Introductory Material
Education in Early America
"America's noble experiment—universal education for all citizens—is a cornerstone of our democracy." — from School: The Story of American Education produced by PBS1
To construct an understanding of the goals of our educational system many questions must be posed for discussion:
Why do we have compulsory education in this country and why is it free?
Who is allowed to attend school and where are they allowed to attend school?
What are teachers allowed to teach?
Why do we have compulsory education in this country and why is it free?
Today's students know it is the law for them to attend school but many of them are at a loss as to why mandatory attendance is a legal issue. Few think about the original goal of education when the early Americans established their ideas about what kind of education they wanted for their children. Both boys and girls studied the basics deemed necessary for everyone to learn: religion, reading, writing, some history. Girls also learned needlework and household management. Boys were given more education than girls and studied Latin, higher mathematics and celestial navigation (sailing ships by the stars). Young children often attended a Dame school. This has been likened to a nursery school or a family day care where a housewife would teach children their ABCs, numbers, and prayers. Some well-to-do families sent their older sons to England to study law or medicine. Children from poor families received no education and were apprenticed at a young age. Once apprenticed, the child would be taught as much as he needed to know to do his job.
Early European settlers viewed education as a necessary accomplishment to ward off evil. If citizens could read the Bible they would be safe from Satan. Puritans, in particular, believed that people were inherently bad and had to be taught to be good. Education made good Christians and valuable members of society. In light of this, education became a necessary means to becoming a worthwhile adult.
In the 1640s, Massachusetts established compulsory education laws. These laws mandated that children must be educated by their parents or masters. This meant being able to read well enough to understand the Bible, manage a household, and run a farm. In 1647, Massachusetts passed a law known as the Deluder Satan Act that required towns of fifty or more families to open a school and hire a teacher, thus making schools free for the children of that particular town. In the 1680s, Quakers in Philadelphia established the first public school. Known for their tolerance of others' beliefs and practices, the Quakers were the first to establish a school open to children of various faiths.
Who is allowed to attend school and where are they allowed to attend school?
But there were still a number of children who did not attend school at all in this land in the late 1600s. Native Americans, who were largely without written language (except for the Cherokee), did not run schools and European settlers certainly did not invite Native American children to their schools. As a people who were constantly being uprooted and disenfranchised, there were no schools provided for Native Americans for many years. Only when Reservations were established was any formal education designed and provided for Native Americans. Even today, schools located in existing Reservations are substandard and largely overlooked.
Over one hundred years from the time the first Africans were brought to this country as slaves, Horace Mann was born in 1796. After spending the greater part of the first half of the nineteenth century in politics, he became the First Secretary of the State Board of Education in Massachusetts in 1837 and is today acknowledged as the father of American public school education. Throughout his career, Mann worked for improvements in education. From establishing libraries and teacher training centers to raising public support and awareness of the needs for educational improvements to writing several Annual Reports for the "Common School Journal" of education, Mann's influence reached beyond his home state to encourage growth and improvement in education throughout the nation.
When Africans were brought to this country and sold as slaves they were considered to be property and had no access to education. A 1787 petition to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Bay pleaded for African American children to be allowed to benefit from the free public schools in Boston.2 In many Southern states it was against the law to teach a slave to read and write. Some slaves became educated in spite of the fact it was a crime and some slave owners even taught their slaves to read and write.
Following the end of the Civil War and the Emancipation of the slaves, a host of social problems were created. In addition to where the newly-freed African-Americans would live and work was the question of education for the African-American children. While school segregation continued in the South until Brown (and in many instances, even after Brown), Louisiana began desegregating its schools in 1869. For about ten years after the war the Freedman's Bureau tried to help former slaves become acclimated to their new status. The Bureau helped to establish churches and serve as a resource for former slaves to consult, but funding ran out and President Johnson seized lands distributed to the slaves by the Bureau and returned them to their former white owners. After only a short time the Bureau was discontinued.
The struggles for equality in education continued for the next half century. During that time many other events occurred which affected life in America including World War I and the 1922 Compulsory Education Act. This legislation required parents to send their children to public schools. The Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925) case argued the constitutionality of a law forcing parents to send their children to a public rather parochial or other private school. The court did indeed declare the law unconstitutional. While government can demand compulsory education it cannot determine where children must be educated.
The twentieth century saw many Supreme Court cases involving education. The most important of these was Brown v. Board of Education, begun in 1952, which argued that an elementary school child should not have to walk a mile through a dangerous railroad yard to attend school when there was an elementary school only seven blocks from her home. This case mushroomed into a national case for ending racial segregation in all schools throughout the country. The very fact that the Supreme Court participated in a case such as this brought to light the importance of education and the absolute necessity of refuting Plessy v. Ferguson as did the seriousness with which the American public split, from those who defied the ruling to those who upheld it and worked toward making school integration happen.
Hailed by many as the most important decision of the Supreme Court in the twentieth century (or ever) Brown v. Board of Education, forever changed education in this country.
What are teachers allowed to teach?
Litigation involving educational rights took off after the triumph of Brown and its accompanying cases with litigation heard on various rights, specifically the following cases involving school prayer: Engel v. Vitale, (1962), Abington School District v. Schempp, (1963) and Wallace v. Jaffree, (1985). Other cases addressing censorship of students' speeches and writings, such as Bethel School District v. Fraser, 478 U.S. 675 (1986), Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico 457 U.S. 853 (1982), and acts of Congress concerning the rights of students with disabilities to obtain an education (The Americans with Disabilities Act 1990) followed.
What this means to today's students
Today's students are largely unaware that prayer was a routine part of the school day until the middle of the twentieth century. They are routinely taught about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Montgomery Boycott but what many of them do not realize is that school is a privilege for everyone and that education has a direct bearing on their futures. Examination of a futuristic society where the right to read has been outlawed may make them reevaluate their own educational opportunities. This vision of the future will present to the students what a gift it is to be able to read and think and to be allowed to do so.
Landmark Cases
Cases involving (or influencing) school segregation:
Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) held that no African American could be a citizen of the United States and therefore none could bring a lawsuit in a Federal Court.
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) held that segregated (separate but equal) facilities for African Americans did not violate the U.S Constitution.
Brown v. Board of Education (1954) held that school segregation did violate the Constitution.
Engel v. Vitale, (1962), Abington School District v. Schempp, (1963) and Wallace v. Jaffree, (1985), Bethel School District v. Fraser, 478 U.S. 675 (1986), Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District v. Pico 457 U.S. 853 (1982) These cases all involve school prayer and are included for those who wish to further their study of First Amendment causes.
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