Abstract
Fresh and contemporary as the term school choice appears to us today, it has a history that in the English-speaking world leads back to Adam Smith’s 1776 Wealth of Nations, to Thomas Paine’s 1792 Rights of Man, and in the nineteenth century to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. The German language’s most famous manifesto was Wilhelm von Humboldt’s “Ideas for an Attempt to Determine the Limits of the State’s Effectiveness,” first published in 1792. While not explicitly using the term school choice, the essay speaks of the need to protect a people’s education from state control. In all of these instances the growing presence of modern state administrations had provoked a debate over the provision of schooling for a state’s or country’s children.
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Notes
See Jon Teaford, “The Transformation of Massachusetts Education, 1670–1780,” reprinted in The Social History of American Education, ed. B. Edward McClellan and William J. Reese (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 35.
James B. Conant, Thomas Jefferson and the Development of American Public Education (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), p. 110.
Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, National Education in the United States of America (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1923), pp. 147–148.
See on this Siobhan Moroney, “Birth of a Canon: The Historiography of Early Republican Educational Thought,” History of Education Quarterly, 39 (Winter 1999): 476–491.
In this and the preceding paragraph I rely heavily on Carl E Kaestle and Maris A. Vinovskis, Education and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 9–27.
See Frank C. Abbott, Government Policy and Higher Education: A Study of the Regents of the University of the State of New York, 1784–1949 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1958), passim, and my “The Regents of the University of the State of New York, 1784–1920: Secondary Education Emerges in the New Nation,” in Antonio Novoa, Marc Depaepe, and Erwin V. Johanningmeier, eds., “The Colonial Experience in Education,” Paedagogica Historica, Supplementary Series 1 (1995): 317–333.
See Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The National Experience 1783–1876 (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), p. 151.
E. G. West, Education and the State: A Study in Political Economy, 3rd ed., rev. and exp. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1994), pp. 297–391.
David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 33–34.
Henry Barnard, Report on the Condition and Improvement of the Public Schools of Rhode Island (Providence, RI, B. Cranston and Co. 1845), p. 50, reprinted in Henry Barnard on Education, ed. John S. Brubacher (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1931), p. 276.
See Maris A. Vinovskis, The Origins of Public High Schools: A Reexamination of the Beverly High School Controversy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), p. 111.
See Carl E Kaestle who in his Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), p. 147, calls localism “one of the most enduring and pervasive sources of conflict in American educational history.”
Carl E Kaestle, The Evolution of an Urban School System: New York City, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 68–71.
Vincent P. Lannie, Public Money and Parochial Education: Bishop Hughes, Governor Seward, and the New York School Controversy (Cleveland: Press of Case Western University, 1968), especially Chapter 12.
David Tyack and Elisabeth Hansot, Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 1820–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1982), p. 78.
Leonhard Froese and W. Krawietz, eds., Deutsche Schulgesetzgebung (1763–1952), 2nd ed. (Weinheim: Julius Beltz, 1968), pp. 91, 94, 105–111.
See also Heinrich Lewin, Geschichte der Entwicklung der preußischen Volksschule (Leipzig: Dürr’sche Buchhandlung, 1910), pp. 42–91.
See Franzjörg Baumgart, Zwischen Reform und Reaktion: Preußische Schulpolitik 1806–1859 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1990), p. 55.
See Hans Heckel, Schulrecht und Schulpolitik: Der Einfluß des Rechts auf die Zielsetzung und den Erfolg in der Bildungspolitik (Neuwied/Berlin: Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, 1967), p. 49.
Manfred Heinemann, Schule im Vorfeld der Verwaltung: Die Entwicklung der preußischen Unterrichtsverwaltung von 1771–1800 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1974), p. 33.
See Frederic Lilge, The Abuse of Learning: The Failure of the German University (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1948), p. 52.
See Johann Gottlieb Fichte, “Reden an die deutsche Nation,” in Sämmtliche Werke, ed. I. H. Fichte (Berlin: I. H. 1846), 7: 271–427.
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© 2006 Jurgen Herbst
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Herbst, J. (2006). Beginnings. In: School Choice and School Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312376222_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312376222_2
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