69. An Insider's Insider: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

69. An Insider's Insider: The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto from archive.org

An Insider's Insider

A bountiful source of clues to what tensions were actually at work back then can be

found in Ellwood P. Cubberley's celebratory history, Public Education in the United

States (1919, revised edition 1934), the standard in-house reference for official

school

legends until revisionist writings appeared in the 1960s.

Cubberley was an insider's insider, in a unique position to know things neither public nor

press could know. Although Cubberley always is circumspect and deliberately vague, he

cannot help revealing more than he wants to. For example, the reluctance of the country

to accept its new yoke of compulsion is caught briefly in this flat statement on page 564

of the 1934 revision:

The history of compulsory-attendance legislation in the states has been much the same

everywhere, and everywhere laws have been enacted only after overcoming strenuous

opposition.

Reference here is to the period from 1852 to 1918 when the states, one by one, were

caught in a compulsion net that used the strategy of gradualism:

At first the laws were optional., later the law was made state-wide but the compulsory

period was short (ten to twelve weeks) and the age limits low, nine to twelve years. After

this, struggle came to extend the time, often little by little. ..to extend the age limits

downward to eight and seven and upwards to fourteen, fifteen or sixteen; to make the law

apply to children attending private and parochial schools, and to require cooperation

from such schools for the proper handling of cases; to institute state supervision of local

enforcement; to connect school attendance enforcement with the child-labor legislation of

the State through a system of working permits. ...[emphasis added]

Noteworthy is the extent to which proponents of centralized schooling were prepared to

act covertly in defiance of majority will and in the face of extremely successful and

inexpensive local school heritage. As late as 1901, after nearly a half-century of such

legislation — first in Massachusetts, then state by state in the majority of the remaining

jurisdictions — Dr. Levi Seeley of Trenton Normal School could still thunder warnings of

lack of progress. In his book Foundations of Education, he writes, "while no law on the

statute books of Prussia is more thoroughly carried out [than compulsory attendance]..."

He laments that "...in 1890, out of 5,300,000 Prussian children, only 645 slipped out of

the truant officer's net..." but that our own school attendance legislation is nothing more

than "dead letter laws":

We have been attempting compulsory education for a whole generation and cannot be

said to have made much progress — Let us cease to require only 20 weeks of schooling,

12 of which shall be consecutive, thus plainly hinting that we are not serious in the

matter.

Seeley's frustration clouded his judgment. Somebody was most certainly serious about

mass confinement schooling to stay at it so relentlessly and expensively in the face of

massive public repudiation of the scheme.

Compulsion Schooling