An American Education Timeline

(Been super-busy and a bit under the weather, so very few posts. Hope to change that soon.)

There are a bunch of American education canards that need rebuttal. One of the most unconscious and deeply embedded is the idea that compulsory schooling, and the professionalization of education that it required, achieved anything positive. It’s like flu shots: if flu shots work, then we should see a drop in deaths caused by the flu as the number of people getting the shots increases- at the very least. Yet, over the last 40 years or so, the number of people getting flu shots has skyrocketed – yet the number of flu deaths and hospitalizations just keeps going up and up. So, what exactly do those shots DO, if they don’t curtail deaths and severe sickness?

In the same way, our nation went from almost no professional educators (outside of colleges, at least) prior to 1848 to very near 100% professional educators by 1950. What I mean: prior to the opening of the first state-controlled compulsory age-segregated graded classroom school in 1848, very few teachers were formally trained in teaching. The Normal School, which became teacher colleges, were mostly but a gleam in their fathers’ eyes at that time; the typical teacher was just somebody who would take the job – a college grad if the school, usually in a city, had money; but more often than not, at least in the one-room schools in which most Americans were educated, some teenage product of those one-room schools who needed a job.

By 1900, about half of all students went to ‘consolidated’ schools, but about half still went to one-room schools. By 1950, virtually every public school was staffed by graduates of teacher colleges, while Catholic schools – by far the largest system outside the state schools – tried to hire ‘qualified’ teachers or get teacher-college training for their staff. Catholic schools all wanted to be public schools, at least on the structural, classroom, and training side. This trend continues today.

So: we should expect the basic markers of education – literacy and numeracy – to increase as the professionalism of the educators increased, just as we would expect health, using the markers ‘staying alive’ and ‘staying out of the hospital’, to increase with the spread of flu shots.

But education, as measured by literacy and numeracy, did not increase over the 100 years from 1850 to 1950. Quite the contrary. Here’s an example:

The imbecility of her military leaders abroad, and the fatal want of energy in her councils at home, had lowered the character of Great Britain from the proud elevation on which it had been placed by the talents and enterprise of her former warriors and statesmen. No longer dreaded by her enemies, her servants were fast losing the confidence of self-respect. In this mortifying abasement, the colonists, though innocent of her imbecility, and too humble to be the agents of her blunders, were but the natural participators. They had recently seen a chosen army from that country, which, reverencing as a mother, they had blindly believed invincible—an army led by a chief who had been selected from a crowd of trained warriors, for his rare military endowments, disgracefully routed by a handful of French and Indians, and only saved from annihilation by the coolness and spirit of a Virginian boy, whose riper fame has since diffused itself, with the steady influence of moral truth, to the uttermost confines of Christendom. A wide frontier had been laid naked by this unexpected disaster, and more substantial evils were preceded by a thousand fanciful and imaginary dangers. The alarmed colonists believed that the yells of the savages mingled with every fitful gust of wind that issued from the interminable forests of the west. The terrific character of their merciless enemies increased immeasurably the natural horrors of warfare. Numberless recent massacres were still vivid in their recollections; nor was there any ear in the provinces so deaf as not to have drunk in with avidity the narrative of some fearful tale of midnight murder, in which the natives of the forests were the principal and barbarous actors. As the credulous and excited traveler related the hazardous chances of the wilderness, the blood of the timid curdled with terror, and mothers cast anxious glances even at those children which slumbered within the security of the largest towns. In short, the magnifying influence of fear began to set at naught the calculations of reason, and to render those who should have remembered their manhood, the slaves of the basest passions. Even the most confident and the stoutest hearts began to think the issue of the contest was becoming doubtful; and that abject class was hourly increasing in numbers, who thought they foresaw all the possessions of the English crown in America subdued by their Christian foes, or laid waste by the inroads of their relentless allies.

James Fenimore Cooper, the Last of the Mohicans, 1827 (The ‘Virginian boy’ is Washington)

And so on, for several hundred pages. In 1826, this book was a smash best seller, the Harry Potter of its day, only more so, read by young and old. Yet in 1826, there were no compulsory state-funded schools. People learned to read in slapdash ways, famously out of the King James Bible on grandmother’s knee. But read they could!

I bet your average American college student would think it a slog, or even nigh unreadable. Cooper’s long sentences, nested clauses, adventurous vocabulary are likely to prove difficult. But they were not too difficult for Americans 200 years ago.

30 years earlier, the Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist Papers, full of historical and classical references, were published in popular newspapers – and hundreds of thousands of people read them and talked about them. Papers in those days were not written to a 6th grade reading level, yet many, many people read them.

Excepting slaves, the population of America was by all evidence as literate in the 1820s as it ever got. In 1835, Tocqueville wrote about seeing farmers sitting under trees in their fields, reading Descartes (I think) while resting their plow horses.

The evidence – these, and many more similar examples – suggests a very high level of literacy in America prior to any compulsory schooling.

In the 1850s, when compulsory age-segregated classrooms were still a bit of a novelty, we had spectacles like the Lincoln-Douglass debates – by modern standards, high-level political discourse, but targeting the general public. During the Civil War, soldiers with very minimal formal education wrote home in letters the sophistication of which would put most modern adults to shame; Lincoln’s speeches and addresses were certainly aimed at a higher level of intellectual attainment than anything our modern politicians crank out. One can reasonably conclude that literacy was high without the benefit of compulsory education.

By 1900, compulsory state schooling had thoroughly metastasized. In cities, where about half the US population lived, almost every child attended a graded classroom school run by professional educators. Out in the country, locally run one-room schools still educated the other half.

In his book One-Room Schools of the Middle West: An Illustrated History, Dr. Fuller mentions (and I can’t lay my hands on it at the moment) that, once, the NEA made the mistake of giving their standardized tests to the one-room school children, hoping to show how superior the consolidated schools were. Problem was, the country kids outperformed their city slicker peers – despite the tests being geared to what was taught in the consolidated schools, and despite 0ne-room schooling costing 25% what the consolidated schools cost per pupil, and having some fraction of the contact hours.

Already by 1900, Americans as a whole were getting stupider.

The US Military has long conducted reading comprehension tests as part of its processing of recruits. Again, I don’t have the book at hand (I think Gatto laid is all out in Underground History), but I recall these reading comprehension tests were given to all recruits starting before WWI. Since the military is interested in every warm body it can grab, these tests are about as close as we can get to a nationwide measure of literacy over the time period when professional educators gained complete control of K-12 schooling.

We’d use the WWI results as our baseline: that’s American literacy when about half the nation had been taught to read primarily in state run schools. Once again, I need to build a few huge floor to ceiling bookcases so I can liberate the 50+ boxes of books I have yet to even bring into the house before I can lay my hands on the sources, so this is all based on my memory: Recruits, both black and white, scored very highly in basic reading comprehension, back in the 1910s.

And, as the professional educators replaced the one room schools with their consolidated schools and the Catholic schools slavishly adopted the standards and practices of the public schools, reading comprehension among military recruits fell. In the 1950s, when the professionalization of schools was all but complete, the tests results continued to decline. By now, while finding physically fit recruits makes the news, finding some with basic reading comprehension is also a challenge.

There’s pretty much a straight-line decline in overall reading comprehension among military recruits from 1900 to now. Correlation is not causation, but it makes a fellah think.

Finally, what for me is the last straw: if graded classroom education is good and necessary, done selflessly for the good of the children, then failing to run children through state schools or their private school equivalents would be a bad thing. Well, is it? I, who radically unschooled our children, and thousands of homeschoolers and unschoolers, can see the results. In my case, 5 out of 5 our our kids chose to attend college, got into their first choice, and we now have 3 – the only three who have now reached an age at which they should have normally completed college – have degrees, honors, one masters and counting. And they are nice, respectful, decent people, who can form lasting personal attachments. Not that college is the best or only measure – far from it! – but even by that popular measure, our kids – and hundreds of thousands of others! – who skipped k-12 schooling entirely, are not suffering from some lack of education, and, indeed, on average, far exceed the achievements of the graded classroom victims. It seems less school = more achievement (adjusting for poverty and sanity, of course).

Enough for now. Didn’t want you all to think I forgot you. I retire in 5 weeks (but who’s counting?) and plan to spend a lot of time pulling all this school stuff together, with citations and quotations and so on. I can hardly wait!

Oh look! Young people arranged in rows, following orders, performing specific difficult manual tasks!

Chaser: Woodrow Wilson, after whom numerous public schools are named, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909:

We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.