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
legends
until revisionist writings appeared in the 1960s.
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
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