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Under One Roof |
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By Michael F. Anderson, Ph.D., noted historian and author, who has lived in northern Arizona for 20 years. Dr. Anderson is the author of Living at the Edge: Explorers, Exploiters and Settlers of the Grand Canyon Region, and several other books. "The late eighteenth century was a revolutionary time, both in politics and educational beliefs. Influential men like Benjamin Rush advocated universal elementary schools, free of charge, to help rear effective citizens guided by Christian morals. Others like Thomas Jefferson disagreed with use of the Bible as a school text, consistent with the separation of church and state, which gave rise to "readers" with implicit values like the New England Primer (late seventeenth century, emphasizing puritanism), Noah Webster's Elementary Spelling Book (late eighteenth century, keying on patriotism and morality), and William Holmes' McGuffey Readers (early nineteenth century, displaying conventional middle-class morality). But Jefferson did agree that in order to maintain the democracy recently won, citizens must be "literate, informed, and prudent." The author of the Declaration of Independence went on to caution that "if a nation expects to be ignorant and free ... it expects what never was and never will be." |
Jefferson and his contemporaries had another motive for public schools. The newborn United States was a fragile polity of immense diversity, populated by immigrants with scores of different languages and customs, many unfamiliar with citizen requisites for self-government. Federalists and anti-Federalists, Whigs and Republicans alike agreed that some measure of homogeneity was needed to forge a unified nation safe from its enemies; and where better to cultivate unity than in the minds of the young? Therefore, patriotism and the desire for a stable social and political order, combined with a strong religious tradition, help explain our public school system and its early curriculums that emphasized literacy in English (reading, writing, spelling, penmanship, rhetoric, literature ...), as well as morals, civics, and discipline. Despite their interest, the founding fathers were reluctant to promulgate a public school system at the federal level, and failed to mention the subject in the U.S. Constitution. Federalists - aristocratic proponents of a strong central government - were generally unconcerned for the education of the teeming masses; Anti-Federalists - more democratic believers in a weak central government - promoted public education but feared federal control."
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