Education: Free and Compulsory

It is important to consider the goals of the establishment of public schools, particularly since professional educators were the prime force in both the establishment of free common schools and of compulsory instruction. In the first place, the desire for public schools by such quasi-libertarians as Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine was based on a belief that republican government is best suited for well-schooled citizens, and that the government should make such institutions available for those too poor to afford them privately.47 Certainly, many of those who advocated the establishment of public schools did it simply for this reason.

There were other and more dangerous goals, however, particularly among the educationists who were the main forces in the drive, and who took control of the state boards of education and teachers’ training colleges which instructed the public school teachers. As early as 1785, the Rev. Jeremy Belknap, preaching before the New Hampshire General Court, advocated equal and compulsory education for all, emphasizing that the children belong to the State and not to their parents.48 The influential Benjamin Rush wanted general education in order to establish a uniform, homogeneous, and egalitarian nation.

The doctrine of obedience to the State was the prime goal of the father of the public school system in North Carolina, Archibald D. Murphey. In 1816, Murphey planned a system of state schools as follows:

all children will be taught in them … in these schools the precepts of morality and religion should be inculcated, and habits of subordination and obedience be formed…. The state, in the warmth of her solicitude for their welfare, must take charge of those children, and place them in school where their minds can be enlightened and their hearts can be trained to virtue.49

By the 1820s, their goals of compulsion and statism were already germinating over the country, and particularly flourishing in New England, although the individualist tradition was still strong. One factor that increased the power of New England in diffusing the collectivist idea in education was the enormous migration from that area. New Englanders swarmed south and west out of New England, and carried their zeal for public schooling and for State compulsion with them.

Into this atmosphere was injected the closest that the country had seen to Plato’s idea, of full State communistic control over the children. This was the plan of two of the first socialists in America — Frances Wright and Robert Dale Owen. Owen was the son of one of the first British “Utopian” Socialists, and with Robert Owen, his father, had attempted an experiment in a voluntary-communist community in New Harmony, Indiana. Frances Wright was a Scotswoman who had also been at New Harmony, and with Owen, opened a newspaper called the Free Enquirer. Their main objective was to campaign for their compulsory education system. Wright and Owen outlined their scheme as follows:

It is national, rational, republican education; free for all at the expense of all; conducted under the guardianship of the State, and for the honor, the happiness, the virtue, the salvation of the state.50

The major aim of the plan was that equality be implanted in the minds, the habits, the manners, and the feelings, so that eventually fortunes and conditions would be equalized. Instead of the intricate apparatus of common schools, high schools, seminaries, etc., Wright and Owen advocated that the states simply organize a series of institutions for the “general reception” of all children living within that district. These establishments would be devoted to the complete rearing of the various age groups of children. The children would be forced to live at these places twenty-four hours a day. The parents would be allowed to visit their children from time to time. From the age of two every child would be under the care and guidance of the State.

In these nurseries of a free nation, no inequality must be allowed to enter. Fed at a common board; clothed in a common garb … raised in the exercise of common duties … in the exercise of the same virtues, in the enjoyment of the same pleasures; in the study of the same nature; in pursuit of the same object … say! Would not such a race … work out the reform of society and perfect the free institutions of America?

Owen was quite insistent that the system not “embrace anything less than the whole people.” The effect will be to “regenerate America in one generation. It will make but one class out of the many.” Frances Wright revealed the aim of the system starkly, calling on the people to overthrow a moneyed aristocracy and priestly hierarchy. “The present is a war of class.”

Thus, we see that a new element has been introduced into the old use of compulsory education on behalf of State absolutism. A second goal is absolute equality and uniformity, and a compulsory school system was seen by Owen and Wright to be ideally suited to this task. First, the habits and minds and feelings of all the children must be molded into absolute equality; and then the nation will be ripe for the final step of equalization of property and incomes by means of State coercion.

Why did Owen and Wright insist on seizing the children for twenty-four hours a day, from the age of two on, only releasing them when the school age was over at sixteen? As Owen declared:

In republican schools, there must be no temptation to the growth of aristocratical prejudices. The pupils must learn to consider themselves as fellow citizens, as equals. Respect ought not to be paid to riches, or withheld from poverty. Yet, if the children from these state Schools are to go every evening, the one to his wealthy parent’s soft carpeted drawing room, and the other to its poor father’s or widowed mother’s comfortless cabin, will they return the next day as friends and equals?

Likewise, differences in quality of clothing invoked feelings of envy on the part of the poor and disdain by the rich — which should be eliminated by forcing one uniform upon both. Throughout his plans there runs the hatred of human diversity, particularly of the higher living standards of the rich as compared to the poor. To effect his plan for thoroughgoing equalization by force, the schools

must receive the children, not for six hours a day, but altogether must feed them, clothe them, lodge them; must direct not their studies only, but their occupations and amusements and must care for them until their education is completed.

It might be asserted that the Owen-Wright plan is unimportant; that it had purely crackpot significance and little influence. The contrary is true. In the first place, the plan had a great deal of influence: certainly the ideas of promoting equality were dominant in the thinking of the influential group of educationists that established and controlled the public schools of the nation during the 1830s and 1840s. Furthermore, the Owen plan pushes the whole idea of compulsory state schooling to its logical conclusion, not only by promoting State absolutism and absolute equality — to which the system is admirably suited — but also because Owen recognized that he had to educate the “whole child” in order to mold the coming generation sufficiently. Is it not probable that the “progressive” drive to educate the “whole child” aims to mold the child’s entire personality in lieu of the complete Owen-Wright compulsory communist seizure, which no one in America would accept?

The influence of the Owen-Wright plan is attested to by the fact that a contemporary laudatory historian of the public-school movement places it first in his story, and devotes considerable space to it.51  Cremin reports that a great many newspapers reprinted Owen’s essays on the plan, and approved them. Owen began expounding his project in the late 1820s and continued on until the late 1840s, when he wrote the elaborated plan with Miss Wright. It had a considerable influence on workers’ groups. It exerted a great influence on the widely noted report of a committee of Philadelphia workers in 1829 to report on education in Pennsylvania. The report called for equality and equal education and proper training for all. And this and similar reports “had a considerable influence in preparing the way for the progressive legislation of the middle thirties.”52

Shortly thereafter, there arose on the American scene a remarkable phenomenon: a closely-knit group of educationists. Cremin calls them “educational reformers” whose tireless propaganda was instrumental in pushing through public schools, who then came to control the schools through positions on the state boards of education, as superintendents, etc.; through the control of teachers’ training institutions, and thereby of the teachers. This same grouping, under different names, continues to dominate primary and secondary education to this day, with their own tightly knit ideas and jargon. Most important, they have managed to impose their standards on state certification requirements for teachers, so that no one can teach in a public school who does not go through a course of teacher-training instruction run by the educationists. It was this same group that pushed through compulsory education, and advocated more and more “progressive” education, and therefore they deserve close scrutiny.

Some Americans pride themselves that their educational system can never be tyrannical, because it is not federally, but state, controlled. This makes very little difference, however. Not only does this still mean the government, whether state or Federal, but also the educationists, through national associations and journals, are almost completely coordinated. In actuality, therefore, the school systems are nationally and centrally controlled, and formal Federal control would only be the crowning step in the drive for national conformity and control.

Another important source of tyranny and absolutism in the school system is the fact that the teachers are under Civil Service. As a result, once a formal examination is passed-and this has little relation to actual teaching competence-and a little time elapses, the teacher is on the public payroll, and foisted on the children for the rest of his working life. The government bureaucracy has fostered Civil Service as an extraordinarily powerful tool of entrenchment and permanent domination. Tyranny by majority vote may be unpleasant enough, but at least if the rulers are subject to democratic checks, they have to please the majority of the voters. But government officials who cannot be voted out at the next election are not subject to any democratic check whatever. They are permanent tyrants. “Taking something out of politics’’ by putting it under Civil Service certainly does “increase the morale” of the bureaucracy. It elevates them into near-perpetual absolute rulers in their sphere of activity. The fact that teachers are under Civil Service is one of the most damning indictments against the American compulsory system of today.

To return to the first educationists, the main figures in the movement were such men as New Englanders Horace Mann in Massachusetts, and Henry Barnard in Connecticut. Also James Carter, Calvin Stowe, Caleb Mills, Samuel Lewis, and many others. What were their methods and their goals?

One of the methods to achieve their aims was to found a welter of interlocking educational organizations. One of the first was the American Lyceum, organized in 1826 by Josiah Holbrook. A major aim was to influence and to try to dominate state and local boards of education. In 1827, the first “Society for the Promotion of Public Schools” was opened in Pennsylvania. This society engaged in an extensive program of correspondence, pamphlets, press releases, etc. Similar organizations were formed in the early 1830s throughout the West, with lectures, meetings, memorials to legislatures, and lobbying featured. Hundreds of such associations formed throughout the land. One of the principal ones was the American Institute of Instruction, established in New England in 1830. The annual meetings and papers of this Institute were one of the leading clearing-houses and centers of educationist movements.

Secondly, the educationists formed educational journals by the dozens, through which the leading principles were disseminated to the followers. Principal ones were the American Journal of Education, the American Annals of Education, the Common School Assistant, and the Common School Journal. The most important route of educationist influence was obtaining leading positions in the state school systems. Thus, Horace Mann, editor of the Common School Journal, became secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, and his annual reports during the 1840s were extremely influential in setting the educationists‘ “line.” Henry Barnard became Secretary of the Connecticut Board of Education, Calvin Wiley became head of the public schools in North Carolina, Caleb Mills in Indiana, Samuel Lewis in Ohio, etc.

The educationists, particularly under the influence of Horace Mann, did not go as far as advocating compulsory education. But they went up to that point in calling on everyone to go to the public schools, and in disparaging private schools. They were particularly eager to induce everyone to go to the public schools so that all might be molded in the direction of equality. Virginia’s educationist Charles Mercer wrote a eulogy of the common school which it might be well to compare with Owen’s plan:

The equality on which our institutions are founded cannot be too intimately interwoven in the habits of thinking among our youth; and it is obvious that it would be greatly promoted by their continuance together, for the longest possible period; in the same schools of juvenile instruction; to sit upon the same forms; engage in the same competitions; partake of the same recreations and amusements, and pursue the same studies, in connection with each other; under the same discipline, and in obedience to the same authority.

And Mercer was the leader in Virginia’s educationist movement. The vigorous championing of the public school’s leveling role appeared again and again in the educationists’ literature. Samuel Lewis particularly stressed that the common schools would take a diverse population and mold them into “one people;” Theodore Edson exulted that in such schools the good children must learn to mingle with the bad ones, as they will have to do in later life. The influential Orville Taylor, editor of the Common School Assistant, declared: “let all send to it (the common school); this is duty.” And in 1837, words very much like Mercer’s and Owen’s:

where high and low are taught in the same class, and out of the same book, and by the same teacher. This is a republican education.53

Hand in hand with such sentiments went disparagement of the private schools. This theme appeared almost universally in the educationist writings. James Carter stressed it in the 1820s; Orville Taylor declaimed in terms reminiscent of Owen that if a rich child is sent to a private school, he will be taught “that he is better than a public school child. This is not republicanism.”

The educationists thought it essential to inculcate the children with moral principles, and this meant religious faith as well. They could not be sectarian, however, and still induce all the religious groups to send their children to public schools. Therefore, they decided to teach the fundamentals of Protestant Christianity in the public schools, as the common faith of everyone. This solution might not have been too glaring in the early period, but heavy immigration of Catholics soon after mid-century created insuperable difficulties in such a program. Another interesting facet of this period was an indication of the great limitation imposed on the educationists because instruction was still voluntary. Since parents could choose or not to send their children to the public schools, the teaching bureaucracy could not have full sway — the parents were still in control. Therefore, there could not be any religious absolutism. Furthermore, Horace Mann was emphatic in insisting that for all controversial political subjects, the teacher must be neutral. If he is not strictly neutral, then the parents of opposing views would not send their children to the public schools, and the ideal of uniform, equal education for all would be defeated.

Thus, we see the enormous importance of voluntary education as a check on tyranny. The public schools had to be kept politically as well as religiously neutral.54 One basic flaw in this plan, of course, is that in dealing with political and economic subjects, it is almost impossible to treat them intelligently and accurately while being strictly neutral and avoiding all controversy. It is obviously the best plan, however, given the establishment of public schools.

The educationists chafed at these restrictions, and looked toward the Prussian model where these difficulties did not arise. Actually, they were only politically neutral where no great controversies existed, and they inculcated American nationalism and uniformity of language. Calvin Stowe urged adoption of the Prussian methods, although he claimed of course that in America the results would be republican and not despotic. Stowe urged the universal placing of school duty on the same plane as military duty. The influential Stowe spoke in almost the same terms, in 1836, as had Martin Luther three centuries before:

If a regard to the public safety makes it right for a government to compel the citizens to do military duty when the country is invaded, the same reason authorizes the government to compel them to provide for the education of their children — for no foes are so much to be dreaded as ignorance and vice. A man has no more right to endanger the state by throwing upon it a family of ignorant and vicious children, than he has to give admission to spies of an invading army. If he is unable to educate his children the state should assist him — if unwilling, it should compel him. General education is as much certain, and much less expensive, means of defense, than military array…. Popular education is not so much a want as a duty … as education … is provided by the parents, and paid for by those who do not profit by its results, it is a duty.55

Another principle of the Prussian system which Stowe admired was its compulsory uniformity of language. He also praised its vigorous compulsory attendance and anti-truant laws.

Stowe’s report on Prussian education was enormously influential among the educationists, and they took his lead on the subject. Mann and Barnard held similar views, although the former hesitated on compulsion. Barnard was not reluctant, however. Praising the Prussian educational system, he wrote:

The regular attendance at the school shall be an object of specific control and the most active vigilance; for this is the source from which flow all the advantages the school can produce. It would be very fortunate if parents and children were always willing of themselves…. Unhappily this is not the case, particularly in great cities. Although it is lamentable to be forced to use constraint, it is almost always necessary to commence with it.56

Horace Mann’s sincerity was certainly open to question. In his annual reports, he denounced property rights, and talked of social control and the one Commonwealth’s property. On the other hand, while asking for gifts from the industrialists for the schools, he abandoned this line and his talk of political neutrality, and declared that he thoroughly approved of indoctrination against Jacksonian democracy and mobocracy.57 Henry Barnard also approved of indoctrination, for property as against mob rebellion. It is obvious that the educationists chafed hugely against the restraints of voluntarism. What was needed to permit State indoctrination and uniformity was the Prussian system of compulsion. This was adopted in the late nineteenth century, and the wraps were off; neutrality would no longer need to be imposed or claimed.

Another educationist declaration on behalf of State authority was made by the influential Josiah Quincy, Mayor of Boston and president of Harvard, who declared in 1848 that every child should be educated to obey authority. George Emerson, in 1873, asserted that it was very necessary for people to be accustomed from their earliest years to submit to authority. These comments were printed in leading educationist journals Common School Journal and School and Schoolmaster, respectively. The influential Jacob Abbott declared, in 1856, that a teacher must lead his students to accept the existing government. The Superintendent of Public Instruction of Indiana declared in 1853 that school policy was to mold all the people into one people with one common interest.

• 47Cremin, The History of Compulsory Education in New England.
• 48Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background (New York: Macmillan, 1934), p. 104.
• 49Archibald D. Murphey, The Papers of Archibald D. Murphey, 2 vols. (Raleigh, N.C.: E.M. Uzzell, 1914), pp. 53 — 54.
• 50Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright, Tracts on Republican Government and National Education (London, 1847). Also, see Cremin, The History of Compulsory Education in New England.
• 51Cremin, op. cit, pp. 37 ff.
• 52Ibid.
• 53Common School Assistant, vol. 2, 1837, p. 1. For Mercer’s statement, see Charles Fenton Mercer, A Discourse on Popular Education (Princeton, 1826). Mercer’s expression antedated Owen’s. Also see the various annual lectures before the American Institute of Instruction.
• 54Horace Mann’s Twelfth Annual Report, p. 89.
• 55Calvin E. Stowe, The Prussian System of Public Instruction and its Applicability to the United States (Cincinnati, 1830).
• 56Henry Barnard, National Education in Europe (New York, 1854).
• 57Compare Cremin, The History of Compulsory Education in New England and Curti, The Social Ideas of American Educators.