1.5) Early Republic Proponents of Common Schools to Build a New Nation

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From the course by University of Pennsylvania

American Education Reform: History, Policy, Practice

оценки

University of Pennsylvania

American Education Reform: History, Policy, Practice

оценки

Discover what shapes how we talk about schools today by exploring the history of U.S. education reform. Engage with the main actors, key decisions, and major turning points in this history. See how social forces drive reform. Learn about how the critical tensions embedded in U.S. education policy and practice apply to schools nationally, globally— and where you live.

From the lesson

The Colonial Period and Early Republic

This module looks at the sources of education in Colonial America; factors that motivated the acquisition of literacy in the colonies; formal educational institutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; post-Revolution republican visions of free public schools; characteristics of elementary schools in the early Republic; and Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia Academy.

Course Overview4:57

1.1) Course Introduction4:03

1.2) U.S. Education - An Early Transformation 10:23

1.3) Literacy in the Colonial Period7:21

1.4) Institutions of Colonial Education7:21

1.5) Early Republic Proponents of Common Schools to Build a New Nation5:32

1.6) Early Republic Schooling in the United States9:08

1.7) Benjamin Franklin’s Academy6:43

Meet the Instructors

Dr. John L. Puckett
Professor of Education
Graduate School of Education
Dr. Michael Charles Johanek
Senior Fellow
Graduate School of Education

Hello.

Today we look at the two most prominent late 18th century champions of state

systems of free public primary schools, Thomas Jefferson and Dr. Benjamin Rush.

Though their arguments fell largely on deaf ears among their contemporaries,

a later generation of education reformers,

notably Horace Mann of Massachusetts, would take up

their cause with greater success in the middle decades of the 19th century.

Thomas Jefferson of Virginia was the author of the Declaration of Independence,

a political leader of the American Revolution, the new nation's ambassador to

France, and from 1801 to 1809, the nation's third president.

As president, Jefferson oversaw the purchase of

the enormous Louisiana Territory from France in 1803,

which enlarged the nation's size by fully one-third.

After his presidency, was the founder and

architect of the University of Virginia, Mr. Jefferson's university.

In 1779, during the Revolutionary War with England,

Jefferson, as the wartime governor of Virginia, drafted a bill for

the more general diffusion of knowledge to the Virginia legislature,

a detailed proposal for a state system of public schools.

Jefferson declared that the education of the masses in

state-supported schools was the republic's surest guarantee against tyranny.

In 1783, Jefferson, in Notes on the State of Virginia, reiterated his call for

a state system of public schools.

According to his plan, Virginia taxpayers would provide primary education to

all free children of the state.

It would be tuition-free for three years, and include a curriculum of reading,

writing, basic arithmetic, and some English, Greco-Roman and American history.

Parents or guardians who desired an education of longer duration for

their children would have to pay for it out of their own pockets.

In his proposal, and it was nothing more than a proposal, Jefferson called for

a division of each county into small districts of five or

six square miles, each of which would support a primary school.

He also assigned each county in Virgina to one of 20 regional groupings,

each of which was to maintain a grammar school.

Every year, the overseer of schools in each district would select one poor child

of exemplary promise to attend the regional grammar school with tuition and

all expenses paid.

Jefferson envisioned the grammar school operating as a strict meritocracy as far

as poor children and the state purse were concerned.

After the first year at the grammar school,

one-third of these poor children would be discontinued.

After the second year, the remainder would be culled, save one.

The scholar designated the best and brightest would have the choice to

continue at the school for another four years free of charge.

Jefferson called this process raking the rubbish heap.

Each year, half of the top-performing poor students would be selected for William and

Mary College in Williamsburg with tuition and all expenses paid by the state.

Jefferson's contemporary, Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia,

was America's most famous medical doctor, as well as a member of

the Continental Congress, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and

a leader in Pennsylvania's ratification of the U.S. Constitution.

In 1786, Rush called for the establishment of free primary schools in each township

or in each district of 100 families, where children will be taught to read and

write in both English and German, and, and they would be taught arithmetic.

Rush also envisioned four taxpayer-supported colleges and

a state university to be established in Philadelphia,

Pennsylvania's original capital, with some tuition charges at the collegiate levels.

Rush argued vigorously that education is a public good.

The practical benefits of an educated populace would accrue to every citizen of

the state, even, as he put it, these states of orphans, bachelors, and

people who had no children.

Virtue and knowledge are in everyone's self interests, he declaimed.

Imagine better agricultural practices, improved manufacturing,

better financial management, fewer locks on doors, fewer pillories and

whipping posts and jails, all of which are expensive.

Expounding an argument one hears in political debates even today

in tax-stingy Pennsylvania, Rush concluded, I believe it could

be proved that the expenses of confining, trying and executing criminals

amount every year in most of the counties to more money than would be sufficient

to maintain all the schools that would be necessary in each county.

[MUSIC]

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