools that promised a superior education for all, the elimination of poverty, and end to crime, and a peaceful, stable population unified through shared values and equality.

It didn't take long for it to become obvious that Mann and his educationists had promised more than they could deliver, and the attempt to force their utopian views on the entire population was soon to blow up in their faces.

But by that time, it was all but too late; the public had already followed Mann across the educational Rubicon.

7: Horace Mann

Number Seven in the History of American Education series describing how American education went over the edge of the cliff. When the history of American education is completed, other issues such as pedagogy, subject matter, who should be responsible for education, etc. will be put up for discussion.

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"Wherever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government."  - Thomas Jefferson

The period surrounding the American Revolution was overflowing with the growth of ideas, and the ones that influenced the direction being taken by education came from many directions.

The three events that were responsible for the greatest intellectual gains after the Dark Age were:

1) the rediscovery of Aristotle's works and reason in Spain, which kick-started the Renaissance with its shift from Other-Worldly concerns to This-Worldly issues,

2) Locke's discovery that humans were born tabula rasa with respect to knowledge and morality, and

3) the formulation of the concept of rights, and the fact that they are inborn, an integral part of human nature, which led to the understanding of the importance of the right to think and, in the United States, to the subordination of the power of government to the rights of the individual.

Now, in the 50 years immediately following the American Revolution, there was another event coming over the horizon: the transition from pre-industrial technology to the full-blown Industrial Revolution.

In New England, the school system was modeled after that of the Reformation. The Calvinist system didn't fare well for long, however. This was because of rapid increases in trade and commerce, the influx of people with different beliefs, and the general increase in religious tolerance, and a need for an expanded educational experience. In fact, by 1720, with the Revolution still 56 years in the future, the number of private schools in Massachusetts was far greater than the number Calvinist tax-supported public schools; indeed, many towns had no public schools at all. With the withering away of Puritan public schools, school laws were rarely enforced.

Even the venerable Harvard did not escape the trend away from a God-centered focus; the Calvinists were expelled from power in 1805, and Harvard was taken over by the Unitarians. This change had another profound impact on American education.

The Unitarians had their origins during the Reformation, but because of some significant differences from the rest of Christianity, they were regarded as heretics and not well tolerated, except in Transylvania and Poland, where, between 1548 and 1574, they established a separate church.

The Unitarians were very, very different from the Calvinists; although their roots lay in Christianity and Judaism, they did not accept the Trinity, and regarded Jesus as completely human, not divine. Instead of looking to doctrine or some external authority for moral guidance, they relied on reason, personal experience and individual conscience as the basis of for belief, and emphasized religious tolerance, the goodness of man, and the interconnectedness of all life. They believed that "revelation" is a continuous process, and that as a result, religious wisdom is ever changing, and tended to ally themselves then, as now, with liberal social and ethical causes.

Their history was a bumpy one, and in England, even the Toleration Act of 1689 did not protect their rights to believe as they wished. The first real Unitarian congregation in England was founded in 1774, just 2 years before the Declaration of Independence, and one of its leaders was Joseph Priestley. In 1813, just 8 years after taking control of Harvard in the United States, they were legally classed as "dissenters" in England, which gave them some protection.

In the United States, the Unitarians grew out of a disagreement within the (Calvinist) Congregationalist clergy. The liberal wing did not believe in Calvinist doctrines of unconditional predestination and original sin, believing instead in free will and a benevolent God who rewarded those who led righteous lives. They rejected the idea of an unfair God who favors some and condemns the rest. Above all, they believed in the perfectability of mankind - and it was through education that much of that perfection could be accomplished.

In 1780, an effort to reverse the decline in the public schools was attempted. Massachusetts reinstated the old school laws, the special status of Harvard,  and the continued interest of the state in public schooling was reconfirmed. Little came of this effort, however, and the private schools continued to thrive.

The people of Massachusetts were impressed by the educational systems in surrounding states, especially in New York. These schools were also private, offering a "common" education (a body of common knowledge) to all children, who were drawn from every socioeconomic group. Tuition was on a sliding scale, depending on the family's income.

For the children of families unable to pay anything at all, "charity schools" were provided by private associations. The "charity" movement began around 1790, and grew rapidly until the early 1800s. The most prominent of these private associations was the New York Free School Society, which was incorporated in 1805.

A system developed in 1798 by a young English Quaker, Joseph Lancaster, was so successful in London that word about it soon reached DeWitt Clinton of the New York Free School Society. Lancaster's system enabled the education of 1000 pupils to be directed by a single Master. Since he couldn't afford to hire teachers, he enlisted his brightest students to act as his assistants.

The Master sat at an elevated desk at the head of the class, where he had an unobstructed view of all the students. The student assistants, called "Monitors," sat in three rows directly in front of the Master's desk, and behind them were the pupils, gathered in three groups, with each group divided into two parts.

The Monitors received their instruction directly from the Master, and they in turn instructed the rest of the pupils. Groups of nine students at a time would present themselves to the Monitor, and when the lesson was over, they would return to the back of the room while the next group of nine went up to the Monitor. By rotating from Monitor to Monitor, nine lessons could be taught at any one time, and at no time were the pupils unoccupied.

When Clinton heard about the success of the method, he invited Lancaster to New York, and praised the system, saying "I contemplate the habits of order which it forms, the spirit of emulation which it excites, the rapid improvement which it produces, the purity of morals which it inculcates, when I behold the extraordinary union of the celerity of instruction and the economy of expense."

Lancaster's system was adopted for use in the charity schools, and in 1809, at the dedication of the new Free School Society building, Clinton said "I consider [the Lancasterean system] as creating a new era in education, as a blessing sent down from heaven to redeem the poor."

Lancaster was so successful that eventually, in 1812, he emigrated to the United States. In 1822, the state of Pennsylvania, founded by fellow Quaker William Penn, re-organized its Second School District and required the use of the Lancasterean method.

The system spread from Massachusetts and New York as far south as Georgia, and as far west as Detroit, Cincinnati, and Louisville. In 1838, Lancaster had just contracted with the New York Free School Society to introduce a method of teaching reading and spelling accurately to pupils in as little as 4-6 weeks, when while in New York inspecting one of his schools, he was run over by a horse and buggy and died. Without the careful attention of its creator, the Lancasterean method fell victim to people who were less concerned about quality than he had been, and the system faded away after about 40 years.

At around the same time, an event took place in Prussia that would also have a profound impact on American education.

After the Reformation, Luther's system of tax-supported compulsory education was adopted on a voluntary basis by many German municipalities. In 1763, Frederick the Great (1713-1786) took it much further. He believed that children belonged to the government, not to the family, and he wanted a system that would promote his view. He issued regulations requiring compulsory attendence of all children, training and payment of teachers, specifying of subject matter, and detailing how instruction should be carried out.

A year after Frederick died, a state ministry of education was established, taking the control of education out of the hands of the clergy and transferring it to the state, although religious instruction continued pretty much as before. Shortly after that, a General Civil Code made this statement: "Schools and universities are state institutions, charged with the instruction of youth in useful information and scientific knowledge. Such institutions may be founded only with the knowledge and consent of the State. All public schools and educational institutions are under the supervision of the State, and are at all times subject to its examination and inspection."

Prussia's was the first comprehensive national education plan.

Frederick's followers were corrupt and weak, and things went especially badly under Frederick William III (1770-1840). Prussia was totally unprepared for the war with Napolean, and suffered a humiliating defeat at his hands. After much soul-searching following the defeat, many reforms were instituted in Prussia that brought renewed vigor back to the nation. Part of the solution was seen in the potential for the state-controlled educational system to act as a tool for building and preserving loyalty to the state, and not simply as a means to teach loyalty to religion. To that end, education was seen by the government as deserving of a great deal more attention than it had received before.

In 1796, just 20 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed, and a mere 7 years after the ratification of the Constitution, and 9 years before the takeover of Harvard by the Unitarians, Horace Mann was born into a poor family in Franklin, Massachusetts. The family was a strict Calvinist one, in the tradition of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and Mann grew up listening to the harsh "hellfire and damnation" sermons of the Reverend Nathaneal Emmons.

When Mann was about 14, his 12-year-old brother skipped Sunday school to go swimming, and drowned. At the funeral, the Reverend Emmons made a mean-spirited object lesson of the boy's death, and Mann started down a path that eventually led him to reject the family religion in favor of Unitariansim.

Mann was educated in spurts of about 8-10 weeks each year. As soon as he was able to read, he began to borrow books from the library established by Ben Franklin.

It wasn't until 1816, at the age of 20, that the largely self-educated Mann began his first formal education; he entered Brown University as a sophomore, and did so well that when he graduated in 1819, he was invited to return as a tutor. He later studied law, and entered practice in 1823, and was elected to office in both the Massachusetts House of Representatives (1827) and the Massachusetts Senate (1833).

Mann had held a strong interest in humanitarian issues from boyhood; he once told a friend, "All my boyish castles in the air had reference to doing something for the benefit of mankind." While at Brown, this desire to do something to better the lot of mankind burst into flame. When he became a lawyer, and was elected to political office, he hoped that in this way he could work for the betterment of humanity.

He had many "causes," and none was dearer to his heart than the potential good that could be achieved through education. His interest was never in teaching per se, but rather, in educational policy. He took great pride in the fact that government-controlled public education in his ancestral home went all the way back to 1647, to the time of the "Old Deluder Satan" law, whereby a moral society could be made stable and permanent through education. He was very unhappy with the disinterest by the public in that the old government-controlled system in Massachusetts.

He was not alone; another reform movement got underway to try to revitalize the schools in Massachusetts. Despite his highly successful law practice and political career, Mann had been disappointed with how little he had been able to accomplish for the "benefit of mankind" with his work, so when the leaders of the educational reform movement invited him to join them, he was happy to do so.

In 1837, the governor of Massachusetts proposed the creation of a Board to study the matter and make proposals, and just two weeks after the bill authorizing the Board was passed, the movement's leaders urged Mann to accept the position of Secretary of the Board.

He took his time to think before accepting, but finally did so, saying that trying to better humanity through the law had failed because it dealt with adults whose characters had already been shaped, but there was hope in molding the child: "Having found the present generation composed of materials almost unmalleable, I am about transferring my efforts to the next. Men are cast-iron, but children are wax. Strength expended upon the latter may be effectual, which would make no impression upon the former."

The formation of the first Massachusetts Board of Education was the serious kick-off of the "common (public, government-controlled) school movement" of the decades of the 1830s and 1840s. The Board members saw the complete centralization of a government-run system as critical to the success of efforts to improve education in Massachusetts, and Mann saw it as the primary tool whereby mankind could be "perfected." Evil could be erased with education, which conquered ignorance, which in turn caused poverty and social injustice.

He was founder and editor of the Common School Journal in 1838, and published annual "Reports" on the work of the Board for each of the 12 years he served. Both of these served to promote his views very widely.

In addition to adopting Unitarianism with its belief in the perfectability of man, Mann adopted another popular notion of his day, phrenology. This also tended to support this view that through education man and society could be perfected. "Phrenology" was the belief that different "faculties" - reason, passion, appetites, morality, intelligence, imagination, etc. - resided in different parts of the brain, and when properly stimulated (as through education), each faculty would either grow and cause "bumps" on the skull that overlay the location of the particular faculty, or if not stimulated, would fail to to grow, and cause no revealing bumps.

Because of the influence of the belief of the Romantics that human beings were malleable and basically good, there was the hope that by using education to mold the child, the various desireable faculties could be promoted, and the undesireable ones suppressed, and that thus, under a government-controlled, compulsory system with a "proper" curriculum, there was a real opportunity for a "perfect society."

The Board was a sort of "Think Tank;" the members did not engage in the actual implementation of any reforms, they just analyzed and suggested. For each of the twelve years that he was Secretary, Mann issued a "Report" on the Board's findings for that year. The last of the Reports, in 1848, was a "wrap-up," a summation, of all the work that had gone before.

It was during this time that massive immigration, especially from Ireland, France, and Eastern Europe, began to flow into the United States. The entire world had felt the effects of the Little Ice Age, and in Europe, it had caused crop failures that led to starvation, disease, and civil unrest on an unprecedented scale, and millions of people sought a better life in the United States.

Immigration on such a large scale, with so many immigrants being Catholics and from cultures unacquainted with the spirit of the Founders, stirred unease in Mann. This was another area where he departed from his adopted religion of Unitarianism, which preached religious tolerance.

Mann had begun to reject Calvinism at the time the Reverend Emmons had presided at Mann's brother's funeral, and as an adult, he adopted Unitarianism, expressing the view that Calvinism had created a living hell for him, and "...spread a pall of blackness..." over life. Just a year before accepting the position as Secretary of the Board, he wrote his sister saying, "My nature revolts at the idea of belonging to a universe to which there is never-ending anguish..."

Just the same, he couldn't shake his Calvinist roots entirely. Mann's wife, Mary, wrote that although his "heart" was Unitarian, his "nerves" were still Calvinist, and while Mann campaigned against corporal punishment and other harsh treatment considered essential to the salvation of the soul by the Calvinists, and although he wanted gentler treatment of children, especially the littlest ones, and more comfortable conditions in the schools, he couldn't quite let go of the idea that we are born in sin: "From our very constitution, there is a downward gravitation to overcome...Our propensities have no affinity with reason or conscience...hence the propensities require some mighty counterpoise to balance their proclivity to wrong." He saw education as that "mighty counterpoise," and the means by which he would "ransom the human race from its brutish instincts and demoniac indulgences." This important societal feat could be accomplished only if the government had total control over the child and could compel a curriculum leading to this end.

The notion of his ancestors that a government-controlled educational system with compulsory attendance and a curriculum designed to implement policy seemed to him to be the key to the very salvation of the Republic. He thought that only by teaching a uniform belief system could the nation remain united, peaceful and stable. Again unlike Unitarianism, saw religion as the source of all morality, the King James Version of the Bible as its textbook, and a thinly disguised Protestant Christian orthodoxy as the single, unifying belief system.

The "common school movement" that favored public schools had three distinctive aspects: first, the children should be educated in a common schoolhouse; second, children were to be drawn from all ethnic, social, and religious backgrounds; third, they were to be educated with a common social and political ideology. In these respects, his proposed government system resembled the already existing private schools in New York and other states.

People in Massachusetts and the rest of New England seemed content with the trend towards private education, so something had to be done to promote the government-run system which, unlike the private system which had to respond to the desires of their constituency with a variety of curricula, could compel the teaching of a particular agenda.

A major campaign was launched to generate public support for a government-run system. Claims were made that delinquent children were running about causing problems, and that too many poor parents were unable to afford to sent their children to the private schools.

These claims stimulated the first survey in the nation. A subcommittee of the school committee looking into the revitalization proposals did a city-wide (Boston) survey to see if these claims were true. Here's what they found: About 2360 students attended the 8 public schools still in existence; however, more than 4000 students attended the 150 private schools. The survey also showed that 283 children between the ages of 4 and 7, along with 243 children over seven, attended no school at all. In sum, over 90% of the city's children attended school, despite the fact that there were no compulsory attendance laws.   

Mann's manifest goal was to eliminate political and social conflict, crime, poverty, and to promote national unity. His actual goal was to create a system of education attended by all children where a common political and social ideology was taught. In 1852, in collaboration with Edward Everett, governor of Massachusetts, he supported the adoption of the Prussian system, with a tax-supported government-run system with compulsory attendance and a curriculum that promoted the government's agenda. The right to the freedom to think was among the first victims of Mann's vision of moral purity in a perfect human being.

During the colonial period the goal of education had been to train the population to understand and obey both religious and secular laws, and after the Revolution, writers advocated the use of schools to promote a responsible citizenry. The difference between these views and Mann's system was the idea of a direct link between government educational policies and the solution and control of social, economic, and political problems. Mann's concept was the forerunner of education used as a tool for social engineering.

The idea of a prosperous, crime-free, unified society with perfect citizens was an appealing one, and as the possibility that that goal might actually be achieved through a government-run system education  was preached, support for it began to spread, more and more hopeful people began to demand the establishment of a government school system.

Little did they know that they were putting all their eggs in one very poorly made basket.

6: The Three R's in the American Colonies - Reformation, Romanticism, and Reason

Number Six in a series describing how American education went over the edge of the cliff. When the history of American education is completed, other issues such as pedagogy, subject matter, who should be responsible for education, etc. will be put up for discussion.

"The chief glory of human nature, the operation of reason in a variety of ways and with diversified results would be lost [if the state controlled education]. Every man should educate his children in his own manner to preserve the balance which existed among the several religious and political parties in Great Britain.” - Joseph Priestley

The Reformation gave us the first example of state-run schooling; the Jesuits gave us the first major overhaul in the approach to instruction; and Rousseau popularized the notion that children were different from adults and so the approach to teaching should be different too.

Rousseau (1712-1778) was not the first to recognize that children didn’t learn the same way adults did. Johann Amos Comenius (1592-1670) also understood that children depended more on sensory input and concretes in order to learn than adults do, and that children should be studied to discover the natural laws that would enable teachers to develop sound pedagogical practices.

Comenius did extensive reviews of what other educational reformers of the day had to say about educational practices, and even wrote some textbooks designed to make learning Latin easier for children. While Comenius’ textbooks enjoyed some popularity, his ideas about education itself were all but ignored for another 200 years. This had a lot to do with the fact that he was a bishop of the small but despised Moravian religious sect.

Nor was Rousseau the first to insist that the education of children should not be the same as that of adults. John Locke (1632-1704), the English philosopher whose thinking had such a profound influence on pre-Revolutionary America, lived nearly 100 years before Rousseau.

Both Rousseau and Locke rejected the concept of original sin that was embraced by religious authorities. Christianity agreed with the Platonic view that ideas were inborn, and existed in the child from birth. This notion was merged with the doctrine of original sin; since Eve had successfully tempted Adam with the idea of disobeying God’s command not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, then all their descendants were guilty of the same inherited proclivity towards evil.

It was also believed that since life on this earth was simply a stepping stone to life in the other-worldly realm of heaven, and since the body was of this earth, but the soul was not, then the body, weak in its ability to deny the material requirements for its survival,  was an impediment to the salvation of the soul, and much inclined in the direction of sin. This view peaked in Calvinist doctrine, which held that the child was heavily predisposed by nature to all sorts of depravities and sinful behavior. Calvinist education therefore emphasized the potential of the child for evil rather than good, and thought that harsh treatment of the body was required to salvage the child’s soul from its natural inclination towards evil and transform him into a more God-like being.

While both Rousseau and Locke rejected the notion of original sin, their answers to the way children should be taught were very different. Rousseau, like the other Romantics, believed that the child was inherently good, and that if learning was allowed to happen without outside influence as the child developed, he would, by nature, become a good adult. Education for Rousseau was a matter of permitting the “free and unrestricted inclinations of the child.” He believed that the child should learn primarily by trial and error, from the consequences of his actions (if you break a window, you study in the cold etc.). Any initiation of instruction by the teacher was considered to “hamper” or “interfere” with this “natural” process of learning; the teacher’s responsibility was to help fill in a few gaps here and there.

Unlike Rousseau, Locke believed that the child was born neither good nor evil, but with respect to both knowledge and morality, the child was “tabula rasa,” a “blank slate.” Like Rousseau, he believed that knowledge was acquired via the senses and concrete perceptions of the world, but unlike Rousseau, he thought that it was a waste of time for the child to have to discover knowledge anew every generation. To avoid this delay was the function of the teacher - to help pass along as much knowledge as possible from previous generations. Unlike Rousseau’s idea that the child’s education was simply a process of “unfolding,” and that the child should learn solely by discovery and experience, Locke understood that learning could be encouraged (or delayed) by teaching methods, and that an effective education came from the stimulation of natural capacities by means of direction from the teacher.

The first system of formal education in the colonies was the system originating with Luther and brought from Germany, through Geneva via the English Puritans, and practiced in New England, especially in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. But there were other colonies, with other educational systems.

The system in New Netherland was modeled after the one in the Netherlands. There, the Dutch Reformed Church had established a system that met the educational needs of the commercial interests of many Dutch cities, and its schools were regarded as the best vernacular schools in all of Europe. When the Dutch East Indies Company established schools in New Amsterdam, it paid the cost of the schoolmaster, but the city paid for the schoolhouse and the teacher’s house, and overall control was administered by the government. Unlike its other European counterparts, the education of girls as well as boys was encouraged.

New Netherland and its most important city, New Amsterdam, had a diverse population; in addition to the Dutch commercial interests and the Dutch Reformed Church, there were some Puritan, Swedish, and Finnish settlements, and as a result, there was a wide variety of educational institutions. In New Amsterdam, there was a large system of private schools that dominated the educational scene until the early 1800s. They offered many subjects, including the “practical arts” and several religious interests, and so remained basically free of disagreements and quarrels about curriculum content. This system remained in place even after the British conquered New Netherland in 1664, when New Amsterdam was renamed New York.

The English colonies of Virginia were chartered in 1606, also by commercial interests, and like the Dutch, they considered themselves as trading posts in the wilderness, rather than religious communities in the wilderness. Not much thought was given to education until the arrival of families in 1609, but it wasn’t until 1620 that there were enough settlers to consider any serious attempts to establish schools. Finally, by 1622, education began to be taken seriously, and like the Dutch, the educational system in Virginia was much like the system at home.

It was laissez-faire, and developed a wide range of educational opportunities. Apprenticeships, tutors, reading and writing schools, dame schools, schools operated by different religious organizations, charity schools, and private schools were all available, in addition to opportunities for education back in England. Unlike similar schools in New England, however, they were not under government control.

The impact of the on-going intellectual/philosophical growth of the Enlightenment (about 1700-1850) and the Romantic Movement (about 1750-1820) in Europe had a major impact on ideas about education in the pre-Revolutionary period of American Colonies. The most stunning breakthrough of all was the idea that freedom of ideas is essential for the advancement of society. English thinker Joseph Priestley was vehemently opposed to government control of education, saying that state-controlled education would be more committed to instilling a particular set of religious or political principles than to training the mind for the free use of reason.

In England, the idea of the freedom of thought was promoted through the formation of “dissenting academies.” These academies served those whose ideas “dissented” from the major religious and educational institutions in England, and grew quickly after Oxford and Cambridge were closed to those whose ideas that did not conform to their own.

The academy concept was brought to the colonies, where it provided an alternative to the purely classical education of the grammar schools, and became the forerunner of today’s high school. Instead of the strong focus on Greek and Latin literature and religious and civic duty, it also included “practical” education about the explosion of knowledge in the sciences and technology.

The concept of the right to the freedom to think was considered so critical by the Founding Fathers that it was incorporated into the Constitution as the First Amendment. Thus it was the “opening salvo” of the Bill of Rights: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” The entire First Amendment is given over to what is considered the most important right, the right of the freedom to think, and the prohibition of government restrictions against that freedom.

One of the most important contributors to the notion that the right to think must be protected from the government was a pre-Revolutionary writer named Robert Molesworth. He studied the nature of tyranny extensively, and his book, Account of Denmark as it was in the Year, 1692, was where he commented most directly about the role of education in society. He concluded that tyranny existed wherever there was a fusion of government and religion, and that the greatest threat to the freedom of ideas existed when religious doctrine was used as a tool in education by government to justify tyranny. Molesworth said that the most important task that religion performed for the government through the education of the young was “to recommend frequently to them what they call the Queen of all virtues, Viz. Submission to Superiors, and an entire blind Obedience to Authority.”

Just as importantly, when this fusion between state and religion occurred, government was perceived as an agent of God rather than as a product of the human mind and actions, and criticism of the government was considered a sin, an offense against God, instead of honest intellectual disagreement.

The issue of whether a state religion should be established was hotly debated prior to the ratification of the Constitution. Prominent religious leaders and fundamentalist Christian delegates alike ultimately recognized that if any religion harnessed to itself the power of government, the temptation of that religion to impose its views on others would inevitably occur; so, with the approval of 100% of the delegates, it was voted to specifically prohibit the establishment of a state religion. In addition, while some of the Framers of the Constitution thought limited state support of education, at least enough to provide basic lessons in reading and writing, might be a good idea, education was also excluded from the Constitution as an inappropriate function of government, one which could be a powerful means of interfering with the freedom to think.

By these exclusions, the government was prevented in any way from restricting the freedom of the citizen to think.

In the immediate post-Revolutionary period in the new United States, there were basically two views of the role of education in society in the brand new Republic. One was that of Scottish-educated physician Benjamin Rush, who favored a view much like that of the Puritans. The rejection by Locke (and later Rousseau) of the notion that children were born innocent of sin was anathema to Rush. Children were not only born in sin, he insisted, but they were “ungovernable animals” who should be taught in government-run schools where each student could be made to become a “republican machine” that would be willing to give up ownership of himself to the state: “Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property.” He also wrote that the most useful citizens were formed from those youths who had “never known or felt their own wills till they were one and twenty years of age.” To this end, schools should be authoritarian, and allowed to use whatever means necessary to impose their wills on the students.

The “Jeffersonian view” held that schools should teach academic subjects only, and leave personal beliefs to the choice of the individual. Jefferson’s conviction that the individual should be free to think was expressed in part when he wrote, “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

Ben Franklin shared Jefferson’s view, and was a strong proponent of the academy movement, even before the Revolution. In 1749, he wrote "Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensylvania" that eventually gave rise the the University of Pennsylvania (which unfortunately never taught his curriculum). He was so dedicated to the freedom to think that he wanted to include "Cato’s Letters" as textbooks. "Cato’s Letters" was a series of pre-Revolutionary pamphlets (1720-1723) written by Molesworth’s friends, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, and were considered pivotal to the justification for the Revolution. “…without Freedom of Speech, Which is the Right of every Man as far as by it, he does not hurt and control the Right of another…[that] is the only check which it ought to suffer…”

Since government control over education was considered such a grave threat to the freedom to think that it was excluded from the Constitution, how was it that it made its way into the fabric of society anyway? Was the concern justified?

5: More About the Role of the Romantic Era

Number Five in the History of American Education series describing how American education went over the edge of the cliff. When the history of American education is completed, other issues such as pedagogy, subject matter, who should be responsible for education, etc. will be put up for discussion.

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"Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave."  - Lord Brougham

It was during the Renaissance that the explosion of knowledge began to drive out the shadows of the Dark Age. With all that knowledge (and the invention of movable metal type!) becoming widely available, and the focus on "this worldly" issues, there was also an increased interest in education.

Unfortunately, a lot of that interest had less to do with the transmission of knowledge than it did with promoting political agendas.

First, the Reformation gave us the basic format of the school system we have today: a tax-supported compulsory system established to promote the agenda of the prevailing political authorities, and to discourage any deviation from it. Then the Ratio Studiorum of the Catholics gave us a curriculum design that significantly increased the efficiency with which children learned, but like the Lutheran schools, it sought to promote loyalty to the Church and discourage opposition to it.

As the Renaissance progressed, the intellectual leaps in every field were phenomenal, especially in mathematics and science. Increasingly, events and entities were seen as obeying the laws of nature rather than as divinely ordained. In time, many people began to think of existence as if it were some sort of giant "machine,” and some began to worry that if everything, even human beings, operated according to natural law the way machines did, then people, like machines, might not have free will. In order to answer concerns like this, people began to study real human beings directly instead of referring to authorities of antiquity or to religious authorities. This was the origin of the term "humanist."

As the Renaissance gained momentum, and curiosity about human nature increased, it evolved into next great period of intellectual growth: the Enlightenment (about 1700-1850).

Due to the increased curiosity about human nature, the “intellectual growth industry” of the Enlightenment became social issues such as human rights, the best way for society to be organized, the best form of government, the proper relationship between government and the people, and, not too surprisingly, how best to educate children.

A rebellion of sorts began to brew against what was regarded as the overly "mechanical" view of human nature. This rebellion ushered in the "Romantic Era" (about 1750-1825), which arose during the Enlightenment.

The term "Romantic" didn't refer to sexual love. It referred instead to the admiration for men who went on heroic adventures seeking idealistic goals, some of which were so lofty or difficult that they were unachievable (hence "impractical" and "unrealistic," bringing to mind the "Grail Quest" of a young Knight of the Round Table, or the "tilting at windmills" activities of Don Quixote).

The Romantics didn't think of humans as machines; they valued individuality, and correctly believed that free will was part of human nature. Unfortunately, they incorrectly blamed reason for the concern about whether free will existed in humans; they were so put off by the "mechanistic" picture of human beings that they unfairly rejected reason altogether, replacing it with emotion. Like many people today, they did not understand that reason and emotion are inextricably related, and not mutually exclusive. 

Philosophy has five major branches, including esthetics. The Romanticists' recognition of individuality and free will led to great progress in esthetics by freeing artistic expression from the overly-constrictive "rules" that governed the newly rediscovered classical art, and the stiff, unnatural art of the Dark Age.

Since art is the selective recreation of art according to the artist's metaphysical value-judgments ("Art and Cognition," The Romantic Manifesto, Ayn Rand), the rigidity of the "rules" governing both classical and medieval art also limited the ability of the artist freely to express his individuality and value judgments through his art. To the Romantic, this violated the concept of free will. Thanks to the Romantic Movement, artists found the freedom to express their values and emotions in a way that they had never been able to do before.

Although the Romantic esthetic was a great step forward, the rest of Romantic philosophy was a step backwards. By rejecting reason, education was left to the mercy of unguided, unevaluated emotions, somewhat along the lines of "If it feels good, do it." This led to problems that persist to this day in the schools of the United States, and plays a large role in the "Death Spiral" of our educational system.

To their credit, the Romantics were the first to insist that children were, by nature, learners. They also recognized that children were not miniature adults, and that the same kinds of thinking and behavior that we expect of adults should not be expected from them. Up to that time, children were dressed as tiny adults, they were expected to mimic manners with the skill of adults, and the failure to achieve these and other adult standards of behavior and learning often resulted in serious punishment even of the littlest ones.

Unfortunately, the swing of the pendulum from reason to emotion left the Romantics little better at discerning how best to teach than their harsher "mechanistic" colleagues were.

The Romantics' rebellion against reason took the form of a kind of "back to nature" movement. The "ideal” man was the "Noble Savage," the simple, uncomplicated man who, unencumbered by the complexities of civilization, lived a morally uncorrupted existence. Children were small versions of the Noble Savage, pure, innocent, almost sacred versions of mankind who should not be “tainted” by "artificial" interventions that would damage their "natural" development. Civilization, with all its conventions, was the "ultimate artifice," and was considered to have a highly destructive influence on children. In school, the use of such "artificial" methods as memorization and behavioral correction were thought to be particularly harmful to the child's creativity, character, and overall well-being. Children were to be allowed to express their impulses without interference, and these impulses were to be allowed to run their full course.

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) was a prominent member of the Romantic Movement, and published what amounted to the "Romantic's Manifesto of Education" in the form of his book "Emile," published in 1762.

Rousseau, a native of Switzerland born in Calvinist Geneva, was an independent soul; he was unhappy with anything he regarded as an attempt to control him, and since there was a lot of that going on in his life, he was also unhappy with much of his life. "My birth was the first of my misfortunes," he complained. He was essentially orphaned as a child after his mother died and his father placed him in the care of relatives, who soon apprenticed him to a harsh and violent master engraver.

Rousseau was bright and largely self-educated; on his own initiative, he sought out books of all kinds and read them voraciously, for which offense the engraver beat him. When he was severely punished for a misdeed for which he claimed innocence, he developed a life-long hatred of authority. He described himself in adolescence as "...troubled, discontented and...without enjoyments."

The beatings notwithstanding, he continued to seek out books of all kinds. In them, he experienced a rich and happy fantasy life. In addition to the books, he derived pleasure from the outdoors, where he was not bothered by being required to do things that did not interest him. While outside the city one day, he was late in returning, and was locked out (the city closed its gates at night). He found that he enjoyed the experience, and started to spend as much time as he could outdoors, and he acquired a great enjoyment of nature.

He ran away, and began a series of mostly unsuccessful efforts to earn a living. From time to time, he played the role of congenial con-man, often persuading wealthy or kind-hearted people to support him. In 1749, he entered an annual essay contest sponsored by the Academy of Dijon. The subject was: "Has the advancement of civilization tended to corrupt or improve morals?" To his surprise (given his perception that the academic establishment was hostile to him), he won the contest.

The thesis had been his characteristic attack against the establishment. He maintained that progress in the arts and sciences went hand-in-hand with increasing corruption in a society hungry for justice and liberty. He said that in the distant past, mankind, by nature good and free, had been happy (the Noble Savage), but that today, people were vile and unhappy. He maintained that mankind must try to recover the "rights of nature" and the "primordial equality" once enjoyed.

The essay struck a chord in society; all over Europe, his ideas were discussed and debated, and Rousseau became an overnight sensation. Along with other celebrated works on the subject of his winning essay, he wrote Emile, and given the circumstances of his life, Emile is surely the description of the kind of education that he wished he had received!

Here's a brief synopsis of the “ideal education” according to Rousseau: the child Emile is taken into the country to be isolated from the corrupting influence of society, and receives no moral/behavioral instruction until puberty (the "age of social reasoning"). He learns solely through "experience" and "discovery" what it is that he needs to learn. For example, when an invitation is received, he "discovers" that he needs to learn to read in order to understand the invitation, or he "experiences" missing the party.

Rousseau's alter-ego Emile is a learner of great self-initiated intellectual activity, and the assumption is made by Rousseau that all children (since they are "natural learners") would respond as enthusiastically as he would have to this kind of solitary, self-directed, unstructured, free-wheeling environment.

The Romantic view of education was in marked contrast to the view held by the New England Puritans, where, in addition to beatings, children were taken on “field trips” to view executions in order to motivate them to obey and do their best.

The United States would be created just 14 years after the publication of Emile; the clash between the two extreme views of education would produce a monstrous hybrid. This hybrid would lead to the concept of education as a tool for the total transformation of society into a population submissive and compliant to the wishes of the governing Elite, influenced primarily by Horace Mann and John Dewey, and aided and abetted by Sigmund Freud.

4: The Role of the Romantic Era

Number Four in the History of American Education series describing how American education went over the edge of the cliff. When the history of American education is completed, other issues such as pedagogy, subject matter, who should be responsible for education, etc. will be put up for discussion.

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In times of change, learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists. - Eric Hoffer

My apologies for not going straight to Romanticism this time, as was my intention. The more I thought about it, the more I thought it would be useful to understand how Romanticism was both helpful and harmful to education, and how it influenced our own system, to say something about where it came from.   

The Reformation gave us the basic format of our system; a tax-supported system with compulsory attendance and a curriculum designed to further the agenda of the prevailing political authorities.

The success of the Protestant system was not lost on the Catholics, and they did not stand idly by. In 1534, just 17 years after Luther posted his proclamation on the church door, the Spanish-born friar Ignatius Loyola founded the Society of Jesus, the first international monastic order dedicated solely to teaching. By 1560, the Jesuits had schools all over the world - Europe, the Americas, and the Far East.

By 1599, they had developed what was widely held as the most innovative and effective educational program in the world, even by their religious adversaries. This program, the Ratio Studiorum, also heavily influenced our system.

From ancient times until the Ratio Studiorum, students had been divided into three categories: elementary, grammar (secondary) and university levels.

Each group could have up to 200 students ranging in ability from beginner to advanced, making group lessons and discussions impossible. Each student went in his turn to see the teacher privately to recite his lesson and receive an assignment. This practice caused learning to go at a snail's pace, and because the teacher's attention was on one student at a time, there were behavior problems. Poor behavior or performance were controlled with frequent harsh punishments, including whipping, administered by the teacher.

The Ratio Studiorum changed all that. Students were grouped according to ability into five grades, with each grade serving children with an age span of about three years. This made group lessons and discussions possible, and the rate of learning speeded up markedly. Each child was allowed to progress at his own pace, and when he completed the material, he was given an exam and passed to the next level during a formal graduation ceremony. Because of more uninterrupted participation of the students in their work, and greater teacher supervision of the entire class, and smaller class sizes, the need for harsh discipline declined substantially. When it was deemed necessary, it was considered inappropriate for the teacher himself to be involved; a different Brother was specially assigned to administer punishments.

Another advancement was in the training of the teachers, something that had never been done before. The best and the brightest from among teacher candidates were chosen for the training program, where they were taught strong programs in the classics, theology, and debate. The most spectacular change was that the teachers-in-training were also given experience in "practice classes," with real children, before being turned loose as independent teachers in their own classrooms.

Although the Catholic schools were not administered under a formal tax-supported system like the Protestant system, and although attendance was not compulsory, it was nevertheless effectively a "state controlled" system because of the strong fusion of state and religion. There was little competition between Protestants and Catholics, since either one or the other prevailed in different territories. In Catholic regions, a Catholic education was the only game in town, with few other choices if one wanted a formal, academic education, and the agenda was the same as that of the Protestants: to promote loyalty to the Church.

This explosive and universal increase in interest in education came at the end of a period when Europe was emerging from an era of profound decay in learning and achievement (the Dark Age, roughly between 500 to 1500), and early in the period of rebirth of learning and knowledge (the Renaissance, roughly 1500 to about 1700).

Rome had been taken over by the Barbarians soon after the last of the Roman Emperors. While unlike the situation between competing religions, where one side tried to destroy the influence of the other by book-burning etc., the Barbarians didn't hate or disagree with the material in books, they just didn't care about them. So books were not protected or copied, and like so much else, the great libraries simply disappeared.

With the loss of the massive classical knowledge base to draw on, education - and civilization - collapsed. It's very interesting to go through various "timetables" that are published about history, science, the arts, etc. and see the drmatic drop in accomplishments across the board during the Dark Age.

The few remnants of educational effort that were still being made were insufficient to carry civilization forward; the Roman Empire had largely converted to Christianity, and interest shifted from "how to live in this world" to "preparation for life in the next world." The few books that the Christian clerics had considered important enough to take with them as they fled the Barbarians reflected this interest, with the this-worldly exception of medical texts (primarily Hippocrates and Galen), since caring for the sick was an interest of the Church.

Even among the clergy, the quality of education rapidly deteriorated.  Even St. Augustine (354-430), who lived at the crossroads between Classical Rome and the Dark Age, thought that disease was due to demons, and this view prevailed among many of his contemporaries and philosophic heirs; Charlemagne the Great (742-814), complained that even the clergy knew insufficient Latin to read the Bible or properly conduct church services.

During the Dark Age, large cities quite literally disappeared, as the building materials from their structures were taken to be used elsewhere; roads and ports disintegrated, so trade and contact with other cultures became very limited; aquaducts fell into disrepair, so a clean, reliable source of drinking water was no longer available; sewage systems disappeared, so the new drinking water sources such as streams and rivers became dangerously polluted; bathing became a non-issue, and disease became rampant, with periodic kill-offs of millions upon millions of people. What little education was being carried out was limited primarily to future clerics and aristocrats, and concerned itself almost exclusively with theologically related issues. 

The story of what brought all this freefall of learning to an end is every bit as fascinating as the story of how "snowball earth" was rescued from its global ice tomb 600,000,000 years ago, but it is too long to tell here. Maybe I'll find an excuse sometime in the future to sneak it in!

During the Renaissance, as a result of the rebirth of learning and knowledge, great leaps forward began to take place; it was almost a stampede, and was a result of renewed interest in the problems of this world, with a corresponding decrease in focus on issues related to the other-wordly. Leonardo Fibonacci (1170-1250), Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), Galileo Galilei (1564-1642),  Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), and Isaac Newton (1642-1727) all lived during this period.

The strong and growing focus on reason instead of faith as the means of acquiring knowledge, with its requirement for evidence and proof, characterized this period.

Both the Protestant and Catholic educational systems were innovations over their own past, and succeeded in their own time; nevertheless, both carried the seeds of their own destruction within themselves; in order to maintain the integrity of their methods and the nature of what they taught, they refused to change, to refine either their content or their methods to take into account the discovery of the knowledge that was spreading like wildfire. 

The next period, from about 1700 to about 1850, was called the "Enlightenment," and represented another great leap; it was a period of thunderous philosophic growth, and it was now that the concept of human rights and their relationship to the proper function of government became an issue of great interest, and the problem of slavery, still a universal practice around the world, became a matter of intense interest. The Enlightenment led to the Industrial Revolution, which put the final nail in the coffin of slavery because of the inventions of technologies that could replace human labor.

It was within the years of the Enlightenment that a new movement, the Romantic Movement, arose. It thrived from about the mid-1700s to the early 1800s. The term "Romantic" didn't refer to the usual first definition in the dictionary, meaning "sexual love." Instead, it referred to a definition further down the list, to the potential for heroic achievement, adventure and excitement, and in addition, an "idealistic" attitude or expectation that could even be considered "impractical." The tales of King Arthur, the Christianized version of an oral tradition going back perhaps thousands of years, were the first to be referred to as "Romantic."

Romanticism was a philosophically complex era, a "mixed bag" of both good and bad. The good part was manifested especially in its esthetics. Art made real advances during the period.  Its bad part was that it essentially rejected reason in favor of emotion, and this is the part that especially affected our educational system.

The Romanticists literally "felt" that their goal was the fight for individuality and free expression, but they used emotions as their tools in the fight instead of reason, abandoning reason to their opponents.

In no small way, the Romantic Era was a rebellion against reason, a sort of "back to nature" movement that considered the reason-based accomplishments of civilization to be "artificial" and inimical to human welfare. It was the time when the "Noble Savage" was regarded as the natural and ideal human being.

This rebellion was to have serious consequences for our schools, our kids, and our civilization; it was to lead to "Progressivism" and Political Correctness.

It was also to carry within it the seeds of some major contributions to the proper understanding of our nature, of how we learn, and  of how to develop a better pedagogy.

The Reformation gave us the basic format of our system; a tax-supported system with compulsory attendance and a curriculum designed to further the agenda of the prevailing political authorities.

The success of the Protestant system was not lost on the Catholics, and they did not stand idly by. In 1534, just 17 years after Luther posted his proclamation on the church door, the Spanish-born friar Ignatius Loyola founded the Society of Jesus, the first international monastic order dedicated solely to teaching. By 1560, the Jesuits had schools all over the world - Europe, the Americas, and the Far East.

By 1599, they had developed what was widely held as the most innovative and effective educational program in the world, even by their religious adversaries. This program, the Ratio Studiorum, also heavily influenced our system.

From ancient times until the Ratio Studiorum, students had been divided into three categories: elementary, grammar (secondary) and university levels.

Each group could have up to 200 students ranging in ability from beginner to advanced, making group lessons and discussions impossible. Each student went in his turn to see the teacher privately to recite his lesson and receive an assignment. This practice caused learning to go at a snail's pace, and because the teacher's attention was on one student at a time, there were behavior problems. Poor behavior or performance were controlled with frequent harsh punishments, including whipping, administered by the teacher.

The Ratio Studiorum changed all that. Students were grouped according to ability into five grades, with each grade serving children with an age span of about three years. This made group lessons and discussions possible, and the rate of learning speeded up markedly. Each child was allowed to progress at his own pace, and when he completed the material, he was given an exam and passed to the next level during a formal graduation ceremony. Because of more uninterrupted participation of the students in their work, and greater teacher supervision of the entire class, and smaller class sizes, the need for harsh discipline declined substantially. When it was deemed necessary, it was considered inappropriate for the teacher himself to be involved; a different Brother was specially assigned to administer punishments.

Another advancement was in the training of the teachers, something that had never been done before. The best and the brightest from among teacher candidates were chosen for the training program, where they were taught strong programs in the classics, theology, and debate. The most spectacular change was that the teachers-in-training were also given experience in "practice classes," with real children, before being turned loose as independent teachers in their own classrooms.

Although the Catholic schools were not administered under a formal tax-supported system like the Protestant system, and although attendance was not compulsory, it was nevertheless effectively a "state controlled" system because of the strong fusion of state and religion. There was little competition between Protestants and Catholics, since either one or the other prevailed in different territories. In Catholic regions, a Catholic education was the only game in town, with few other choices if one wanted a formal, academic education, and the agenda was the same as that of the Protestants: to promote loyalty to the Church.

This explosive and universal increase in interest in education came at the end of a period when Europe was emerging from an era of profound decay in learning and achievement (the Dark Age, roughly between 500 to 1500), and early in the period of rebirth of learning and knowledge (the Renaissance, roughly 1500 to about 1700).

Rome had been taken over by the Barbarians soon after the last of the Roman Emperors. While unlike the situation between competing religions, where one side tried to destroy the influence of the other by book-burning etc., the Barbarians didn't hate or disagree with the material in books, they just didn't care about them. So books were not protected or copied, and like so much else, the great libraries simply disappeared.

With the loss of the massive classical knowledge base to draw on, education - and civilization - collapsed. It's very interesting to go through various "timetables" that are published about history, science, the arts, etc. and see the drmatic drop in accomplishments across the board during the Dark Age.

The few remnants of educational effort that were still being made were insufficient to carry civilization forward; the Roman Empire had largely converted to Christianity, and interest shifted from "how to live in this world" to "preparation for life in the next world." The few books that the Christian clerics had considered important enough to take with them as they fled the Barbarians reflected this interest, with the this-worldly exception of medical texts (primarily Hippocrates and Galen), since caring for the sick was an interest of the Church.

Even among the clergy, the quality of education rapidly deteriorated.  Even St. Augustine (354-430), who lived at the crossroads between Classical Rome and the Dark Age, thought that disease was due to demons, and this view prevailed among many of his contemporaries and philosophic heirs; Charlemagne the Great (742-814), complained that even the clergy knew insufficient Latin to read the Bible or properly conduct church services.

During the Dark Age, large cities quite literally disappeared, as the building materials from their structures were taken to be used elsewhere; roads and ports disintegrated, so trade and contact with other cultures became very limited; aquaducts fell into disrepair, so a clean, reliable source of drinking water was no longer available; sewage systems disappeared, so the new drinking water sources such as streams and rivers became dangerously polluted; bathing became a non-issue, and disease became rampant, with periodic kill-offs of millions upon millions of people. What little education was being carried out was limited primarily to future clerics and aristocrats, and concerned itself almost exclusively with theologically related issues. 

The story of what brought all this freefall of learning to an end is every bit as fascinating as the story of how "snowball earth" was rescued from its global ice tomb 600,000,000 years ago, but it is too long to tell here. Maybe I'll find an excuse sometime in the future to sneak it in!

During the Renaissance, as a result of the rebirth of learning and knowledge, great leaps forward began to take place; it was almost a stampede, and was a result of renewed interest in the problems of this world, with a corresponding decrease in focus on issues related to the other-wordly. Leonardo Fibonacci (1170-1250), Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), Galileo Galilei (1564-1642),  Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), and Isaac Newton (1642-1727) all lived during this period.

The strong and growing focus on reason instead of faith as the means of acquiring knowledge, with its requirement for evidence and proof, characterized this period.

Both the Protestant and Catholic educational systems were innovations over their own past, and succeeded in their own time; nevertheless, both carried the seeds of their own destruction within themselves; in order to maintain the integrity of their methods and the nature of what they taught, they refused to change, to refine either their content or their methods to take into account the discovery of the knowledge that was spreading like wildfire. 

The next period, from about 1700 to about 1850, was called the "Enlightenment," and represented another great leap; it was a period of thunderous philosophic growth, and it was now that the concept of human rights and their relationship to the proper function of government became an issue of great interest, and the problem of slavery, still a universal practice around the world, became a matter of intense interest. The Enlightenment led to the Industrial Revolution, which put the final nail in the coffin of slavery because of the inventions of technologies that could replace human labor.

It was within the years of the Enlightenment that a new movement, the Romantic Movement, arose. It thrived from about the mid-1700s to the early 1800s. The term "Romantic" didn't refer to the usual first definition in the dictionary, meaning "sexual love." Instead, it referred to a definition further down the list, to the potential for heroic achievement, adventure and excitement, and in addition, an "idealistic" attitude or expectation that could even be considered "impractical." The tales of King Arthur, the Christianized version of an oral tradition going back perhaps thousands of years, were the first to be referred to as "Romantic."

Romanticism was a philosophically complex era, a "mixed bag" of both good and bad. The good part was manifested especially in its esthetics. Art made real advances during the period.  Its bad part was that it essentially rejected reason in favor of emotion, and this is the part that especially affected our educational system.

The Romanticists literally "felt" that their goal was the fight for individuality and free expression, but they used emotions as their tools in the fight instead of reason, abandoning reason to their opponents.

In no small way, the Romantic Era was a rebellion against reason, a sort of "back to nature" movement that considered the reason-based accomplishments of civilization to be "artificial" and inimical to human welfare. It was the time when the "Noble Savage" was regarded as the natural and ideal human being.

This rebellion was to have serious consequences for our schools, our kids, and our civilization; it was to lead to "Progressivism" and Political Correctness.

It was also to carry within it the seeds of some major contributions to the proper understanding of our nature, of how we learn, and  of how to develop a better pedagogy.

The Reformation gave us the basic format of our system; a tax-supported system with compulsory attendance and a curriculum designed to further the agenda of the prevailing political authorities.

The success of the Protestant system was not lost on the Catholics, and they did not stand idly by. In 1534, just 17 years after Luther posted his proclamation on the church door, the Spanish-born friar Ignatius Loyola founded the Society of Jesus, the first international monastic order dedicated solely to teaching. By 1560, the Jesuits had schools all over the world - Europe, the Americas, and the Far East.

By 1599, they had developed what was widely held as the most innovative and effective educational program in the world, even by their religious adversaries. This program, the Ratio Studiorum, also heavily influenced our system.

From ancient times until the Ratio Studiorum, students had been divided into three categories: elementary, grammar (secondary) and university levels.

Each group could have up to 200 students ranging in ability from beginner to advanced, making group lessons and discussions impossible. Each student went in his turn to see the teacher privately to recite his lesson and receive an assignment. This practice caused learning to go at a snail's pace, and because the teacher's attention was on one student at a time, there were behavior problems. Poor behavior or performance were controlled with frequent harsh punishments, including whipping, administered by the teacher.

The Ratio Studiorum changed all that. Students were grouped according to ability into five grades, with each grade serving children with an age span of about three years. This made group lessons and discussions possible, and the rate of learning speeded up markedly. Each child was allowed to progress at his own pace, and when he completed the material, he was given an exam and passed to the next level during a formal graduation ceremony. Because of more uninterrupted participation of the students in their work, and greater teacher supervision of the entire class, and smaller class sizes, the need for harsh discipline declined substantially. When it was deemed necessary, it was considered inappropriate for the teacher himself to be involved; a different Brother was specially assigned to administer punishments.

Another advancement was in the training of the teachers, something that had never been done before. The best and the brightest from among teacher candidates were chosen for the training program, where they were taught strong programs in the classics, theology, and debate. The most spectacular change was that the teachers-in-training were also given experience in "practice classes," with real children, before being turned loose as independent teachers in their own classrooms.

Although the Catholic schools were not administered under a formal tax-supported system like the Protestant system, and although attendance was not compulsory, it was nevertheless effectively a "state controlled" system because of the strong fusion of state and religion. There was little competition between Protestants and Catholics, since either one or the other prevailed in different territories. In Catholic regions, a Catholic education was the only game in town, with few other choices if one wanted a formal, academic education, and the agenda was the same as that of the Protestants: to promote loyalty to the Church.

This explosive and universal increase in interest in education came at the end of a period when Europe was emerging from an era of profound decay in learning and achievement (the Dark Age, roughly between 500 to 1500), and early in the period of rebirth of learning and knowledge (the Renaissance, roughly 1500 to about 1700).

Rome had been taken over by the Barbarians soon after the last of the Roman Emperors. While unlike the situation between competing religions, where one side tried to destroy the influence of the other by book-burning etc., the Barbarians didn't hate or disagree with the material in books, they just didn't care about them. So books were not protected or copied, and like so much else, the great libraries simply disappeared.

With the loss of the massive classical knowledge base to draw on, education - and civilization - collapsed. It's very interesting to go through various "timetables" that are published about history, science, the arts, etc. and see the drmatic drop in accomplishments across the board during the Dark Age.

The few remnants of educational effort that were still being made were insufficient to carry civilization forward; the Roman Empire had largely converted to Christianity, and interest shifted from "how to live in this world" to "preparation for life in the next world." The few books that the Christian clerics had considered important enough to take with them as they fled the Barbarians reflected this interest, with the this-worldly exception of medical texts (primarily Hippocrates and Galen), since caring for the sick was an interest of the Church.

Even among the clergy, the quality of education rapidly deteriorated.  Even St. Augustine (354-430), who lived at the crossroads between Classical Rome and the Dark Age, thought that disease was due to demons, and this view prevailed among many of his contemporaries and philosophic heirs; Charlemagne the Great (742-814), complained that even the clergy knew insufficient Latin to read the Bible or properly conduct church services.

During the Dark Age, large cities quite literally disappeared, as the building materials from their structures were taken to be used elsewhere; roads and ports disintegrated, so trade and contact with other cultures became very limited; aquaducts fell into disrepair, so a clean, reliable source of drinking water was no longer available; sewage systems disappeared, so the new drinking water sources such as streams and rivers became dangerously polluted; bathing became a non-issue, and disease became rampant, with periodic kill-offs of millions upon millions of people. What little education was being carried out was limited primarily to future clerics and aristocrats, and concerned itself almost exclusively with theologically related issues. 

The story of what brought all this freefall of learning to an end is every bit as fascinating as the story of how "snowball earth" was rescued from its global ice tomb 600,000,000 years ago, but it is too long to tell here. Maybe I'll find an excuse sometime in the future to sneak it in!

During the Renaissance, as a result of the rebirth of learning and knowledge, great leaps forward began to take place; it was almost a stampede, and was a result of renewed interest in the problems of this world, with a corresponding decrease in focus on issues related to the other-wordly. Leonardo Fibonacci (1170-1250), Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), Galileo Galilei (1564-1642),  Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), and Isaac Newton (1642-1727) all lived during this period.

The strong and growing focus on reason instead of faith as the means of acquiring knowledge, with its requirement for evidence and proof, characterized this period.

Both the Protestant and Catholic educational systems were innovations over their own past, and succeeded in their own time; nevertheless, both carried the seeds of their own destruction within themselves; in order to maintain the integrity of their methods and the nature of what they taught, they refused to change, to refine either their content or their methods to take into account the discovery of the knowledge that was spreading like wildfire. 

The next period, from about 1700 to about 1850, was called the "Enlightenment," and represented another great leap; it was a period of thunderous philosophic growth, and it was now that the concept of human rights and their relationship to the proper function of government became an issue of great interest, and the problem of slavery, still a universal practice around the world, became a matter of intense interest. The Enlightenment led to the Industrial Revolution, which put the final nail in the coffin of slavery because of the inventions of technologies that could replace human labor.

It was within the years of the Enlightenment that a new movement, the Romantic Movement, arose. It thrived from about the mid-1700s to the early 1800s. The term "Romantic" didn't refer to the usual first definition in the dictionary, meaning "sexual love." Instead, it referred to a definition further down the list, to the potential for heroic achievement, adventure and excitement, and in addition, an "idealistic" attitude or expectation that could even be considered "impractical." The tales of King Arthur, the Christianized version of an oral tradition going back perhaps thousands of years, were the first to be referred to as "Romantic."

Romanticism was a philosophically complex era, a "mixed bag" of both good and bad. The good part was manifested especially in its esthetics. Art made real advances during the period.  Its bad part was that it essentially rejected reason in favor of emotion, and this is the part that especially affected our educational system.

The Romanticists literally "felt" that their goal was the fight for individuality and free expression, but they used emotions as their tools in the fight instead of reason, abandoning reason to their opponents.

In no small way, the Romantic Era was a rebellion against reason, a sort of "back to nature" movement that considered the reason-based accomplishments of civilization to be "artificial" and inimical to human welfare. It was the time when the "Noble Savage" was regarded as the natural and ideal human being.

This rebellion was to have serious consequences for our schools, our kids, and our civilization; it was to lead to "Progressivism" and Political Correctness.

It was also to carry within it the seeds of some major contributions to the proper understanding of our nature, of how we learn, and  of how to develop a better pedagogy.

3: The Role of the Reformation

Number Three in the History of American Education series describing how American education went over the edge of the cliff. When the history of American education is completed, other issues such as pedagogy, subject matter, who should be responsible for education, etc. will be put up for discussion.

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"Education is the transmission of civilization." - Will and Ariel Durant, the man and wife team who cooperated in a multi-volume set of books on the History of Civilization

What if the longer our children stayed in our educational system, the worse off they became academically? What would that say about the transmission of our civilization?

It's exactly what's happening. At age 10, our kids ranked 8th out of the 24 nations tested, below 30% of all test-takers. Above us are Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Chinese Taipei, Latvia, England, the Netherlands, Flemish Belgium, and the Russian Federation. While that's not so very terribly awful, given the amount of money, time and effort we throw into the system, one could not be criticized for expecting better.

By age 15, 40 nations take the test, and our kids slip to 25th place, below 62.5% of all test-takers. They have dropped behind some of the countries that they outperformed as 10-year-olds just five years earlier - Australia, New Zealand, Norway, and Hungary.

It is not an exaggeration to say that our future as a civilization is at risk because of the direction taken by our educational system. Alan Greenspan did not express "irrational exuberance" when, at a symposium in 1999, he warned that our nation's productivity, and therefore its prosperity, depends on our intellectual achievement, and that the poor state of our educational system from kindergarten through high school places our future in jeopardy.

Our students not only don't know very much, they don't understand some very important concepts. They don't understand the reasons why our country chose to declare independence; what it is that has lifted us to the heights of productivity and prosperity that we experience today; or what, besides simple overall ignorance, is putting our very existence in danger.

Have the consumers of our educational product - the parents - noticed a problem?  Yes, indeed; their response has been so strong that some are calling it "the quiet revolution."

In fact, parental concerns about the quality of their children's education are so widespread that they have given rise to an entire industry in supplemental "DIY programs" for parents to use at home.

TV and radio ads assure us that help is available in the form of books, kits and workbooks for reading and math instruction for use at home. One TV ad for a reading program tried to be diplomatic about its product, saying that the schools can't be expected to do everything, as if reading were some sort of peripheral function of the educational system.

Tutorial centers such as Sylvan and Kumon are seen everywhere, and they are doing a booming business.

Summer school is in session in almost every community in the country; some summer camps include academic enrichment and "catch-up" programs along with their other, more traditional summer activities.

Private schools, both parochial and secular, have high application rates, and many have long waiting lists. In some places, desperate parents apply to the most highly regarded pre-schools while the mother is still pregnant with the prospective student!

Home schooling, once regarded as being of interest solely to the "religious fringe," is now the fastest growing segment of education in the general population, and it has a vast network of support services, including lawyers.

A controversial movement promoting tax-paid vouchers to allow children to leave the government school system to attend private schools gains momentum every year.

"Magnet" and "charter schools," although run by the government, are being allowed to introduce new courses and teaching methods in an attempt to see what can be done.

Relaxation or even complete dissolution of "districts" that confine students to a particular school are being experimented with.

We know our children are in trouble, that our teachers are in trouble, and that our schools are in free-fall. Can "the quiet revolution" do anything to make things better?

George Santayana, the Spanish-born American philosopher, had some good advice for us: "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

If we look at the history of our system, then we can look for mistakes we have made, and what we learn can help us have a better chance of correcting them.

Our system arose out of a "Perfect Storm" of sorts when three major events collided: 1) The Protestant Reformation, 2) the Romantic Movement, and 3) the work of Sigmund Freud.

The story of each is a little long, but well worth the telling because of the lessons they contain.

What was the role of the Reformation? It gave us the form and fundamental goal of our current system.

Martin Luther (1483 - 1586) was an Augustinian friar who taught philosophy and theology at the University of Wittenberg in Germany. Riding the general wave of philosophical restlessness that had ushered in the Renaissance, he posted some of his views on the door of the church in Wittenberg in 1517.

Luther's chief argument with the Catholic Church was his contention that the faithful did not require priestly intermediaries to gain salvation; they could win entrance to heaven on the basis of their faith alone, and interpret doctrine and the Bible independently. While there was some support for his views, there was also a lot of high-powered opposition to them. Luther realized that if his ideas were to "stick," he would have to influence a large portion of the population very quickly.

To this end, in 1524, he wrote to the rulers of several German states, and asked that they establish a system of tax-supported schools with compulsory attendance where Lutheran piety would be a required part of the curriculum; he maintained that state control of education of education, rather than individual control, was necessary because of the unreliable whims of the parents. In order to assure compliance, truant officers were hired, and any children not attending the new schools were told they were in danger of eternal damnation.  By 1527, the system was underway, and Lutheranism's place in history was assured.

Luther and the Reformation introduced the idea of widespread government-controlled education for one purpose, and that was to compel belief and suppress dissent. At the time he did this, he assumed that since the civil authorities - the rulers - considered that they derived their power from God, and were God's representatives on earth, the schools - and the educational agenda - would remain forever under the strong influence and control of religion.

The initial response by both ecclesiastical and civil authorities to Luther's heresies was quite mild, and the movement spread largely unimpeded.  But on the morning of October 18th, 1534, in (still largely) Catholic France, Parisians and other northern Frenchmen awoke to placards posted with "no more Mr. Nice Guy" statements condemning the Eucharist, calling the mass "an insufferable abuse," etc.  That's when things got more serious; some of the Protestants were burned at the stake, some were exiled, and armed conflicts between groups holding different views, including different Protestant sects, began to break out.

Jean Cauvin, whom we know as John Calvin (1509 -1564), was one of the lucky ones who was exiled instead of burned. In 1536, he published a work called The Institutes of the Christian Religion while in Basel, Switzerland. His goal was to establish a new, more godly society, and his book was considered the second most influential one, after the Bible, on Protestanism in all of France.

In French-speaking Geneva, where the population was especially dedicated to the idea of independent study of Scripture, Calvin's work ended up instead establishing a rigid theocracy where it became a crime even to stay up after 9:00 pm.

The Calvinists and the Lutherans grew so far apart in their views that they ultimately despised each other. Michel Montaigne, the humanist French Renaissance scholar who popularized the writing form known as "essays," traveled about Europe during 1580-81 in search of a treatment for kidney stones, and kept a journal of his experiences. He was interested in everything, including the religious beliefs of everyone from Lutherans to witches. When he had a conversation with a Lutheran pastor in Germany, he recorded in his Travel Journal (not published until 1774) that the pastor had said he would rather "celebrate the mass of Rome than so much as walk into a Calvinist service."

It was initially thought that Luther's concept of the freedom of the individual to decide for himself how to interpret doctrine and the Bible would launch a whole new era of tolerance. Such was not the case, however, and active suppression of dissenters began among the various groups.

Primarily under the influence of Calvin's writings, the new movement took root in England, where the Church of England had already split from the Catholic Church during the reign of Henry the VIII. There, a group calling themselves "Puritans" thought that the Church of England was little better than the Catholics; they acquired the name "Puritan" because of their desire to "purify" the church and their own lives.

The Puritan's belief was that the Bible was God's true law, and that it provided a complete plan for life. Their interpretation of Scripture was strict and harsh. God had already determined who would enter heaven and who would go to hell, and no one knew what his own fate was, and there was nothing anyone could do to change it. The devil was behind every deviation from Puritan belief, and conversion, which they regarded as a rejection of "worldliness," was the Puritan goal. Their ministers gave eloquent "fire and brimstone" sermons warning the congregations of the dangers of the "world." Since music was thought to induce a "dreamy" state that interfered with worship, it was forbidden, as were drama and erotic poetry. What was permitted was the writing of religious poetry and, oddly enough, the study of pagan classical authors such as Cicero, Virgil, et al., whose works were studied in Latin and Greek. Another contradiction was the fact that the very worldly practice of hard work, which led to the acquisition of wealth, was regarded as an honor to God, and the very worldly wealth acquired thereby was one's reward for such piety.   

The failure of those to convert to Puritan views often had lethal consequences. While they said that God could forgive anything, man could forgive only a change in behavior. For them, actions truly spoke louder than words, so actions were strictly controlled.

The struggle between the Puritans and the Church of England erupted into a civil war; under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell, the Puritans won a brief victory over the Crown's forces, but then lost power; their situation after that  was unpleasant, and it precipitated their departure to the New World, where they could practice their beliefs without interference.

They considered that they were creating a model religious commonwealth in the wilderness, a "good society" (meaning a well-ordered religious society that would be a model for the rest of the world and win God's approval).  In 1630, early Puritan leader John Winthrop told the colonists "We must consider that we shall be as a 'city upon a hill,' the eyes of all people are upon us." 

The Puritan colonies had a significant effect on the course to be taken by education in the New World, and it is from them that most of the traditional American educational practices have come.   

When they settled the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Puritans took with them one Lutheran idea that they thought was especially worthwhile, and that was: tax-supported, compulsory education was the most effective way to establish a common belief system, suppress conflicting ideas, and thereby achieve social stability. For Puritan New Englanders, education was an instrument of religion, and its agenda was to continue to further the "purification" of the church and society.

In 1635, the Roxbury Latin School was established as the first formal school. A year later, in 1636, Harvard College was founded  by a vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. One of the reasons for the establishment of Harvard was to educate future Puritan leaders on their home turf. A significant part of the reason for the desire to keep the kids at home was because the world was still experiencing the effects of the Little Ice Age, and Europe was frought with civil disorder, starvation and disease. The colonists did not want to subject their children to those dangers by sending them back to Europe for higher education.

Not all Puritan children attended the Roxbury Latin School or Harvard. Because of the immense need for skilled labor in the colonies, many children were apprenticed out to masters for a seven-year period to learn a trade; in addition to the skills of the trade, their masters taught them basic reading and writing. Soon, though, the labor shortages caused the apprenticeship to be shortened, with the consequence that the apprentices didn't learn as much reading, writing, and Scripture as desired by the colonial leaders.

Two laws were passed to remedy that situation.

The first law about education in the colonies, the Massachusetts Law of 1642, was passed because of complaints about the failure of both masters and parents to properly teach their charges "to read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of this country."

Five years later, in 1647, this theme received even greater attention when the "Old Deluder Law" was passed, requiring each municipality in Puritan New England to establish its own tax-supported school with compulsory attendance and mandatory curriculum. The law was so-named because it opened with the words, "It being the chief project of Old Deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures..."  Thus, the tax-supported, compulsory system of Luther became the law in the colonies.

While apprenticeships continued as the chief source of education for most boys, communities with at least 50 households were also compelled by law to hire for a teacher to give separate instruction in reading and writing; in communities with 100 households, a community-supported grammer school was established. By 1700, 39 such grammar schools had been established.

The "reading and writing schools" (sometimes called "petty schools") were just that, and limited almost exclusively to reading and writing, with very minimal attention to ciphering. It was the children of the relatively poor families who attended them.

Children of the families who could afford it (merchants, the clergy, lawyers and the like) avoided the public schools, and attended instead the private "dame schools," so-called because this was how an educated widow could earn a living, usually in the living room of her own home. After that, wealthier families sent their children on to the grammar schools for another seven years of instruction.

The curriculum in the grammar schools was broader and more rigorous; more advanced reading and writing, as well as arithmetic and the Greek and Latin classics were taught. They were intended to prepare the students to follow in their families' leadership footsteps. Poor families often found it necessary to stop their children's formal education at the end of "petty school" to allow them to devote full time to an apprenticeship so they could earn money to help support the family. 

A problem arose in 1641. The problem was that the instructional texts that were used in the schools had been published in England for the previous hundred or more years, and had orginated not as textbooks, but as manuals for church services. The catechism (a list of questions with prepared answers) in them conflicted with Puritan beliefs. The General Court in the Massachusetts Bay Colony ordered the church elders to rewrite the texts to contain a catechism for their own children. The product was the New England Primer, and while the law mandating it was passed in 1641, the first edition was not thought to be completed and printed until 1687.

The New England Primer remained the most heavily used schoolbook in America for about 150 years, selling around 20,000 copies annually, and ultimately reaching a total sales of over 3 million copies. It reflected the emphasis on religion and the authoritarian approach of Puritan education. The first verse that the child was required to memorize was: "I will fear God, and honour the KING. I will honour my Father and Mother. I will obey my Superiors. I will Submit to my Elders." This verse was followed by "an Alphabet of Lessons for Youth," which was a list of statments with religious maxims for the student to memorize - "A  In Adam's Fall We Sinned All. B Thy Life to Mend This Book (the Bible) Attend," and so on. 

Other lessons included the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the speech given to his children by John (aka "Thomas Matthews") Rogers in 1555 as he, the first to be executed by Queen (aka "Bloody") Mary, was about to be burned at the stake.  His crime was having helped publish a Bible in English (which later evolved into the Authorized King James' Version) and having denounced the Catholic Church while serving as "divinity lecturer" at St. Paul's Church in Smithfield, England.

Unlike England, educational levels in the New England Colonies were not a closed system; while different curricula prepared the students for different courses in life, the social and class lines were blurred and often crossed. Poor students often advanced to higher levels despite their humble births, and wealthier students sometimes just didn't make the cut, and had to rely on other, less profitable means to survive. Talent appearing in students born into families of different social status could not be wasted by rigid class structures, so "upward mobility" (as well as "downward") became common.

The New England Colonies' most important goal was to maintain Puritan belief and establish social stability by training their citizens to be compliant and to submit to the laws of religion and government. The means by which this agenda was achieved was to bring the educational system under the control of government, which in turn was an instrument of God.

So it was that the Reformation, via the Puritans, brought to America the practice of government-controlled schools with compelled attendance and a fixed curriculum designed to implement government policy by training the students to be compliant and subserviant to authority.

This system did not take root in the rest of the colonies for many years, and largely - if not totally - because of this, the thinking that led to the decidedly not subserviant American Revolution was able to take place.

While many of us tend to think that our system was the "norm" in the United States right from the beginning, it wasn't until about 75 years, more or less, after the American Revolution that this system began to escape New England's Puritan colonies to become widely established in the new republic.

The chief vector of the spread of state-controlled education was America's most famous professional "educationist," Horace Mann.

2: The Death Spiral of American Education

Number Two in the History of American Education series describing how American education went over the edge of the cliff. When the history of American education is completed, other issues such as pedagogy, subject matter, who should be responsible for education, etc. will be put up for discussion.

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"Virtually everyone has heard how poorly American students perform, whether compared to foreign students or to American students of a generation ago. What everyone may not know are the specifics of how bad the situation has become, how and why the public has been deceived, or the dogmas andhidden agendas behind it all."  -- Thomas Sowell, Hoover Institution, from Inside American Education, The Free Press, 1993

How did our educational system go into an intellectual death spiral?

There are several reasons for it, but let's begin with the quality of our teachers, and then later work backwards.

There was a time, not really so very long ago, when the "schoolmarm" was highly respected, and often the most educated person in the community. She (she was usually a "she" for reasons we'll go into at another time) often taught in a one-room rural school house with a mixed-age population of boys and girls, and used as her staple the famous "McGuffey's Readers." She often had "assistant teachers," a hand-picked few from among her ablest older students.

McGuffey's "First Reader" had diacritical marks to help with the pronunciation of the words and the emphasis of syllables. The "Third Reader" used words like "heath" and "benighted," and its exercises asked the student to "relate the facts of this dialogue," and to answer questions like, "What is this species of composition called?" The "Fourth Reader" had the student reading selections from Hawthorne and Longfellow, while the "Fifth Reader" had selections from Shakespeare.

Early in the 20th century, eighth graders in Kansas were required to pass a spelling exam with words like "elucidation" and "anomosity," and define words such as "zenith" and "panegyric." They also diagrammed sentences and found the interest earned on $900.00 at 8% after 2 years, 2 months, and 6 days. Questions at a comperable level of difficulty were asked about history and geography.

Over time, our textbooks have been made steadily easier to read, even limiting vocabulary; words like "spectacle" and "admired" have been eliminated as "too difficult" in one widely used history textbook. This process of simplifying textbooks has even acquired a name - "dumbing down." Student performance has crashed, and we are obliged to rely more and more often on foreigners to keep our productivity up, either by bringing them in, or by exporting the jobs to them. As early as 1989, for example, New York Life began sending its health insurance claims by air to Ireland for processing, because American employees were making too many mistakes.   

What happened?

It wasn't some sudden genetic mutation in our population that produced a nation of incompetents. The kids' brains haven't turned into mush  and it isn't a lack of passion of the teachers for their field. On the contrary, many young teachers enter the field with a intense desire to help their students.

Sooo... What's the problem?

Unfortunately, while those desiring to enter teaching are often sincere, they are, as a whole, drawn from a pool of the least academically qualified of all our college-bound students. Once in teachers' college, they continue to be poorly educated, and they are exposed to a philosophy that hobbles even the best of them intellectually.

Every one of us knows of a teacher who was intelligent, inspiring, and capable, someone who excited his or her students, and who perhaps even turned some lives around. They're out there. But unfortunately they are not in the majority.

The evidence for the poor quality of both teacher selection and training abounds. When the Educational Testing Service of Princeton checked the SAT scores of nearly a million high school seniors in 1990, it found that those who intended to become teachers scored near the bottom of all those taking the test.

The future teachers got a combined verbal/math score of 864, a socre that could not gain them admission to most middle-level liberal arts colleges. By contrast, students seeking a "general" college education got a combined score of over 1000.

The U.S. Department of Education has complained that "too many teachers are being drawn from the bottom quarter and third of the graduating high school and college students."

Pennsylvania is one of the states where there have been attempts to raise teacher standards. There, it was reported that most prospective teachers had a grade point average of only 2.5 - a C+ - prior to majoring in education, and that the requirements for entry into the teachers colleges could be met with the easiest courses. One academic has said "the educationists have set the lowest possible standards and require the least amount of hard work." The brightest college graduates have contempt for the kind of training given in schools of education, and often refer to the coursework as "Mickey Mouse," and consider the degrees to be "made-up phonies" that they would be embarrassed to be awarded. Education schools and education departments have been called "the intellectual slums" of the universities.

In 1997, another SAT score/career choice correlation was made. Of twenty intended vocations, would-be teachers scored 4th from the bottom, doing better only than vocations such as home economics and vocational training. They scored a full 200 points below those expecting to train in math and science. The average college-bound student has 50 more points on his SAT than his classmate wanting to become a teacher.

The SATs are given to high school students, but there is no improvement in test scores at the college level. The Graduate Record Exam tests college seniors applying for entrance into graduate school. These tests are in business, engineering, health sciences, life sciences, social science, physical science, the humanities, and education. The average score of college seniors entering teaching was dead last, at 1477. The overall average for all takers was 1577; the engineers got 1762, while the physical scientists got 1779.

When the U.S. Army tested college students for draft deferments during the Korean War, more than half the students in the humanities, social scineces, biological sciences, physical sciences and mathematics passed, but only 27% of the education majors did.

Students majoring in education in 1980-81 scored lower on both verbal and math sections of the SAT than students majoring in art, music, theater, the behavioral sciences, the physical sciences, the biological sciences, busines, engineering, mathematics, the humanities, or the health occupations. Undergraduate majors in business and commerce are generally regarded to be of lower quality than many others, but they performed better than education majors on both parts of the SAT. Engineering students tend to be much better mathematically than verbally, but their verbal scores - their weak point - were better than those of education majors. Art and theater majors tend to be better verbally than mathematically, but their math scores were better than education majors.

Worse yet, education majors' test scores have declined over time. In the academic year 1972-73, the average verbal SAT score for future education majors was 418; by 1979-80, it had declined to  389. The same held true at the graduate level, with students in many other fields outscoring education students on the GRE, by 91 points to 259 points, depending on the field.

When you consider that the graduate students in education are the pool supplying not only teachers, but counselors, administrators, and professors of education for the education establishment, the problem of quality across the educational board is seen to be, as one person said, "too critical for euphemism." The most poorly qualified students, taught by the most poorly qualified professors, in the poorest quality courses, are the pool from which most of America's teachers are drawn. They are not only academic bottom-feeders, they are susceptible to fads, especially to non- and anti-intellectual fads that are favored in education.

The fact that so many teachers are drawn from the bottom of the academic heap has profound consequences. Upon retirement from a 35-year career in teaching in an education program, a former professor stated that frustration was one of the reasons he was retiring; he found that the poor quality of the students made his work unrewarding. The students "dislike being educated and educating others." Many of them reject academic rigor because they never enjoyed it themselves, either as children or as adults. Since so many of them were poor students themselves that when they go into the classroom to begin teaching, they create for themselves an environment in which they feel comfortable, an environment which has low acadmic standards and expectations. Since for the most part students accomplish only what is expected of them, this weak academic environment produces a failing educational system.

As pointed out earlier, even the best, brightest, and most determined of our nation's students find it difficult to overcome our impoverished system, and they consistently score well below the top performers in tests of international assessment.

There are some exceptional people in teaching, and while they are few, the difference it makes to be taught by an intelligent teacher who is passionate about the subject can be dramatic. In Texas, a state-wide study found that smart teachers produce smart students, and that the performance of  the teachers themselves on a statewide standardized test correlated positively with the achievement of the students in their classrooms.

An elite group of 600 experienced teachers said that the years they had spent in schools of education were "mind-numbing," and "an abject waiste of time," and that they were taught "the shabbiest psychobabble." In another similar group, there were complaints of "fragmented, superficial course work that had little relevance to classroom realities," and that the preparation work was "woefully inadequate."

That schools of education are not only of poor quality, but unnecessary and even detrimental is demonstrated "in the field," so to speak, by the fact that, as one ascends the ladder of academic results from those produced by government public schools to those produced by the best private schools, fewer and fewer teachers trained in colleges of education, and subsequently certified by the government, are seen.

At many top private schools, there is so much skepticism about government certification that faculties are made up almost exclusively of "non-professionals" without training in education. At one highly regarded school in Wallingford, Connecticut, the assistant headmaster pointed out that of the 172 faculty members, none had an undergraduate degree in edcuation; of the 104 with a master's degree, only 4 were in education; of the 9 who held a doctorate, none were in edcuation.

Evidence for the enthusiasm of many intelligent people who want to teach is the fact that they are often willing to work for from 10 to 40% less that they could make at government schools.

I wish I could say that the problem was limited to teacher qualifications, but there's more - much more - from philosophy, curriculum content, pedagogy, and who it is who sets the educational agenda. Eventually, we'll touch on all of these.

 

 

 

1: Has American Education Become a "Fixer-Upper"?

Number One in the History of American Education series describing how American education went over the edge of the cliff. When the history of American education is completed, other issues such as pedagogy, subject matter, who should be responsible for education, etc. will be put up for discussion.

"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance." Derek Bok, President of Harvard University, 1971-90.

In 1998, the U.S. Department of Education published the results of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, an international assessment of how well the students of twenty-one nations performed academically in these subjects. American students scored 19th. 

Of the sixteen nations that participated in the math portion, our best and brightest, math students taking advanced placement classes, scored 15th.

In calculus, they were 14th out of 15, and in geometry, they were dead last.

In the science portion, advanced placement high school senior physics students, who were the pride of the Intel Science Search, also scored last.

In a statement about the quality of our math students, the Department of Education said that half of 17 year olds lacked the math skills commonly taught in the 8th and 9th grades.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federally conducted assessment of learning in reading, math, science, history, and geography, found the following: Two out of three didn’t know the meaning of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation; half the high school students didn’t recognize Patrick Henry’s challenge “Give me liberty or give me death;” even fewer knew that there had been a War of 1812, or had heard of the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after WWII.

In science, the majority couldn’t figure out that a shadow cast by the rising sun would fall to the west.

In geography, the majority were unable to locate Southeast Asia on a world map.

Only one 11th grader in eight was deemed “adequate” in a test of analytical writing.

The Scholastic Aptitude Test was taken by 70% of 11th graders between 1988 and 1998. During that decade, the scores of “A” students declined by a statistically significant 13 points, even though at the same time, the number of “A” students taking the test increased by 30%.

Why was this?

Quite simply, there was an active attempt to disguise the students’ declining academic achievement by inflating their grades.

TV talk show host Jay Leno, and TV-radio talk show host Sean Hannity often do “Man in the Street” interviews, usually of young adults, many of whom are college students. They run across such things as: the inability to name the three main branches of the government; to recognize a picture of Hillary Clinton; or to name the Vice President of the United States.

The business community has complained that a third of high school graduates need remedial training in the “basics” in order to be able to function in the jobs for which they were hired.

The high-tech industry says that it would not be able to stay in business if their employees were limited to hiring American-educated graduates; they must hire large numbers of better-educated foreigners in order to maintain productivity.

Our graduate schools award about 45% of the Ph.D.s in the hard sciences such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, engineering, and computer science to foreigners, without whom many departments in these subjects would have to close their doors.

As far back as 1983, in a stunning federal report called “A Nation at Risk,” it was shown that student performance was falling at all levels, from kindergarten through twelfth grade. The situation was considered so serious that it was described in terms of a plot: If an enemy of our country wanted to do us grave harm, it would design and implement the educational system we had then. Today, nearly 25 years later, the situation remains essentially unchanged.

Has our educational system become a “fixer-upper”?

Some - and I am among them - believe it has been brought to its knees, and that our culture, our country, and our very civilization are at serious risk as a result.

Next time, I'll begin to discuss how we started down the road that led us to this point.