Public schools are so ubiquitous and ingrained in American culture that one could easily be forgiven for thinking that we, as a nation, have always had them. However, public schools are a relatively recent invention. Federal funding for public schools is a recent anomaly, dating back to the days of President Jimmy Carter. His successor, President Ronald Reagan, famously tried to dismantle the Department of Education to no avail.

Public schools being an arm of the state are indoctrination centers. This becomes increasingly true as basic skills such as the old "three Rs" of "reading, writing and 'rithmatic" are jettisoned in favor of climate change, critical race theory and gender ideology – all of which are now part and parcel of a public education in the United States. As if this weren't troubling enough, public schools are largely funded by property taxes on housing. These taxes, which are paid generally on a bi-annual basis, are confiscated from people whose children do not even attend public schools. What's more, these taxes require people to effectively pay rent on owned property under penalty of losing their homes.

We do not have to look far for an alternative to the world of public schools. Throughout most of American history, education has been the purview of parents, the church, and other private institutions. The rise of public education in the United States is a story of violence and coercion that is largely hidden from the public record. After reading this, you will never view public schools in the same light ever again.

Public vs. Private vs. Vouchers: How It All Works

Before we get into the meat of the matter, it is worth explaining some things about public education, private education, the voucher system, and how each of these works.

• 5.7 million students are enrolled in private schools, approximately 10 percent of all students in the K-12 system.

• Between the year 1991 and 2015, the proportion of non-religious schools in the United States has grown greatly, from 14.8 percent to 21.8 percent.

• Catholic schools are still the leader, but their market share has declined significantly from 53 percent to 38.8 percent.

• In 2016, 1.69 million children were homeschooled, making up 3.3 percent of all children of school age.

• This is an explosive growth from the year 1990, when only 250,000 children were educated at home.

• As of December 2016, there were 14 states with traditional school voucher programs.

• Other private market alternatives to school vouchers include tax credits and education savings accounts.

• When these are added into the picture, there are 27 states with some kind of educational choice program.[/li][/list]

All told, 10 states provide vouchers for children to attend private schools as of 2019. Vouchers are either coupons directly paid to private schools or tax credits that reimburse parents at tax time. President Donald Trump has said that he wants to distribute $20 million in federal education dollars as block grants to states that would take the form of school vouchers.

The Pre-History of Public Schools in the United States

Unsurprisingly, public education in the United States was primarily a regional phenomenon in the earliest days. New England was known as one of the first places with public schools. However, these were not "public" in the sense that we think of public schools today. First of all, the schools were not compulsory. While Massachusetts and other New England states did have compulsory education laws, these did not mandate the use of the public schools nor any other education method for that matter. They only required what was called "proper education," which in many cases might not have included basic literacy.
In the South, tutors were the most common means of education for the planter class. During the colonial period, it was not uncommon for such upper-crust Southerners to send their children overseas to England and Scotland for their education at a boarding school.

For the most part, where people received formal education, it ended at eighth grade. Secondary education was not commonplace for the majority of Americans until the mid-20th century. According to A Cyclopedia of Education (4 vol. 1911), every state had some kind of publicly funded elementary school education by the year 1870.

Teaching was not a profession most sought out. It was mostly work for single women who lived in the school district. The primary qualification was knowing how to make the most out of the limited tax resources available to the schoolmaster. With the development of two-year normal schools (career academies for unmarried middle-class women), teaching became increasingly professional. There were now specified training academies for teachers. According to Jurgen Herbst in The Once and Future School: Three Hundred and Fifty Years of American Secondary Education, most public school teachers in Northern states had degrees from normal schools by the year 1900.

The important thing to note is that prior to the establishment of compulsory education in the United States, there was greater freedom for parents to determine how best to educate their children than probably anywhere else in history. Teachers were not required to have certificates. Licensing boards did not exist, nor did regulatory bodies.

Even in the early days of public education, there was much more freedom, even for those who attended public schools. The entire curriculum, as well as the person teaching it, were under the control of the local school board, not federal or colonial bureaucrats. Part of this flowed from the Puritan/Calvinist ethic. There was no central authority when it came to determining the meaning of The Bible. Nor was there any central authority for education, for many of the same reasons.

Upon the establishment of the United States, only one American city had a public education system, and it was not a "system" in any sense we would recognize today. First, it was not compulsory. Primary education was largely left to the private "dames schools." Literacy was required to enter grammar school at the age of seven. What's more, the trend was toward more private schools. Most people throughout the commonwealth preferred private schools, with the exception of Boston and it's Boston Latin, which was widely respected as an elite education institution and feeder to Harvard University (which was founded in part with a public grant).

In 1818, Boston began its push to shutter the popular private schools and force the state's children into compulsory, publicly funded schools. There was too much juvenile delinquency, and this was linked to a lack of compulsory education. A committee appointed a subcommittee (of course) and a survey of the state's educational system was carried out. Here's what it found:

• The eight public schools in Boston had 2,360 pupils.

• The 150 private schools shared over 4,000 pupils between them.

• Of children between the ages of four and seven, 283 children did not attend school.

• Of children over the age of seven, 243 attended no school.

A couple of extrapolations spring out from this. First of all, over 90 percent of Boston's children were in some kind of school. What's more, the private schools offered a much lower student-to-teacher ratio on average than the publicly funded schools. Finally, charity schools existed to cover the needs of pupils whose families could not afford either private or public schools, which, at that time, collected tuition fees in the same manner public universities and college do today.

The solution was not to provide subsidies for the children whose parents could not afford the public and private schools which already existed. Instead, Massachusetts embarked on the radical enterprise of forcing every child into the public school system – every child, that is, other than those who could afford to go to the elite private academies that were de rigueur for the bluebloods of Boston.

Screaming children were literally ripped from the arms of their parents and sent off to public schools. As if this were not horrifying and totalitarian enough, the new public schools of Massachusetts largely disseminated the Unitarian religious philosophy which had ousted Calvinism from Harvard in 1805. Further, they looked to the Prussian school system – centralized, with truant officers, grades and uniform curriculum – as their model for what public education ought to look like.

Thus, in 1852, Massachusetts became the first state to mandate compulsory education of children in primary school. New York became the second state in 1853. By 1918, all American children were required to go to school at least through eighth grade.

Continue reading The History of Private Schools: How American Education Became a Political Battleground at Ammo.com.