Education, U.S., History

^{Superscript text}History of Education in the United States, often called Foundations of Education, is the study of educational policy, formal instiututions and informal learning from the 17th to the 21st century.

History

Colonial schoolhouse in Hollis, New Hampshire

The first American schools opened during the colonial era. As the colonies began to develop, many began to institute mandatory education schemes. In 1642 the Massachusetts Bay Colony made "proper" education compulsory. Similar statutes were adopted in other colonies in the 1640s and 1650s. Virtually all of the schools opened as a result were private. The nation's first institution of higher learning, Harvard University, opened in 1636. Churches established most early universities in order to train ministers. Most of the universities which opened between 1640 and 1750 form the contemporary Ivy League, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Brown, the University of Pennsylvania, and several others. After the American Revolution, the new national government passed the Land Ordinance of 1785, which set aside a portion of every township in the unincorporated territories of the United States for use in education. The provisions of the law remained unchanged until the Homestead Act of 1862. After the Revolution, a heavy emphasis was put on education which made the US have one of the highest literacy rates at the time.

In 1789 church and state were seperated by Article VI of the constitution which stipulated "no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States." Then two years later the first Amendment added"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

The school system remained largely private and unorganized until the 1840s. Education reformers such as Horace Mann of Massachusetts began calling for public education systems for all. Upon becoming the secretary of education in Massachusetts in 1837, Mann helped to create a statewide system of "common schools," which referred to the belief that everyone was entitled to the same content in education. These early efforts focused primarily on elementary education.

The common-school movement began to catch on. Connecticut adopted a similar system in 1849, and Massachusetts passed a compulsory attendance law in 1852. By 1900, 31 states required 8- to 14-year-olds to attend school. As a result, by 1910 72 percent of American children attended school and half of the nation's children attended one-room schools. In 1918, every state required students to at least complete elementary school. Lessons consisted of students reading aloud from their texts such as the McGuffey Readers, and placed emphasis on rote memorization. Teachers often used physical punishments, such as hitting students on the knuckles with birch switches, for incorrect answers. Because the public schools focused on assimilation, many immigrants, who resisted Americanization, sent their children to private religious schools. Many of these were Roman Catholics. Though the new private schools met opposition, in 1925 the Supreme Court ruled in Pierce v. Society of Sisters that students could attend private schools to comply with compulsory education laws.

Secondary education progressed much more slowly, remaining the province of the affluent and domain of private tutors. In 1870 only 2 percent of 14 to 17-year-olds graduated from high school. The number rose to 10 percent by 1900, but most were from wealthy families. The introduction of strict child labor laws and growing acceptance of higher education in general in the early 20th century caused the number of high schools and graduates to skyrocket. Most states passed laws which increased the age for compulsory attendance to 16.

Higher education

At the beginning of the 20th century, fewer than 1,000 colleges with 160,000 students existed in the United States. Explosive growth in the number of colleges occurred at the end of the 1800s and early twentieth century. Philanthropists endowed many of these institutions. Leland Stanford, one of The Big Four, for example, established Stanford University in 1891.

Many American public universities came about because of the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Acts of 1862 and 1890. During the rapid westward expansion of the United States during the 19th century, the federal government took control of huge amounts of so-called "empty" land (often after forcing the previous Native American residents into reservations). Under the Morrill Acts, the federal government offered to give 30,000 acres (121 km²) of federal land to each state on the condition that they used the land (or proceeds from its sale) to establish universities. The resulting schools are often referred to as land-grant colleges. Founded in 1855, Michigan State University is the pioneer land-grant institution. Other well-known land-grant universities include Pennsylvania State University, The Ohio State University and the University of California system. Some states have more than one land-grant institution, one often being an historically black university. Three states, Alabama, Massachusetts and New York, designated private universities as one of their land-grant institutions. Respectively, these are Tuskegee University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cornell University.

Following World War II, the GI Bill paid for the college education of many former service men, and helped to create a widespread belief in the necessity of college education and damaging the belief that higher education was only for the wealthy. As such, attendance at institutions of higher learning has grown ever since.

Segregation and inequality

File:Educational seperation in the US prior to Brown Map.svg

Segregation laws in the United States prior to Brown v. Board of Education

For much of its history, education in the United States was segregated (or even only available) based upon race. For the most part, African Americans received very little to no education before the Civil War. In the south where slavery was legal, many states enacted laws which made it a crime for blacks to even be able to read, much less attend school alongside white classmates. After the Civil War and emancipation, blacks still received little help from the states themselves. The federal government, under the Radical Republicans, set up the Freedman's Bureau to help educate and protect former slaves and passed several civil rights bills, but neither survived the end of Reconstruction in 1877.

After the end of Reconstruction, many southern states began to enact so-called Jim Crow laws which mandated racial segregation between blacks and whites. The Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson of 1896 legalized the segregation of races as long as each race enjoyed parity in quality of education (the "separate but equal" principle). However, very few black students actually received equal education, often with low funding, outmoded or dilapidated facilities, and deficient textbooks (often ones previously used in white schools).

The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s helped overturn such laws; in 1954 the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education unanimously declared separate facilities inherently unequal and unconstitutional. The Civil Rights Acts of 1960 and 1964 further helped end the period of segregation. Integration itself was a long and drawn out issue; although required by law, the first integrations of minute numbers of black students met with intense opposition across the south. In 1957 the integration of Little Rock, Arkansas, had to be enforced by federal troops; this was after President Dwight D. Eisenhower had federalized the National Guard, which the governor had called in to prevent integration. Throughout the 1960s integration continued with varying degrees of difficulty, including a period of forced bussing, popular during the administration of Richard Nixon.

Although full equality and parity in education would take many years (many school districts are technically still under the integration mandates of local courts), technical equality in education had been achieved by 1970. The actual equality of education, however, is still often the subject of dispute. It may also be argued that the transformation of the Pal Grant program to a loan program in the early 1980s has caused the gap between the growth rates of European and African American college graduates to widen since the 1970s.

Bibliography

for more detailed bibliography see History of Education in the United States: Bibliography

Surveys

• Button, H. Warren and Provenzo, Eugene F., Jr. History of Education and Culture in America. Prentice-Hall, 1983. 379 pp.
• Cremin, Lawrence A. American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607–1783. (1970); American Education: The National Experience, 1783–1876. (1980); American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876-1980 (1990); standard 3 vol detailed scholarly history
• Curti, M. E. The social ideas of American educators, with new chapter on the last twenty-five years. (1959).
• Herbst, Juergen. The once and future school: Three hundred and fifty years of American secondary education. (1996).
• Herbst, Juergen. School Choice and School Governance: A Historical Study of the United States and Germany 2006. ISBN 1-4039-7302-4.
• Lucas, C. J. American higher education: A history. (1994). pp.; reprinted essays from History of Education Quarterly
• McClellan, B. Edward and Reese, William J., ed. The Social History of American Education. U. of Illinois Pr., 1988. 370 pp.; reprinted essays from History of Education Quarterly
• David Nasaw; Schooled to Order: A Social History of Public Schooling in the United States (1981) online version
• Parkerson, Donald H. and Parkerson, Jo Ann. Transitions in American Education: A Social History of Teaching. Routledge, 2001. 242 pp.
• Parkerson, Donald H. and Parkerson, Jo Ann. The Emergence of the Common School in the U.S. Countryside. Edwin Mellen, 1998. 192 pp.
• John L. Rury; Education and Social Change: Themes in the History of American Schooling.'; Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 2002. online version
• Theobald, Paul. Call School: Rural Education in the Midwest to 1918. Southern Illinois U. Pr., 1995. 246 pp.
• David B. Tyack. The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (1974),
• Tyack, David B., & Hansot, E. Managers of virtue: Public school leadership in America, 1820–1980. (1982).

Pre 1880

• Axtell, J. The school upon a hill: Education and society in colonial New England. Yale University Press. (1974).
• Cremin, Lawrence A. American Education: The Colonial Experience, 1607–1783. (1970); American Education: The National Experience, 1783–1876. (1980);
• Parkerson, Donald H. and Parkerson, Jo Ann. The Emergence of the Common School in the U.S. Countryside. Edwin Mellen, 1998. 192 pp.
• Reese, William J. The Origins of the American High School. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.

Since 1880

• Maurice R. Berube; American School Reform: Progressive, Equity, and Excellence Movements, 1883-1993. 1994. online version
• Brint, S., & Karabel, J. The Diverted Dream: Community colleges and the promise of educational opportunity in America, 1900–1985. Oxford University Press. (1989).
• Cremin, Lawrence A. The transformation of the school: Progressivism in American education, 1876–1957. (1961).
• Cremin, Lawrence A. American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876-1980 (1990); vol 3 of standard detailed scholarly history
• Gatto, John Taylor. The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation into the Prison of Modern Schooling. Oxford Village Press, 2001, 412 pp. online version
• Krug, Edward A. The shaping of the American high school, 1880–1920. (1964); The American high school, 1920–1940. (1972). standard 2 vol scholarly history
• Peterson, Paul E. The politics of school reform, 1870–1940. (1985).
• Ravitch, Diane. Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms. Simon & Schuster, 2000. 555 pp.
• Theobald, Paul. Call School: Rural Education in the Midwest to 1918. Southern Illinois U. Pr., 1995. 246 pp.
• Tyack, David B. The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (1974),
• Tyack, David and Cuban, Larry. Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform. Harvard U. Pr., 1995. 184 pp.
• Tyack, David B., & Hansot, E. Managers of virtue: Public school leadership in America, 1820–1980. (1982).

Ethnicity, race, gender, religion

• Walter R. Allen, Joseph O. Jewell; "African American Education since 'An American Dilemma'" Daedalus, Vol. 124, 1995 online version
• James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (University of North Carolina Press, 1988). online edition
• Eisenmann, Linda ed. Historical Dictionary of Women's Education in the United States. (1998)
• MacDonald, Victoria-Maria. Latino Education in the United States: A Narrated History from 1513-2000 (2004)
• Nash, Margaret A. Women's Education in the United States, 1780-1840 (2005)
• Sanders, James W The education of an urban minority: Catholics in Chicago, 1833–1965. (1977).
• Solomon, Barbara M. In the company of educated women: A history of women and higher education in America. (1985).
• Walch, Timothy. Parish School: American Catholic Parochial Education from Colonial Times to the Present. 1996.

Higher Education

• Brint, S., & Karabel, J. The Diverted Dream: Community colleges and the promise of educational opportunity in America, 1900–1985. Oxford University Press. (1989).
• Geiger, Roger L., ed. The American College in the Nineteenth Century. Vanderbilt University Press. (2000).
• Geiger, Roger L. To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900-1940. Oxford University Press. (1986).
• Geiger, Roger L. Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities Since World War II. Oxford University Press. (2001).
• Horowitz, Helen L. Campus life: Undergraduate cultures from the end of the eighteenth century to the present. (1987).
• Levine, D. O. The American college and the culture of aspiration, 1915–1940. (1986).
• Lucas, C. J. American higher education: A history. (1994).
• Veysey Lawrence R. The emergence of the American university. (1965).

Regional and Local Studies

• Edgar W. Knight; Education in the South (1924) online edition
• Lazerson, Marvin; Origins of the Urban School: Public Education in Massachusetts, 1870-1915 Harvard University Press, 1971 online version
• Leloudis, J. L. Schooling the New South: Pedagogy, self, and society in North Carolina, 1880–1920. (1996). online version
• Troen, Selwyn K.; The Public and the Schools: Shaping the St. Louis System, 1838-1920 (1975) online version

Primary Sources

• Richard Hofstadter and C. Dewitt Hardy, eds; The Development and Scope of Higher Education in the United States (1952) online edition
• Knight, Edgar W. and Clifton L. Hall, eds.; Readings in American Educational History (1951) online edition

Recent

• John E. Chubb and Terry M. Moe. Politics, Markets and America's Schools (1990)
• Kosar, Kevin R. Failing Grades: The Federal Politics of Education Standards. Rienner, 2005. 259 pp.
• E. Wayne Ross et al eds. Defending Public Schools. (Praeger, 2004), 4 vol: Volume: 1: Education Under the Security State (2004) online version; Volume: 2: Teaching for a Democratic Society (2004) online version; Volume: 3: Curriculum Continuity and Change in the 21st Century (2004) online version; Volume: 4: The Nature and Limits of Standards-Based Reform and Assessment (2004) online version
• Tyack, David. Seeking Common Ground: Public Schools in a Diverse Society. Harvard U. Pr., 2003. 237 pp.