Abstract
Something rather remarkable has occurred in the recent history of American education: a rediscovery of the public benefits of private education. The idea is an old one in the nation’s history but has not been seriously entertained by mainstream political leaders or policymakers since the early nineteenth century. When dissenting Protestants, nonsectarian private school leaders, and Roman Catholics in particular protested against the monopolistic nature of public schooling in the mid-nineteenth century, they were loudly criticized and defeated in their efforts to divide the school fund for their competing systems of education. In effect, public schools became a virtual monopoly, and private networks of schooling existed without direct state aid. The public school, and not its private counterpart, became for most Americans the symbol of an indigenous democracy. And, until the final decades of the twentieth century, the majority of citizens and elected officials generally believed that the expansion and proliferation of tax-supported, compulsory public schools best served the common good.
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Notes
Bernard Bailyn, Education in the Forming of American Society (New York, 1960), 11; Otto F. Kraushaar, Private Schools: From the Puritans to the Present (Bloomington, IN, 1976), 1; and Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York, 1983), chapter 1.
On the primacy of the family, see Bailyn, Education; and Lawrence A. Cremin, American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607–1763 (New York, 1970). On child-rearing, see Jerry W. Frost, “As the Twig is Bent: Quaker Ideas of Childhood,” Quaker History 60 (Autumn 1971): 67–87; and especially Philip W. Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early American History (Chicago, 1977).
James Axtell, The School Upon a Hill: Education and Society in Colonial New England (New York, 1974); and Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York, 2001).
See especially, Axtell, The School upon a Hill; Kraushaar, Private Schools, 11, 14; Cremin, Colonial Experience; and Carl F. Kaestle, The Evolution of an Urban System: New York City, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, MA, 1973). On the distinction between private venture schools and academies, which sometimes grew out of the former, see Kim Tolley, “Mapping the Landscape of Higher Schooling, 1727–1850,” in Chartered Schools: Two Hundred Years of Independent Academies in the United States, 1727–1925, ed. Nancy Beadie and Kim Tolley (New York, 2002), 20–21, 26.
Frederick Rudolph, ed., Essays on Education in the Early Republic (Cambridge, MA, 1965); and Kaestle, Pillars, chapter 1.
Kaestle, Pillars, chapter 3; and Donald G. Mathews, “The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process,” American Quarterly 21 (Spring 1969): 23–43.
On New York, see especially Vincent P. Lannie, Public Money and Parochial Education: Bishop Hughes, Governor Seward, and the New York School Controversy (Cleveland, OH, 1968); Kaestle, The Evolution of an Urban System; and Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805–1973 (New York, 1974).
On the role of Protestants in the creation of public schools, and religious compromises made among them in the process, see Timothy L. Smith, “Protestant Schooling and American Nationality, 1800–1850,” Journal of American History 53 (March 1967): 679–95; David B. Tyack, “The Kingdom of God and the Common School: Protestant Ministers and the Educational Awakening in the West,” Harvard Educational Review 33 (Fall 1966): 447–69; David B. Tyack, “Onward Christian Soldiers: Religion in the Common School,” in History and Education: The Educational Uses of the Past, ed. Paul Nash (New York, 1970), 212–55; John R. Bodo, The Protestant Clergy and Public Issues (Princeton, NJ, 1954); and Frances X. Curran, The Churches and the Schools: American Protestantism and Popular Elementary Education (Chicago, 1954).
Michael B. Katz, The Irony of Early School Reform: Educational Innovation in Mid-Nineteenth Century Massachusetts (Boston, MA, 1968) and Kaestle, Pillars, illuminate the breadth of social changes transforming American society and offer contrasting interpretations of the origins of the American public school system.
On mass education, see Kraushaar, Private Schools, 30. On higher education, read John S. Whitehead, The Separation of College and State: Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Yale, 1776–1876 (New Haven, CT, 1973).
Kim Tolley, “Making the Landscape,” 22–23; Margaret A. Nash, Women’s Education in the United States, 1780–1840 (New York, 2005); Michael B. Katz, Class, Bureaucracy, and the Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America (New York, 1975), 23; Theodore R. Sizer, ed., The Age of the Academies (New York, 1964); and William J. Reese, The Origins of the American High School (New Haven, CT, 1995).
Mann quoted in The Republic and the School: Horace Mann on the Education of Free Men, ed. Lawrence A. Cremin (New York, 1957), 33, 107. Also see William J. Reese, “Public Schools and the Elusive Search for the Common Good,” in Reconstructing the Common Good in Education, ed. Larry Cuban and Dorothy Shipps (Stanford, CA, 2000), 16–25.
David B. Tyack, Thomas James, and Aaron Benevot, Law and the Shaping of Public Education, 1785–1954 (Madison, WI, 1987), 140–47; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York, 1988), chapter 7; Ward M. McAffee, Religion, Race, and Reconstruction: The Public School in the Politics of the 1870s (Albany, NY, 1998), 192–96; and Timothy Walch, Parish School: American Catholic Parochial Education From Colonial Times to the Present (New York, 1996), 62–63.
Dexter A. Hawkins, “Compulsory School Attendance,” American Journal of Education 30 (1880): 825; and Walch, Parish School, 63–65.
Edward N. Saveth, “Education of an Elite,” History of Education Quarterly 28 (Fall 1988): 367–86; and William H. Harbaugh, The Life and Times of Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1975), 128, 216.
Joel H. Spring, Education and the Rise of the Corporate State (Boston, MA, 1972); David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, MA, 1974); Wayne E. Fuller, The Old Country School: The Story of Rural Education in the Middle West (Chicago, 1982); and Herbert M. Kliebard, Schooled to Work: Vocationalism and the American Curriculum, 1876–1946 (New York, 1999).
Tyack, “Onward,” 212–255; William J. Reese, “Public Schools and the Great Gates of Hell,” Educational Theory 32 (Winter 1982–83): 9–18; Jerry Falwell, with E. Dobson and E. Hindson, The Fundamentalist Phenomenon: The Resurgence of Conservative Christianity (New York, 1981); Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (New York, 1997); Joel A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York, 1997); David B. Tyack, “The Perils of Pluralism: The Background of the Pierce Case,” American Historical Review 74 (October 1968): 74–98; and Kraushaar, American Nonpublic Schools, 13–14.
Paul F. Douglas, “Keep the Public Schools Public,” Social Frontier 4 (November 1937): 42–46; Mary Elizabeth O’Connor, “Are Private Schools So Superior?” Journal of Education 120 (October 1937): 321–22; “Are Private Schools Better?” Journal of Education 131 (February 1948): 47; J. L. Sherman, “Is the Private Secondary School Undemocratic?” School and Society 69 (1949): 193–95; Rev. Paul C. Reinert, “Does America Need Private Education?” Vital Speeches 16 (April 1, 1950): 372–75; T. D. Martin, “Are Private Schools a Menace to our Democracy?” Nation’s Schools 46 (September 1950): 28; and Oliver L. La Farge, “We Need Private Schools,” The Atlantic Monthly 193 (February 1954): 53–56.
On Catholicism and the 1960 election, see Walch, Parish School, 209; and James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974 (New York, 1996), 439.
Christopher Jencks, “Is the Public School Obsolete?” in School Reform: Past and Present, ed. Michael B. Katz (Boston, MA, 1971), 243.
Joel H. Spring, The Sorting Machine: National Education Policy Since 1945 (New York, 1976); and Barbara Clowse, Brainpower for the Cold War: The Sputnik Crisis and National Defense Education Act of 1958 (Westport, CT, 1981).
Carl F. Kaestle and Marshall S. Smith, “The Federal Role in Elementary and Secondary Education, 1940–1980,” Harvard Educational Review 52 (November 1982): 384–409; and Julie Roy Jeffrey, Education for the Children of the Poor: A Study of the Origins and Implementation of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (Columbus, OH, 1978).
While the literature on race and education after 1945 is vast, the starting place on the Brown decision is Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (New York, 1976); and James T. Patterson, Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy (New York, 2001). On segregationist academies, see David Nevin and Robert E. Bills, The Schools That Fear Built: Segregationist Academies in the South (Washington, DC, 1976).
Harvey Kantor and Barbara Brenzel, “Urban Education and the ‘Truly Disadvantaged’: The Historical Roots of the Contemporary Crisis, 1945–1990,” in The “Underclass” Debate: Views from History, ed. Michael B. Katz (Princeton, NJ, 1993), 366–402. On rising expectations, see William J. Reese, America’s Public Schools: From the Common School to “No Child Left Behind” (Baltimore, MD, 1995), chapters 7–9.
On concerns over morality, see B. Edward McClellan, Moral Education in America: Schools and the Shaping of Character from Colonial Times to the Present (New York, 1999), chapter 5; and Reese, “Public Schools,” 9–18.
H.M. Hamlin, “Are We Returning to Private Education?” Nation’s Schools 55 (March 1955): 63; Bernard J. Kohlbrenner, “Some Practical Aspects of the Public Character of Private Education,” School and Society 86 (September 27, 1958): 248; E.R. D’Allesio, “Public Policy Implications of Public Assistance to Nonpublic Education,” Religious Education 70 (March–April 1975): 174–84; and the essays in Edward G. Gaffney, Jr., ed., Private Schools and the Public Good: Policy Alternatives for the Eighties (Notre Dame, 1981).
On the “child benefit theory,” read Diane Ravitch, The Troubled Crusade: American Education, 1945–1980 (New York, 1983), 30, 33, 41; on private school groups and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act during the Johnson years, see Walch, Parish School, 213–14.
See, for example, Milton Friedman, Free to Choose (New York, ©1979); and John Coons and Stephen D. Sugarman, Education by Choice: The Case for Family Control (Berkeley, CA, 1978). Also see an early attempt to document the revival of conservatism in the 1970s, Alan Crawford, Thunder on the Right: The “New Right” and the Politics of Resentment (New York, 1980).
Bruce J. Schulman underscores the rising power of the ideology of the market place in The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York, 2001), and Catherine A. Lugg discusses the personalities and policies of the Reagan years in For God and Country: Conservatism and American School Policy (New York, 1996). On Reagan and tax credits, see Walch, Parish School, 221, 227–28; and James W. Fraser, Between Church and State: Religion and Public Education in a Multicultural America (New York, 1999), 178–79.
The literature on Catholic education is vast. In addition to Walch, Parish School, at a minimum read Andrew M. Greeley and Peter H. Rossi, The Education of Catholic Americans (Chicago, 1966); James Coleman, Thomas Hoffer, and Sally Kilgore, High School Achievement: Public, Catholic, and Private Schools Compared (New York, 1982); and Anthony S. Bryck, Valerie E. Lee, and Peter B. Holland, Catholic Schools and the Common Good (Cambridge, MA, 1993).
National Center for Education Statistics, Private School Universe Survey, 1999–2000 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, 2001), 1–3. On the diversity of private schools in the past, see the overview in Kraushaar, American Nonpublic Schools, part 1; and the case studies in James C. Carper and Thomas Hunt, eds., Religious Schooling in America (Birmingham, AL, 1984); and in Religious Schools in the United States K-12, ed. Thomas C. Hunt and James C. Carper (New York, 1993).
On the rise of modern conservatism, especially read Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (New York, 2001).
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© 2007 William J. Reese
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Reese, W.J. (2007). Changing Conceptions of “Public” and “Private” in American Educational History. In: History, Education, and the Schools. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230104822_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230104822_6
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