Chapter 10 Notes

In early colonial days, most education took place in the home, in the church, and through apprentice programs, with instruction dominated by religious teachings. While today's public school systems hardly resemble their colonial roots, many of our current controversies are rooted in the past. We continue to dispute the role of religion in schools, differences in state government education policies, and inequities in educational opportunities for women, people of color, and the poor. In 1647, Massachusetts passed the "Old Deluder Satan Law," requiring that every town of 50 households appoint and pay a teacher of reading and writing, and every town of 100 households provides a Latin grammar school. This law offered a model for other communities and made the establishment of schools a practical reality. Colonial Latin grammar schools prepared white boys for a university education. In the 1700s, academies were established; they were more secular and practical in their curriculum and were open to girls. The Constitution has helped to determine the shape of modern education in two ways. By omitting any mention of national education as a federal responsibility, the Constitution left the issue to the states as each state government set-up its own policy, practice, and means of funding schools. During the nineteenth century, the public began to feel that schools should serve the poor as well as the wealthy. As leader of the common school movement, Horace Mann is sometimes called the father of the public school. By the time of the Civil War, the concept of the elementary public school had become widely accepted. Public high schools caught on much more slowly than elementary schools. But, as the country moved from agrarian to industrial and from rural to urban, resistance to public funding of high schools decreased. Eventually, high schools came to represent democratic ideals of equal opportunity; later, many believed that education could be a panacea for societal problems. From the Committee of Ten in 1892 to the 1983 publication of A Nation at Risk, waves of educational reform have become part of the American landscape. While reform movements have not reached a consensus as to the best educational system for the nation, one idea remains key: schools should have a central role in maintaining a vibrant democracy. Over the course of its development, the nation's educational system has been supported by a rich variety of instructional materials, including the colonial hornbook; the nation's first real textbook, New England Primer; Noah Webster's American Spelling Book, which replaced The New England Primer as the most widely used elementary textbook; and McGuffey Readers, emphasizing hard work, patriotism, and morality. McGuffey Readers sold more than 100 million copies between 1836 and 1920. Progressivism, with John Dewey as its most notable advocate, had a significant impact on education in the twentieth century. Its emphasis on learning by doing and shaping curricula around children's interests has influenced many educators to this day. Dewey and others have come under frequent attack, however, first by conservative extremists of the 1950s, who saw progressivism as communistic and contrary to American values. Later, in the wake of the Soviet Sputnik launching, progressivism was blamed for causing U.S. students to lag behind in important subjects. While progressivism has ceased to be the organized educational movement it once was, many of its ideas continue to be debated and re-examined. While the Constitution leaves most of the responsibility for schooling to the states, the federal government has played an increasing role in education over the past century. National programs have included targeted funds for such programs as the National Defense Education Act, as well as legislation and court action designed to fight segregation and other forms of discrimination in the schools. During the 1980s and 1990s, more conservative forces decreased federal funding, but not federal influence in education.