Ah, public education—the grand experiment that dragged this republic kicking and screaming toward something resembling civilization. For 250 years, it has been the great equalizer, wrenching the downtrodden from ignorance, opening doors for women, and even bestowing literacy upon the poor Southern whites who, before Reconstruction, were five times as illiterate as their Northern counterparts.
The Founding Fathers, those wild-eyed radicals, knew the truth: a self-governing people, left uneducated, would soon find themselves the playthings of tyrants. Madison warned that a democracy without an educated public was little more than a prelude to tragedy. Adams insisted that education must reach even the lowest citizen, lest the nation be governed by fools. …. lest the nation be governed by fools. Tommy Jefferson, ever the pessimist, predicted tyranny if the masses remained ignorant. And so, before the ink was dry on the Constitution, Congress enshrined education in law, carving up the frontier into tidy plots where schools would be built—by order of the state, no less.
FastClass: Why Abe Lincoln Built the Dept Of Education
Then came the Civil War, and with it, the next great push. Honest abe Lincoln, no stranger to self-education himself, saw literacy as a weapon of freedom. He demanded that Southern states, as they crawled back into the Union, educate their Black citizens. The army, usually busy with more destructive tasks, took up the cause—marching teachers into occupied territory, securing schoolhouses, and imposing a tax to fund this radical notion. When the war ended, the Freedmen’s Bureau carried on the crusade, planting schools across the South, hiring thousands of teachers, and proving—if proof was needed—that the thirst for knowledge was unquenchable, no matter what plantation owners or politicians believed.
By 1867, Congress had had enough of half-assed assurances and created a Department of Education. Naturally, some howled in protest, but they were drowned out by men who still had the smoke of war in their nostrils. Education, they declared, was the bedrock of the republic. Without it, liberty was a farce, democracy a tragic joke. The new department would, at last, ensure that every child—North or South, Black or white—had the tools to hold their government to account.
And yet, here we are, a century and a half later, still debating the merits of knowledge. The ghosts of ignorance still haunt the halls of power, their owners ever eager to unmake the progress that wiser men bled to build.
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