Separating School & State: How To LiberateAmerican Families

 

Separating School & State: How To LiberateAmerican Families by Sheldon Richman

This is taken from Sheldon Richman's book, Separating School & State: How To Liberate American Families.  Chapter 3: Why There Are Public Schools 

Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property. Let him be taught to love his family, but let him be taught at the same time that he must forsake and even forget them when the welfare of his country requires it. - Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence

Why were the public schools ever established? Did the private sector fail to set up schools or set up too few of them? Were large segments of society barred from obtaining education? Was the education of poor quality? The answer to the last three questions is no. The public schools were not established to make up for any deficiency in people's ability to learn to read, write, do arithmetic, and acquire knowledge of other subjects. The government schools were set up for another purpose entirely.  

As Jack High and Jerome Ellig have written, "Private education was widely demanded in the late 18th and 19th centuries in Great Britain and America. The private supply of education was highly responsive to that demand, with the consequence that large numbers of children from all classes of society received several years of education." High and Ellig show that the government's involvement in education "displaced private education, sometimes deliberately stifling it [and] altered the kind of education that was offered, mainly to the detriment of the poorer working classes. "In colonial times through the early Republic period, when private schools were the rule, a great many people were educated, despite the relatively low living standards of the day. As the historian Robert Seybolt wrote: 

In the hands of private schoolmasters the curriculum expanded rapidly. Their schools were commercial ventures, and, consequently, competition was keen.... Popular demands, and the element of competition, forced them not only to add new courses of instruction, but constantly to improve their methods and technique of instruction.

Schooling in that early period was plentiful, innovative, and well within the reach of the common people.What effect did it have? High and Ellig note that 80 percent of New Yorkers leaving wills could sign their names. Other data show that from 1650 to 1 795, male literacy climbed from 60 to 90 percent; female literacy went from 30 to 45 percent. Between 1800 and 1840, literacy in the North rose from 75 percent to between 91 and 97 percent. And in the South during the same span, the rate grew from 50-60 percent to 81 percent . Indeed, Senator Edward M. Kennedy's office issued a paper not long ago stating that the literacy rate in Massachusetts has never been as high as it was before compulsory schooling was instituted. Before 1850, when Massachusetts became the first state in the United States to force children to go to school, literacy was at 98 percent. When Kennedy's office released the paper, it was 91 percent.  

According to Carl F. Kaestle, "Literacy was quite general in the middle reaches of society and above. The best generalization possible is that New York, like other American towns of the Revolutionary period, had a high literacy rate relative to other places in the world, and that literacy did not depend primarily upon the schools." Another indication of the high rate of literacy is book sales. Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense sold 120,000 copies in a colonial population of 3 million (counting the 20 percent who were slaves)the equivalent of 10 million copies today. In 1818, when the United States had a population of under 20 million, Noah Webster's Spelling Book sold over 5 million copies. Walter Scott's novels sold that many copies between 1813 and 1823, which would be the equivalent of selling 60 million copies in the United States today. The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper sold millions of copies. John Taylor Gatto notes that Scott's and Cooper's books were not easy reading. European visitors to early nineteenth-century America - such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Pierre du Pont de Nemours marveled at how well educated the people were. MORE