U.S. Education keeps getting a Black Eye, punched in the face every time conservative media want to blow off some victim-woes me steam.

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Here’s the Blackeye

Everywhere you look, conservatives are attacking pretty much every aspect of life in America, from books to trans kids to common sense gun control to access to health care for all. But there tends to be one central theme and one central goal to the republican agenda something all their activities coalesce around. But it doesn’t seem very often obvious until you start looking for it. Republicans are after public education. Whether they’re attacking critical race theory, books about gay kids, sex education, gun reform, trans kids playing in sports, or COVID closures and restrictions, the battleground tends to center around not just kids, but kids in schools and what those schools are or aren’t allowed to do. They do this under the guise of parents rights. But the reality is that this fight in our schools has been manufactured for decades.

Really, for centuries, we’ve known that education of young children can determine the outcome of a society, and during the 20th century, republicans honed in on that for their own political agenda. And the attack on our schools has only gotten stronger with the Trump presidency and COVID pandemic, with teachers stretched to the brink and quitting in record numbers.

When you create a battleground where kids are supposed to have calm, focused learning, and you treat the people who are supposed to be doing the teaching like monsters or conniving criminals, that doesn’t create a great work environment. And as I’ve said over and over and over again, this isn’t about the children, not really. It’s about power and control, as always, garnered through fear mongering and force. And it’s not about parents rights, either. It’s about the rights of a small group of parents to impose their ideas and agenda on all other parents at the expense of the children. Because there’s money to be made and votes to be won. The best interest of the children is an afterthought. This is why conservatives hate public schools.

Today’s conservatives didn’t just come up with this idea to target public education and our nation’s children out of thin air. The idea that you can control the nation by controlling the education of its children has been around since before this country existed. Puritans, who came over and formed the Massachusetts Bay Colony believed that everyone should be taught to read so that they could read the Bible and receive religious information and teachings. Many of the Founding Fathers understood that an educated citizenry was essential to a functioning democracy. John Adams believed every square mile should have a school on it run via public funding. Thomas Jefferson believed that education should be a public good as well. However, he proposed a two track education system with different tracks for the laboring and the learned, allowing for a few of the laboring class to rise above their status by, and I quote, raking a few geniuses from the rubbish. This idea that there should be different education for well off children than for children of the laboring class has been pervasive.

In 1790, the Pennsylvania state constitution called for free public education for poor children with the expectation that rich people would pay for their children’s schooling. However, the legislature didn’t do much to fulfill this constitutional mandate because they determined that reading instruction by parents and the few local religious schools was sufficient because the economy didn’t really require anything beyond basic literacy at the time. And in 1805, the New York Public School Society was formed by wealthy businessmen to provide religious education to impoverished children and to emphasize discipline and obedience in the students.

These wealthy businessmen weren’t just moved by a desire to help society and ensure a functioning democracy. No, you see, discipline and obedience are really great qualities to have in your factory workers. By 1837, Massachusetts had its own state board of education. Edmund Dwight, a major industrialist of the time, knew that a state board of education to educate his future factory workers was so important that he offered to supplement the state’s salary with his own money. The head of the Massachusetts State Board of Education, Horace Mann brought in a teaching style he learned in Prussia, where students were assigned to grades based on age and would progress through each grade as they aged.

In 1790, the Pennsylvania state constitution called for free public education for poor children with the expectation that rich people would pay for their children’s schooling. However, the legislature didn’t do much to fulfill this constitutional mandate because they determined that reading instruction by parents and the few local religious schools was sufficient because the economy didn’t really require anything beyond basic literacy at the time. And in 1805, the New York Public School Society was formed by wealthy businessmen to provide religious education to impoverished children and to emphasize discipline and obedience in the students. These wealthy businessmen weren’t just moved by a desire to help society and ensure a functioning democracy. No, you see, discipline and obedience are really great qualities to have in your factory workers. By 1837, Massachusetts had its own state board of education. Edmund Dwight, a major industrialist of the time, knew that a state board of education to educate his future factory workers was so important that he offered to supplement the state’s salary with his own money. The head of the Massachusetts State Board of Education, Horace Mann brought in a teaching style he learned in Prussia, where students were assigned to grades based on age and would progress through each grade as they aged.

This was combined with European styles of lecture-based teaching and eventually spread throughout the country, known as the factory model. By the mid 1800s immigrants were flooding the United States from places like Ireland and Italy, creating a large population that adhered to Catholicism and had major cultural and linguistic differences. So, in 1851, the state of Massachusetts passed the first compulsory education Law. But again, this wasn’t because of a charitable desire to help students in Massachusetts succeed. It was explicitly to ensure that the children of poor immigrants got civilized and were taught to be obedient and restrained to avoid social upheaval and so that they would be good factory workers on the federal level. In 1864, Congress made it illegal for Native Americans to be taught in their native languages. Native children as young as four years old were taken from their parents and sent to Bureau of Indian Affairs off reservation boarding schools with the official goal to kill the Indian to save the man. Another Attempt at Civilization after the Civil War, reconstruction in the south led to the creation of a thousand schools to educate Black children. By the end of 1865, over 90,000 formerly enslaved people were enrolled in those schools.

Almost all new public schools in the south were segregated, and when conservatives came to power in the south in the late 1870s, public school funding was sharply cut. Booker T. Washington was a major proponent of offering industrial education to formerly enslaved people because of its practicality for obtaining paid jobs. We B. Du Bois, however, argued that formerly enslaved people should be given the opportunity to prove themselves equal to whites by succeeding in traditional bachelor’s degree programs. It’s in the wake of the Civil War that many historically black colleges were founded, including Howard University and Morehouse College. Both opened in 1867. In 1917, the National Vocational Education Act established federally funded programs for agriculture, home economics, and training in various trades. This federal funding was lobbied for by large manufacturers who wanted the federal government to subsidize the training of their workers and take that training out of the hands of trade union apprenticeships. It’s a lot easier to buy out a federal politician and get your way than it is to try to negotiate with a trade union that’s diametrically opposed to your interests, your interests being exploiting your labor force as much as possible.

By 1940, 50% of Americans had a high school diploma, though this number was higher in areas with greater wealth and less manufacturing activity. Because high schools were seen as a place to receive necessary skill sets for teachers and for those planning careers in white collar work. It wasn’t until the pivotal Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education, decided in 1954 roiled the nation with the threat of forced desegregation that conservative political ideals began to intertwine with educational reform. Milton Friedman, the father of modern libertarian, free market economics, who ruined many lives and deserves his own whole, video, advocated strongly for the idea of educational freedom. The fight to give families the right to choose where and how to educate their children. He touted this as a racially neutral way to promote private schools and keep schools segregated despite the changing times. William F. Buckley, Jr. Generally credited as the founder of the modern conservative movement, was dedicated to demanding right wing content in schools. His first book, God and Ma’am at Yale, proposed that left leaning faculty should be denied academic freedom because they were abusing the academy in order to warp the minds of impressionable college students, and he was a major proponent of censoring textbooks.

This was in the 1950s, but his ideas didn’t quite catch at the time. Even during the height of McCarthyism, Congress stopped short at full academic censorship, probably because the memory of Nazi book burning was still a little too fresh. Throughout the 1950s, groups of vigilante parents monitored schools closely for signs of communist infiltration, and as schools began desegregating in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, large numbers of families, especially in the south, began pulling their children out of public schools and enrolling them in private institutions rather than have.

SDMNEWS

By Leeja Miller @leejamiller