How Public Education Worked Its Way Into Policy
Puritan Communities Make Education the Law...
New England Puritan communities believed literacy could save people from the temptation of the devil, and set the leading example for a top-down authoritative approach to public schooling. They passed laws, beginning in 1647, requiring every town of fifty or more families to hire a teacher, and every town of one hundred or more families to build a grammar school to prepare students for Harvard College. This formal structure contributed to an impressive literacy rate. About ninety percent of men living in this region at the time of the American Revolution could read and write.10 Speaking directly about the New England communities’ support of public schools, John Adams bragged in 1765 that, “It has been observed that we are all of us lawyers, divines, politicians, and philosophers. And I have good authorities to say, that all candid foreigners who have passed through this country, and conversed freely with all sorts of people here, will allow, that they have never seen so much knowledge and civility among the common people in any part of the world.”11 Massachusetts remained a leading example for other states, as the first to pass compulsory public education into law in 1852. The New England region routinely produces the highest math and reading proficiency rates, advanced placement scores, and standardized test scores in America today.12
...But Southern Plantation Colonies Felt Much Differently
The Mid-Atlantic and Southern regions of the American colonies were unable and unwilling to support the kind of systems found in New England at the time. States like New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware had significantly more religious and ethnic diversity that added complexity to any efforts to create common schools.13 Further south, Virginia’s social climate was firmly aristocratic and they tended to view public education as a threat to the social order. In 1671, royal governor Sir William Berkeley expressed thanks that there “are no free schools nor printing” in Virginia. He felt that learning created heretical religious sects, printing spread those views, and then the people would criticize “even the best government.”14 Most citizens viewed the few existing public schools as “pauper schools” and did not want to send their children to such for social reasons. After Governor Berkeley left, progress came to Virginia, but it moved very slowly. Thomas Jefferson would run up against this when he was appointed to lead a committee to revise and replace Virginia laws after independence, and less than half of the committee’s suggestions passed the state legislature. This highlighted a widening gap between close-knit Northern political culture and the more isolated plantation life.15
Thomas Jefferson's Vision
The 1779 Bill 79 for the General Diffusion of Knowledge was Jefferson’s doomed pet project for creating a system of public schools. He dreamed of dividing Virginia into counties and wards, small enough that each could have a central school children would be able to get to. The schools would teach reading, writing, arithmetic, and history rather than religion. Jefferson believed studying history would let students recognize “ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views.”16 He tried very hard personally, and through James Madison’s lobbying, to get the bill passed, but it failed repeatedly because of concerns that rural Virginia was too thinly populated to justify the expense of schools. A version of Bill 79 did finally pass in 1796, but it left the creation of the school to the discretion of the county judge. Since funding was to come from the wealthiest families in a county, and the judge was typically one of these, not a single county judge ever created a public school under this plan.17
Despite meeting with utter failure in his home state, Thomas Jefferson contributed the most significant legacy to public education of any founding father. After the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the young country needed to decide what to do with the area of land ceded by Britain known as the Northwest Territory. Jefferson served as a delegate to the Confederation Congress and wrote the Land Ordinance of 1784 and the update in 1785. The 1784 document proposes a division of the territory and a mechanism for bringing new states into the union once they have reached a threshold population.18 The 1785 document provides detailed instructions for how the land is to be surveyed, split up, and sold. It establishes a provision for the creation and funding of public schools, reserving the sixteenth plot specifically for this purpose.19 The Ordinance was updated to a final version in 1787, detailing how the territorial land was to be governed and the process by which territories could apply for statehood.
Jefferson’s provision for public education was kept, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 remained the blueprint under which the rest of the continental United States was settled. In his article The American Right to Education: The Northwest Ordinance, Reconstruction, and the Current Challenge, law professor Derek W. Black sums up the magnitude of its influence. “In total, the Northwest Ordinance helped shape thirty-one states….[it] divided every town into thirty-six lots and reserved a center lot for public schools, requiring outer lots to generate resources for those schools. Education was embedded into the structure of these future states.”20 The Ordinances predate the Constitution, as well. This shows just how crucial the framers believed education was. Few federal policies existed during this very early period and it’s notable that education was planned for in such a specific manner.
10 Boonshoft, Mark. Aristocratic Education and the Making of the American Republic. (The University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 16.
11 “V. “A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law,” No. 3, 30 September 1765,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-01-02-0052-0006. [Original source: The Adams Papers, Papers of John Adams, vol. 1, September 1755 – October 1773, ed. Robert J. Taylor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977, pp. 118–123.]
12 https://districtadministration.com/these-states-are-home-to-2024s-best-school-systems/#:~:text=America's%20best%20school%20systems,the%20state%20tops%20the%20list.&text=At%20the%20high%20school%20level,Happe%20in%20a%20public%20statement.
13 Boonshoft, Mark. Aristocratic Education and the Making of the American Republic. (The University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 17.
14 Wagoner, Jennings L. Jefferson and Education. [Charlottesville, Va.] : Chapel Hill, N.C.: Thomas Jefferson Foundation ; Distributed The University of North Carolina Press, 2004, p. 22.
15 Ibid.
16 Wagoner, Jennings L. Jefferson and Education. [Charlottesville, Va.] : Chapel Hill, N.C.: Thomas Jefferson Foundation ; Distributed The University of North Carolina Press, 2004, p. 35.
17 Wagoner, Jennings L. Jefferson and Education. [Charlottesville, Va.] : Chapel Hill, N.C.: Thomas Jefferson Foundation ; Distributed The University of North Carolina Press, 2004, p. 42.
18 https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/image/LandOrdinance1784Jefferson.htm
19 https://www.loc.gov/item/90898224/
20 Black, Derek W. "The American Right to Education: The Northwest Ordinance, Reconstruction, and the Current Challenge." Poverty & Race 30, no. 1 (2021): 5.