Public Schools are quintessentially American. Attending public school is probably the most important common experience undergone by people all over our diverse country.
Today education advocates often argue that good schools enable us to compete globally; in his day, Benjamin Franklin also thought that education should prepare students for business and the professions. IN the 1820s and ’30s, though, political concerns drove the common school movement more than economic ones. Newly emerging factory jobs did not necessarily require literacy; that would soon be demonstrated by the influx of unskilled workers who would be hired to operate those factories as the demand for labor grew. The reason to educate the workers was primarily to domesticate them for participation in the civic life of the American republic. The election of the unpolished frontiersman Andrew Jackson in 1828 heralded the expanded political influence of non-elites. Only education, it was thought, could save the republic from collapsing into a mere popular democracy in which competing social forces fought for the resources of the state, with the more numerous poorer classes inevitably victorious.
Noah Feldman, Divided By God p. 57, 58-9
According to Feldman, Education was thought to tame or cultivate a person for republicanism, taking a person out of the realm of voting in self-interest into the realm of voting for the common good.
One Comment
I learned earlier this year that the Sunday School program that became so big in the US in the last century and a half had the same aims in mind, to make good moralistic little young people who would in turn become good Americans.