R. Freeman Butts, Teachers College, Columbia
University
A Cultural History of Education: Reassessing
our Educational Traditions
NY: McGraw-Hill Series in Education, 1947
Ch. xiii, THE
ENLIGHTENMENT IN AMERICA p.
366
Federal
Interest in Education
Scarcely had independence been assured when a
flood of pamphlets, articles, and essays began to set forth new theories of
educational control for the new republic. The public discussion of education
was stimulated by the American Philosophical Society, which offered a prize
for the best description of a liberal education suitable to the new United
States. Most of the writers who engaged in this contest were imbued with the
French humanitarian doctrines of the perfectibility of man and the possibility
of social progress by reforming social institutions, of which education was
deemed one of the most important. The currents of thought represented by
liberalism, democracy, and nationalism were caught up in these theories and
focused upon American education.
Samuel Knox, Samuel Harrison Smith, Benjamin
Rush, and Robert Coram argued that education should be practical, flexible, and
adaptable to new conditions; it should be democratic and universally free to
all [367] in order to provide equal opportunity and prepare citizens for their
responsibilities in a democracy; and it should embrace a complete system of
elementary, secondary, and higher institutions under national control and
nationally supported in order to contribute to secular rather than religious
outcomes and to ensure the greatest progress toward social welfare. President
Washington was much interested in a national university as a means of unifying
the new country and proposed to Congress that it be established. He even set
aside some fifty shares in the Potomac Canal Company to help subsidize the
university, but nothing ever came of the idea, despite subsequent proposals by
other presidents and leaders.
It is interesting to note that these theories
of national education were not put into practice. The tradition of religious
and decentralized control of education was too strong to allow the federal
government to set up a national system of schools; yet some steps were taken
that were to have great influence upon American education. While the American
states were operating under the Articles of Confederation, two ordinances were
passed concerning the disposition of the new and vast public lands in the West,
the claims to which the various states had given up to the federal government.
The Ordinance of 1785 was passed to establish a policy for the sale of this
public land. It provided that the land should be surveyed into square plots 6
miles on a side, to be known as townships. Each township was to be further
divided into 36 sections, or squares, 1 mile on a side. The income from the
sale of the sixteenth section, located in the center of each township, was to
be used for common schools when the land was sold.
Two years later the Ordinance of 1787
reconfirmed this land policy and set forth the governmental principles to be
followed when the Northwest Territory was settled (an area represented by the
present states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of
Minnesota). The ordinance provided that the states carved out of this territory
should assure free religious conscience, trial by jury, prohibition of slavery
or involuntary servitude, good faith with the Indians, and common schools. What
might be called the charter of public concern for education was contained in
the following famous sentence: "Religion, morality, and knowledge being
necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the
means of education shall forever be encouraged." This meant that the
income from the sixteenth sections would be dispensed by civil authorities and
therefore at least some of the support of common schools would come from
public sources. Important policies on
education were thus being formulated by the federal government even though a
national system of education was not established.
When the Constitution was drawn up and
ratified in 1789, no mention [368] of
education was made in it. Apparently most of the members of the Constitutional
Convention felt that other matters were of more pressing concern, and many
considered education properly to be a function of the churches rather than of
local civil government, let alone the national government. The Federalists were
interested in a strong federal government but not in education for the common
people; therefore they did not desire national education. The Republicans were
interested in education for the common people but opposed a strong national
government; therefore they did not want national control of education.
Even the Bill of Rights did not mention
education directly. But the First Amendment guaranteed religious liberty, which
the churches took to include the right to conduct schools, and the Tenth
Amendment reserved to the states or to the people all powers not delegated by
the Constitution to the federal government or prohibited by it to the states.
This was later interpreted to mean that the states could assert their rights to
establish and maintain schools. By ignoring the opportunity for federal support
of education the framers of the Constitution made it difficult for the states
to win their legal right to control education and for the federal government to
win the right to support general education.
Types
of School Support
The early sources of revenue for American
schools in the eighteenth century were varied and often complicated. In general, schools were supported in two
principal ways, (1) direct payment by parents for the education of their own
children and (2) by direct or indirect means that helped to educate other
children as well as one's own. The first form, direct payment for the education
of one's own children, was primarily by tuition fees and by rate bills. Fees
were paid to teachers of dame schools, to parish priests in the South, to
private tutors, to teachers of private Latin grammar schools, to teachers of the
new, private English schools of the seacoast towns, to the academies, and to
the colleges. Rate bills were of the same general nature except that they
represented the fees paid by parents whose children went to town schools set up
by civil authorities. Rate bills were
usually fixed pro rata according to the length of time the child attended in
relation to the total expenses of the school.
The second type of support involved a good
many methods of indirect help for the education of other children as well as
one's own. Individuals gave money, land, or income-producing property of
various kinds to private schools, to specific charity schools, to churches for
the support of their schools, or to such school societies as the Society for
the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. These gifts, bequests, and
endowments were put into the operation of the schools to help de fray expenses;
poor children were often given free or charity education, whereas parents who
could afford to pay were charged tuition.
The civil authorities used a variety of means
to support schools, including local taxes, income from land grants,
appropriations from general funds, the proceeds of licenses, and taxes on
liquor, peddling, and lotteries. These funds were often given by civil
authorities to private and religious schools as well as to town and public
schools. For example, the state of Massachusetts in 1797 gave land grants to
certain private academies, and other states did likewise; colleges as well as
lower schools were often the recipients of governmental as well as private aid.
Near the end of the century some states began to set aside "common school
funds" into which they would put a variety of revenues to be used for the
benefit of the public schools.
R. Freeman Butts, Teachers College, Columbia
University
Lawrence A. Cremin, Teachers College,
Columbia University
A History of Education in American Culture
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1953
Ch. 8, Characteristic Educational Practices
Organization, Support, and Control
p. 245
It would be pleasant to record that the early
federal grants for schools grew out of the far-reaching educational vision of
leaders in the Continental Congress. This, however, does not seem to have been
entirely the case. In fact, the educational policy formulated in the Land
Ordinances of 1785 and 1787 was but one aspect of a general, over-all national
land policy which had one overbearing purpose -- to obtain revenues for a
debt-ridden government.
Two principal means for disposing of public
lands had been developed in the colonies prior to the Revolution. One,
originating in New England, involved the carving of land for sale into
townships before it was offered for private purchase. In keeping with New
England tradition, grants for the support of religion and education were
frequently made as part condition of the township sale. The other system,
developing primarily in the South, involved simply the sale of land parcels
varying with individual purchases. No grants were made either for schools or
for ministers.
When the Continental Congress in 1784 appointed a committee to draft a
plan for the sale of public lands, these were the principal alternatives before
it. Their deliberations led eventually to the Land Ordinance of 1785, which, although it represented a
compromise, carried a provision reserving the sixteenth section of every
township (each township was divided into thirty-six equal parcels one mile
square called sections) "for the
maintenance of public schools within the said township." The advantage of
such a provision is clear in that public money for schools would make purchase
and settlement more attractive to men with families. In any case, when Congress
two years later was faced with the problem of establishing a government in the
Northwest Territory (an area represented by the present states of Ohio,
Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota), it reinforced
and restated this policy in the now-famous Article 3 of the Ordinance of 1787: "Religion, morality, and
knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind,
schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged."
Although grants under these two ordinances
amounted to millions of acres, the federal government extended its liberal policy
even further after 1800 by earmarking for educational purposes certain lands in
almost every new state. In many sections of the country valuable oil and
mineral deposits have since been discovered on these lands, and they have often
proved to be lucrative sources of school income.
The above-mentioned grants do not by any
means exhaust the story of federal beneficence during this period.