In a recent article in the Foundation for Economic Education, Dr. Robert Peterson points out….
“For two hundred years in American history, from the mid-1600s to the mid-1800s, public schools as we know them today were virtually non-existent, and the educational needs of America were met by the free market.”
Yes, you heard me correctly, the free market.
Think about this. Would you like to choose what is being taught to your children?
Would you like to send your kids to a school free of teaching Critical Race Theory of the 1619 Project?
Would you like to send your kids to a school that taught patriotism?
Would you like them to be taught the role of good citizenship?
Would you like to send them to a school where the teachers and the Administration could provide discipline for acts of misbehavior?
Would you like to send your kids to a school that allowed school prayer, celebrated Christmas, and required the pledge of allegiance be recited every morning at the start of class?
Would you like your kids to graduate capable of being able to perform critical thinking and express their thoughts clearly both orally and through the written word?
I won’t even get into the issue of being able to solve simple math problems.
Now I can tell you, our forefathers are rolling in their graves watching what is happening to the education of our children.
From the 1650’s to the 1850’s, America produced several generations of highly skilled and literate men and women who laid the foundation for a nation dedicated to the principles of freedom and self-government.
The private system of education in which our forefathers were educated included home, school, church, voluntary associations, philosophical societies, circulating libraries, apprenticeships, and private study.
It was a system supported primarily by those who purchased the services of education, and by private benefactors.
All was done without a mandate by, or oversight of the federal government.
Dr. Lawrence A. Cremin, a distinguished scholar in the field of education, has said that during the colonial period the Bible was “the single most important cultural influence in the lives of Anglo-Americans.”
Thus, the cornerstone of early American education was the belief that “children are a heritage from the Lord.”
Parents believed that it was their responsibility to not only teach them how to make a living, but also how to live. How to live.
Folks, that is the missing link. You want to stop the craziness running rampant through our schools and our cities?
We must teach our children how to live.
As our forefathers searched their Bibles, they found that the function of government was to protect life and property.
Education was not a responsibility of the government.
Education began in the home and in the fields.
Education in early America began in the home at the mother’s knee, and often ended in the cornfield or barn by the father’s side.
The task of teaching reading usually fell to the mother, and since paper was in short supply, she would trace the letters of the alphabet in the ashes and dust by the fireplace.
The child learned the alphabet and then how to sound out words. Then a book was placed in the child’s hands, usually the Bible.
As many passages were familiar to him, having heard them at church or at family devotions, he would soon master the skill of reading.
The Bible was supplemented by other good books such as Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, The New England Primer, and Isaac Watt’s Divine Songs.
From volumes like these, our founding fathers and their generation learned the values that laid the foundation for free enterprise.
Armed with love, common sense, and a nearby woodshed, colonial mothers often achieved more than our modern-day elementary schools with their federally-funded programs and education specialists.
These colonial mothers used simple, time-tested methods of instruction mixed with plain, old-fashioned hard work.
Children were not ruined by educational experiments developed in the ivory towers of academia.
Home education was so common in America that most children knew how to read before they entered school.
“Children were often taught to read at home before they were subjected to the rigors of school. In middle-class families, where the mother would be expected to be literate, this was considered part of her duties.
Without ever spending a dime of tax money, or without ever consulting a host of bureaucrats, psychologists, and specialists, children in early America learned the basic academic skills of reading, writing, and ciphering necessary for getting along in society.
Even in Boston, the capital city of the colony in which the government had the greatest hand, children were taught to read at home.
A Boston bookseller’s stock in 1700 included no less than eleven dozen spellers and sixty-one dozen primers.
The books were bought by parents, and illiteracy was absent because parents taught their children how to read outside of a formal school setting.
Coupled with the vocational skills children learned from their parents, home education met the demands of the free market. For many, formal schooling was simply unnecessary.
The fine education they received at home and on the farm held them in good stead for the rest of their lives, and was supplemented with Bible reading and almanacs like Franklin’s Poor Richard’s.
Some of our forefathers desired more education than they could receive at home. Thus, grammar and secondary schools grew up all along the Atlantic seaboard, particularly near the centers of population, such as Boston and Philadelphia.
In New England, many of these schools were started by colonial governments, but were supported and controlled by the local townspeople.
In the Middle Colonies there was even less government intervention. In Pennsylvania, a compulsory education law was passed in 1683, but it was never strictly enforced.
Nevertheless, many schools were set up simply as a response to consumer demand. Philadelphia, which by 1776 had become second only to London as the chief city in the British Empire, had a school for every need and interest.
Quakers, Philadelphia’s first inhabitants, laid the foundation for an educational system that still thrives in America. Because of their emphasis on learning, an illiterate Quaker child was a contradiction in terms.
Other religious groups set up schools in the Middle Colonies. The Scottish Presbyterians, the Moravians, the Lutherans, and Anglicans all had their own schools.
In addition to these church-related schools, private schoolmasters, entrepreneurs in their own right, established hundreds of schools.
Historical records, which are by no means complete, reveal that over one hundred and twenty-five private schoolmasters advertised their services in Philadelphia newspapers between 1740 and 1776.
Instruction was offered in Latin, Greek, mathematics, surveying, navigation, accounting, bookkeeping, science, English, and contemporary foreign languages.
Incompetent and inefficient teachers were soon eliminated, since they were not subsidized by the State or protected by a union.
Teachers who satisfied their customers by providing good services prospered.
One schoolmaster, Andrew Porter, a mathematics teacher, had over one hundred students enrolled in 1776. The fees the students paid enabled him to provide for a family of seven.
Libraries
In addition to formal schooling in elementary and secondary schools, colleges, and universities, early America had many other institutions that made it possible for people to either get an education or supplement their previous training.
An individual who never attended school could receive an excellent education by using libraries, building and consulting his own library, and by joining a society for mutual improvement. In colonial America, all of these were possible.
Consumer demand brought into existence a large number of libraries. Unlike anything in the Old Country, where libraries were open only to scholars, churchmen, or government officials, these libraries were rarely supported by government funds.
The first non-private, non-church libraries in America were maintained by membership fees, called subscriptions or shares, and by gifts of books and money from private benefactors interested in education.
Soon libraries became the objects of private philanthropy, and it became possible for even the poorest citizens to borrow books. Sometimes the membership fee was completely waived for an individual if he showed intellectual promise and character.
The sermon was also an excellent educational experience for our colonial forefathers. Sunday morning was a time to hear the latest news and see old friends and neighbors. But it was also an opportunity for many to sit under a man of God who had spent many hours preparing for a two, three, or even four hour sermon.
Thus, without ever attending a college or seminary, a church-goer in colonial America could gain an intimate knowledge of Bible doctrine, church history, and classical literature.
The first Sunday Schools also developed in this period. Unlike their modern-day counterparts, colonial Sunday Schools not only taught Bible but also the rudiments of reading and writing. These Sunday Schools often catered to the poorest members of society.
Philosophical Societies
Another educational institution that developed in colonial America was the philosophical society. One of the most famous of these was Ben Franklin’s Junto (pronounced (Hun-toe) where men would gather to read and discuss papers they had written on all sorts of topics and issues.
Another society was called The Literary Republic. This society opened in the bookbindery of George Rineholt in 1764 in Philadelphia. Here, artisans, tradesmen, and common laborers met to discuss logic, jurisprudence, religion, science, and moral philosophy (economics).
Traveling lecturers, rented halls and advertised their lectures in local papers.
By 1776, when America finally declared its independence, a tradition had been established and voluntarism in education was the rule.
Our founding fathers, who had been educated in this tradition, did not think in terms of government-controlled education.
Accordingly, when the delegates gathered in Philadelphia to write a Constitution for the new nation, education was considered to be outside the jurisdiction of the civil government, particularly the national government.
Madison, in his notes on the Convention, recorded that there was some talk of giving the Federal legislature the power to establish a national university at the future capital. But the proposal was easily defeated because the Founding Fathers supported the local institutions which had sprung up all over the country.”
A principle had been established in America that was not to be deviated from until the mid-nineteenth century. Even as late as 1860, there were only 300 public schools, as compared to 6,000 private academies.
The results of colonial America’s free market system of education were impressive indeed.
Almost no tax money was spent on education, yet education was available to almost anyone who wanted it, including the poor.
No government subsidies were given, and inefficient institutions either improved or went out of business.
Competition guaranteed that scarce educational resources would be allocated properly.
The educational institutions that prospered produced a generation of articulate Americans who could grapple with the complex problems of self-government.
The Federalist Papers, which are seldom read or understood today, even in our universities, were written for and read by the common man.
Literacy rates were as high or higher than they are today.
A study conducted in 1800 by DuPont de Nemours revealed that only four in a thousand Americans were unable to read and write legibly
In 1772, Jacob Duche, the Chaplain of Congress, wrote:
The poorest laborer upon the shore of Delaware thinks himself entitled to deliver his sentiments in matters of religion or politics with as much freedom as the gentleman or scholar. Such is the prevailing taste for books of every kind, that almost every man is a reader; and by pronouncing sentence, right or wrong, upon the various publications that come in his way, puts himself upon a level, in point of knowledge, with their several authors.
Ben Franklin, as well, testified to the efficiency of the colonial educational system.
According to Franklin, the North American libraries alone “have improved the general conversation of Americans, made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries, and perhaps have contributed in some degree to the stand so generally made throughout the colonies in defense of their privileges.”
The experience of colonial America clearly supports the idea that the market, if allowed to operate freely, could meet the educational needs of modern-day America.
I for one, would like to see education in America return to a free enterprise, market driven, competitive system .
Why? Abraham Lincoln said it best years ago, “The philosophy of the classroom will be the philosophy of the government in the next generation.”
Think about that folks.