Public Education: More Revolutionary Than We Thought?

When we think about the history of public education, we might think about one-room schoolhouses, Horace Mann, or John Dewey. But what we typically don't realize, is that our history goes back further. A LOT further. The Enlightenment movement in Europe produced new ideas about society and government, and American colonial academies taught these ideas in the generation leading up to the Revolutionary War. Our founding fathers came to believe that public education was the cornerstone to a democracy and, while it didn't materialize on a national level for the first century of American independence, they built the foundation for so much of what we have today.