This nation’s idea of education as a redemptive force seems first to have been expressed in a 1647 law that compelled the establishment of schools in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and that has come to be called “The Old Deluder, Satan, Act” for its piquant opening salvo: “It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures . . . .”

The law went on to instruct yeoman farmers clinging to a narrow bit of shoreline from Cape Cod north to the Ipswich River that townships comprising 50 or more households were required to appoint a teacher from whom children would learn to read and write “to the end that learning may not be buried in the grave of our forefathers.” Additionally and prudently, townships with a hundred or more households were required to found a “grammar school” in which boys might be “fitted for the university,” meaning, at this time, ministerial education.

A century later and about 300 miles to the south, America’s public schools were charged with a second expansive responsibility when Ben Franklin, the practical-minded scion of Puritan stock, published “Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania.” It is a document that in spite of its antique spelling and locutions feels remarkably contemporary, particularly its argument that education reform was acutely necessary because neither schools nor pupils nor society were up to the brave old standards. The commonwealth, Franklin said, needed to pick up the slack by creating academies that would prepare boys not merely for Heaven, but also for Broad Street. In his proposed model school, boys would study “those Things that are likely to be most useful and most ornamental. Regard being had to the several Professions for which they are intended.”

It remained to Thomas Jefferson to add to the tasks of sustaining virtue and prosperity the duty of preserving the republic. He did this several times, but earliest in his 1778 Virginia Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge, saying, “The most effectual means of preventing [tyranny] would be, to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large.”

It was a view of education’s American role that would garner massive support once it became clear, a bit more than a decade later, that the government to which Jefferson was referring was turning out a rather complicated apparatus, adorned with a national constitution, a Bill of Rights, branches bristling with checks and balances, and a matrix of municipal, county, state, territorial, and national officials, bureaucrats, and regulations.

Over the past two centuries or so, American education has been “reformed” many times over. Franklin’s alarm about the sorry state of schools and kids has been sounded so often that it can seem to anyone attending to the history of American education a stubborn case of tinnitus or, somewhat more charitably, the prophetic key in which every demand for change needs be delivered if it is to be taken seriously.

In the 19th century the demands included development of “a national aristocracy of talent” (Jefferson, again); the Jacksonian counter-call for a system of “common schools” that produced no aristocracies, thank you, but a set of uniformly enabled citizens on every hill farm and street corner; and the quixotic schoolteachers’ crusade that followed behind the victorious armies of the North, intent on bringing to the former Confederacy the sort of enlightenment whose absence from Southern minds had, it seemed quite clear, brought them to foist a civil war upon the nation in the first place.

But that was as a summer wind compared with the 20th century storm, from Dewey’s experiential education all the way to high-stakes testing, with stops at child-centered education, tracking, the “tough standards movement,” the movement against the tough standards movement (sadly, they didn’t choose to call themselves the “weak standards movement”), the federal boost to math and science instruction inspired by Sputnik’s beep-beep, open classrooms, Head Start, the new math, site-based management, magnet schools, charter schools, and that perennial reform movement: “return to basics.”

Against this turmoil, only three assertions about American education stand out as durable. The first is that the exposition of education’s purposes that was agglomerated long ago from the disparate thoughts of the Puritans, Franklin, and Jefferson has proved hard-wearing. The second is that despite thousands of attempts to reform and improve education, the schools are still as competent and as inept as they were when Franklin made his whine. The third is that this hard fact doesn’t seem to have ever discouraged citizens, teachers, or scholars in their hopeful and futile search for the school, or the means of schooling, that makes everything come out right, always, for all children. “There is every evidence of [our educational system] being purely an expression . . . of a truly noble, selfless and affectionate desire,” H.L. Mencken wrote in 1931 in backhand dismissal of a reform proposal of the moment. If he never wrote a kinder word about an American institution (and the overwhelming evidence is that he didn’t), he never wrote a truer either.

Our cover story on professor Mary Walsh’s advances in the Boston Public Schools begins here.

—Ben Birnbaum

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