Uh, Buz, what is
your particular version of the US public education
system? And how does it measure up to history?
From what I can find, the
federal government (that
is what you have been talking about, isn't it?) did not have anything to say about what was supposed to be taught, but rather just that communities should provide for education. The beginning of a system of public education itself started with a
Unitarian named
Horace Mann (
History of education in the United States - Wikipedia):
quote:
Mann reforms
Education reformers such as Horace Mann of Massachusetts began calling for public education systems for all. Upon becoming the secretary of education in Massachusetts in 1837, Mann helped to create a statewide system, based on the Prussian model[17], of "common schools," which referred to the belief that everyone was entitled to the same content in education. These early efforts focused primarily on elementary education. The common-school movement began to catch on in the North. Connecticut adopted a similar system in 1849, and Massachusetts passed a compulsory attendance law in 1852.
1837. Gee, isn't that a bit
after the Founding Fathers?
OBTW, one of the things that Horace Mann stressed and actually included as one of his six main principles was " that this education must be non-sectarian". As I would say to the leader of the Boy Scouts of America who profess that they are "absolutely non-sectarian" and yet arbitrarily require an distinctly
sectarian religious belief (which is not required by their regulations or by-laws, which is contrary to the same, and which has been explicitly denied by explicit statements by the BSA leadership), "What part of 'non-sectarian' do you not understand?".
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