Public Schools--Why They Were Created

Few would argue that the American educational system—for all the billions spent on it—suffers from some serious glitches. Too many kids squeeze through with skills far too minimal to make them employable in today’s world.
It worked when a kid could walk out of school at sixteen, go into a factory and pull the handle on a punch press for several decades, and then retire on some kind of pension. It worked really well in the 1950s and ‘60s when wages for unskilled labor soared along with their pensions.
Except for a relatively few scientists and scholars—who tended to get their learning from private, parochial are public schools located in affluent districts filled with motivated—and motivating—educated parents, we did all right with the semi-literate punch press pullers.
Now the underlying problems with the system—that were always there, but of no real significance—are showing up. Brutal fact is the average public school was never designed to teach people the skills they need to live in a technologically challenging world.
Let’s go back to the beginning—1837, when Massachusetts’ Horace Mann became the first State Secretary of (Public) Education in history. The way we tell the story now, both Mann (who may well have been, personally) and the tax payers of Massachusetts were motivated by an altruistic desire to see all the little children properly educated.
Something doesn’t ring true here. Massachusetts basically invented the American (UNSKILLED) factory system—at this period in time. Kids went to work there at ages as young as eight and nine—and got no education at all.
So what got the same voting tax payers who owned the factories and employed the children at lovely low wages fired up to create a public school system? Blame the unwashed, illiterate, unwashed, Catholic Irish for that.
The factory owners were protestants—at a time when the nation was militantly protestant. Catholics were at best heretical, at worst treacherous and evil. The factory owners were largely from the Island of Great Britain, where contempt for the Irish has been epidemic for centuries.
After all the Pilgrims and Puritans who founded New England were all English protestants. Scotch Irishmen (also protestant, originally from Great Britain) gained great respect during the Revolution for their ability to shoot British sentries at vast distances—and they kept largely to the frontier areas of the new nation.
There were Germans in Pennsylvania—protestant. (New York City was always suspiciously diverse—14 languages were spoken in the city by 1660.) The rest of the new nation was largely White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (except for a few hundred thousand black slaves).
But, by 1830, Ireland had begun a century-long process of emigration, in which two out of every five living Irishmen fled the island—five million coming to America alone. The most Irish city in America became that once bastion of Puritan probity, Boston.
The Anglo-Saxons were shocked, to say the least, at the unwashed and illiterate condition of the new immigrants—the first of subsequent wave upon wave of non-English, Welsh or Scots folk. These “new” immigrants simply weren’t at all like the old Puritans and Virginians.
It became necessary to teach these barbarians how to be proper Americans. Teach them how to write and speak proper English, to wash their hands and bodies, to forego some of their most offensive Catholic superstitions. What better way than to fund a “non-sectarian” public school system that would teach all children to be good, clean, protestant Americans? As more immigrants flooded in, more “public” schools were created.
(Some of that kind of instruction was still found in our schools when I attended in the 1940s.) The Irish reacted, not really surprisingly, by creating parochial Catholic schools so that they could hang onto their own traditions.
But the real point is: can a public school system originally structured to teach cleanliness and protestantism and English values do an effective job of teaching math, the sciences or other purely academic disciplines? Or do we have to go way back to the beginning and construct a completely new system designed to meet the needs of our post industrial, knowledge oriented society?
Might problems with the purposes for which and ways the system was originally structured be part of the reason it isn’t working today? If so, we have bigger problems than can be solved simply by increasing or cutting teachers’ pay.