I wanted to write a post outlining the development of our modern schooling by looking at what was written by the people who were there, creating the systems that we have now. I ran into two related problems, however: first, there is over two hundred years of writings to go through from hundreds of men and women, and second, during most of that period, they wrote as though they were being paid by the word. And maybe they were.
I found myself with hundreds of pages of both source material as well as analysis of those sources, and it quickly grew to thousands. I don't really have time to do a deep dive into all of it, and am hampered by the additional problem that not only is the past a different country, it has a different language as well. There are many times, working through a dense two page paragraph, that I know I’m missing something that the author is just taking for granted, something that everyone reading it would know.
Some writers, like Thomas Jefferson, are easier to understand than others, and thankfully, when people are trying to explain or persuade, they often make an effort to make their positions easily understandable. Sometimes the opposite happens, however, and even in text, you can see some of these people spewing words in the hope that something will be believed.
And then you hit the cultural snags.
I came across this when I discovered the Orphan Trains. From the 1850s to the 1920s, cities in the eastern United States would round up homeless children and ship them to the Midwest as indentured servants. And in my last post, I pointed out that at least in Boston, the reform schools had a similar program, even though they knew the children had parents.
For most people reading this, the idea that your children could simply disappear, and you would never know what happened to them is horrifying. And to then discover that the state had declared them to be orphans, and then sent them across state lines to work as unpaid employees until they turned 21, and all sorts of alarm bells should be going off.
Except... the values and standards of our age are not the same as they were a mere 50 years ago. Go back one hundred years or more, and our assumptions about what is acceptable at either the personal or the political level cannot be used as a gauge of what their assumptions might have been.
It’s hard to judge the people of the past. Was Thomas Jefferson a hypocrite to write “All men are created equal” while owning slaves? In the 21st century, we say yes, and obviously so. But it wasn’t as clear cut in the 18th and 19th centuries, and for many reasons. How would we feel if we discovered that our food today had been harvested and processed by orphans that had been rounded up in New York City and sent to work on farms in Kansas and Iowa? Probably not the same as someone living in 1895.
So how do we look at the past, especially when it comes to the systems and institutions that have persisted into the present age? That becomes a very difficult question to answer for a very different reason.
Let’s go back to Thomas Jefferson. In searching for the origins of compulsory education, I kept seeing Jefferson cited as an example of the founding fathers wanting to have public, state funded education that all children would be required to attend. Yet reading through his plan for Virginia, the Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge, 18 June 1779, there is no mention of requiring parents to send their children to the schools the bill proposes. Instead, the primary schools are described this way:
At every of these schools shall be taught reading, writing, and common arithmetick, and the books which shall be used therein for instructing the children to read shall be such as will at the same time make them acquainted with Græcian, Roman, English, and American history. At these schools all the free children, male and female, resident within the respective hundred, shall be intitled to receive tuition gratis, for the term of three years, and as much longer, at their private expence, as their parents, guardians or friends, shall think proper.
So just by this one document, we have public education, but nothing like our current system. All free children, both boys and girls, are entitled to three free years of primary education. The state is required to set up the schools and pay the teachers, which means taxes on all the citizens, but parents are not forced to send their children. The curriculum is also fairly straightforward: reading, writing, arithmetic, and history. It also makes no mention of the age of the children being offered this schooling, again leaving it to the parents’ discretion. Further education is also made available, but at the parent’s expense, and grammar schools are also provided for, which provide what we would consider high school level education. This is not guaranteed for all children, but only for a select few who are deemed suited for it, or for those willing to pay for it. And the control of each primary school fell to a geographic division called a hundred, which equaled about six square miles.
In his Bill for Establishing Elementary Schools, [ca. 9 September 1817], he actually warned that having the state manage just the funding for the primary schools from the general fund “they would be badly managed, depraved by abuses, & would exhaust the whole literary fund”.
Still, he wanted three years of free education for all children. Although some might argue this implies compulsory attendance, in the same document as above, we read the following:
it is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings & ideas by the forcible asportation [“the action of carrying off” (OED)] & education of the infant against the will of the father.
This makes it clear that Jefferson strongly opposed forcing children to go to school. He went on to propose that only those who could read and write should be allowed to vote, which is an entirely different debate. It should be noted, however, that he thought the threat of their children not being allowed to vote would be all the encouragement that parents needed to send those children to school.
So how do we make sense of what has happened, and how to proceed? I recommend keeping in mind Chesterton’s Fence:
In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.
I sometimes believe that most of the dysfunctional institutions in our nation come from people who ignored this advice. The rest come from those who followed it too closely.