Chapter 5: The History of Schools in the United States

Summary - There have been a lot of educational shifts in the past 300 years. Many of which have been covered in our textbook, The Joy of Teaching by Gene E. Hall, Linda F. Quinn, and Donna M. Gollnick. One of the first debates that was talked about in schooling was whether or not they should have compulsory attendance in the schools. Another big debate was brought to the attention by Horace Mann who said “It [the common school] is a free school system, it knows no distinction or rich and poor…it throws open its doors and spreads the table of its bounty for all the children of the state…Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the equalizer of the conditions of men, the great balance wheel of the same machinery.” His debate was that everyone should get the same education despite the social class of the child, which then in turn had people evaluating splitting the children up, not by class, but by age group. The topic of what should be taught in the school system was in the past a very big controversy, and in some ways today still is, there have been a lot of court cases discussing what should and shouldn’t be taught in the public school system. The last debate (and possibly the most important) to discuss is the desegregation in the public schools; that caused such a controversy for so many years.

Description - Compulsory attendance is defined as the required attendance at school until an age set by state legislatures. Since the constitution does not cover how the education system should be handled, they made the tenth amendment which said “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively of to the people” through the tenth amendment it was determined that the states define the required attendance, but generally it’s the same age for all states. Horace Mann had the vision of education being the common school that has the same curriculum for all of the students, despite their economic condition. However he envisioned this in the 1830s, because in the present day curriculum is influenced by local cultures and beliefs. What should be taught in the classroom has always been hard to define, but in the 1950’s the National Defense Education Act was greatly concerned with the lack of quality in the things that were taught in public schools. So they decided that a part of education had to be with the students learning better skills in science and math, because of the way the world has been advancing technologically since the 50’s.