Henry Brougham conducted surveys of schools in 1820 and 1828, and found that the numbers in schools had doubled in one decade.  A government study found that the numbers had almost tripled, from 478,000 in 1818 to 1,294.000 in 1834.  By 1851, the total had increased to 2.1 million, at a time when the total population of adults and children was 18 million.  In 1861, the Newcastle Commission found that essentially every child in England and Wales was receiving some kind of education.

In England, the nineteenth century was a century of education.  But it was a movement that occurred spontaneously, from the bottom up.  In 1818, the government needed to appoint a parliamentary commission to find out what was going on.  Later in the century, more government studies were needed to understand the breadth and depth of this social phenomenon.  What they found was that the English people were almost universally sending their children to school.  Some of the schools were paid for by charitable organizations; many provided assistance to those in need.  But overwhelmingly, the schools were funded by fees paid by the parents.  Many parents made enormous sacrifices so that their children could attend school.  But they sent them.

Against the slow moves to centralization in Britain and the United States, the history of education in Germany is salutary.  Year Zero for the Germans was the humiliating Prussian defeat in the battle of Jena in 1806, experienced as a national disaster.  In the dark days following defeat the Prussian monarchy reached out to all sectors of society to rebuild and restore the nation to strength and self-respect, emancipating the peasants, rebuilding and reforming the army, extending power to the middle class, and reforming education.  It was a crash program of national renewal.  Wilhelm von Humboldt, Germany’s most revered scholar and friend of Schiller and Goethe, was called back to Berlin to head the education ministry and undertake the building of a German national education.  He developed a three stage philosophy of education: elementary, scholastic, and university, encouraging development of the Pestalozzi methods in the elementary schools.  The whole structure was intended to deliver an allgemeine Bildung or all-around education that would create citizens capable of thinking for themselves.  His crowning achievement was the founding of the University of Berlin, devoted to Wissenschaft in research and education, that became the model for the western university.  This was the system that Horace Mann got to experience when he visited the Prussian education system in 1843 and determined to implement from the top down as Humboldt had done 30 years before.  The Humboldt reform turned out to be a stunning success.  By 1900, Germany had the best scientists and the best army in the world.  By 1945 this top-down experiment boasted the most ruined cities in the world.

This brief history of schooling shows that field of education has never been tranquil.  The lower classes have struggled to acquire the basics of literacy, and tried to get the political system to subsidize their expenses.  The elite classes have attempted to use the education system to form the minds of the young to their idea of the good.  As governments have instituted almost complete government control over schooling, education has become intensely political.  In the Anglo-Saxon countries of the early-to-mid nineteenth century when schools were overwhelmingly fee supported, parents were able to obtain an education for their children that approached their own desires.  If they did not like the school their children attended, they could change it by simply going down the street.  But in the age of the government school, this was usually no longer possible.  The centralization and uniformity preferred by education reformers demanded a one-size-fits-all approach to education.   Parents found themselves in conflict with teachers, with administrators, with nativists, with religious sects, and with religious groups in a fight to control their children’s education.  In the United States, public schools have been used to Americanize immigrants and celebrate diversity, to teach literacy and to let children find their own way to reading, to teach tolerance and to teach political correctness, to get back to basics and to encourage creativity, to teach morality and to allow children to clarify their own values.  But instead of letting parents use their own judgment in educating their children and find schools that fit their own choice in the battle of warring polarities, the system confines them to limited choices dictated by political power at all levels of government: national, state, and local.  In consequence, whereas education used to be flexible and responsive to its clients, under government control it has become rigid, unresponsive, and mediocre.

The problem is that different children need different education.  The child of an illiterate herder in the Gobi desert needs one kind of education.  The child of an American college professor needs another.  What kind of education did the child of an illiterate costermonger in London in 1850 need?  What does the child of a Appalachian redneck need?  What does a child of the Christian Right need?  What does the child of a single mother in the inner city need?  In the case of Nancy Johnston in Rock Hill, South Carolina, the need is “the best education, grade school through college,” an education that will allow her children to complete the journey from Chester to Charlotte, and enjoy the rich life, the career open to talents enjoyed by families like the Bushes.

Of course, the goal of public education has never been to assist parents in obtaining education for their own children.  It has always been about establishing a framework for the education of other peoples’ children to make sure that it conforms to grand national purposes.  In the case of the Prussians, the model beloved of Whig Party common school activists like Horace Mann, the purpose was to educate children for the army so that Prussia would never again be humiliated by the French.  In the case of Horace Mann and the Boston Transcendentalists, the purpose was to preserve their high-toned Protestant Americanism from the uncouth Jacksonian Democrats and the barbaric Catholic Irish. 

You can never be too careful about other people and their children.  That is the philosophy that has driven the great centralizing movement in education that began with the German revanchist movement after the Napoleonic Wars and spread to the United States and to Britain in turn.  Educational activists just could not countenance the idea that parents ought to be responsible for the education of their children, despite the evidence that they took their responsibility very seriously.  They knew, or thought they knew, that parents would not raise children to become the kind of adults that the activists wanted for the future.  The Germans wanted cannon fodder; the Americans wanted to block the Jacksonians and the Catholics; the British wanted to close the “gaps.”  They found that the best method of advancing their goals was to traduce the parents, to propose that parents were too ignorant or too feckless to educate their children without supervision.  The best policy was the “precautionary” principle beloved of modern environmentalists: to place the burden of proof on the parents to prove their competence to raise their own children.  However experts and politicians reserve the right to try out their own ideas on other peoples’ children without limit. 

| <<prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | (4) | 5 | next>> |

print view

Click for Chapter 8: Mutual Aid

Your comments are welcome. Please e-mail to Christopher Chantrill at mailto:chrischantrill@gmail.com, and take the RMC test here.

©2005 Christopher Chantrill