Before there was anything remotely resembling PUBLIC education, or Schools as we know them today, there were “private” and “religious” instruction in classes that were hit and miss, not part of a regional or national plan. People knew their children would benefit from reading and their ministers told them that reading was required to understand the Bible and would save their souls up in heaven.
Since those early days in the Colonial period the idea of a “public” education took root and there was a movement for a SYSTEM of such schools where every child would be able to learn to read, write, compute and get a good grounding in civic knowledge. This would enable him to exercise the right to vote which came first for property owners, next for workers, then for ex-slaves and finally for women.
Today there are very large, expensive systems of education for the children of the wealthy, the middle class and the religiously oriented. They are not “public” in the sense that tax monies from all are used to pay for them. The movement rolling efficiently today is to use public monies to pay for private and exclusive education for the privileged and the lucky.
Examples in the first story on the Editorial Page of the NY Times this morning are where the attempt to structure public school’s populations so that there is a great deal of mixing but no loading the population with one group or another. This is difficult to achieve but the efforts sometimes leads to a further flight from public education into other schooling systems creating a hodge-podge that the organizers of Public Education in the early 19th Century did not imagine.
The first public schools were created after arguments prevailed that it was cheaper to build schools than jails. This has been said before but the reasoning seems to escape those who wish to have their children escape going to public schools.
One of the best arguments for public schools was the small neighborhood school where the principal and teachers knew the name and predilections of each child. The High Schools were created to provide a “college – like” opportunity for those who obviously could not get into private (usually religiously connected) colleges. The Colleges were originally established to provide educated ministers for churches and other professions but the main purpose was religion.
The advocates of schools today do not accept democracy depends on equal education for all and that schools that segregate by privilege defeat that purpose.