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.