3 Eras of U.S. Education

If we look back at the history of education in our country from the time of the founding until the present, what is apparent is that we have had only three clearly differentiated periods of U.S. education.

1. The Era of Voluntary Education. Parents could decide the kind of education they desired for their children. Education was actually dominated by home schooling. Most people learned to read at home, and even those who were extremely well educated had less than three years of formal instruction, mostly at private schools, mostly in terms of three or four hours a day, 30 to 90 days a year.

The common schools in New England taught the Calvinist Puritan doctrines. The Puritans intentionally modeled these schools after those created by Martin Luther.

In addition, there were specialized private schools that prepared students for society life, college, or religious studies.

2. The Era of Transition to Compulsory Education. Over a period of 67 years (from 1852 to 1918), one state after another was persuaded to adopt compulsory education laws and penalties for truancy, along with child labor laws. State by state, over the years, control of the child was effectively transferred from the parents to the state.


3. The Era of Compulsory Education. The first state compulsory education was created by a highly respected Massachusetts lawyer, state representative, and senator, Horace Mann. His own schooling consisted of not more than six weeks per year during his teens, but Horace Mann, a legislator and later the first Secretary of Education in Massachusetts, was destined to fall under the spell of the rigidly ordered Prussian school movement. On his summer honeymoon tour to Germany in 1843 (while schools were on vacation), he briefly visited a Prussian compulsory school, and was persuaded by a few conversations to import the Prussian system to America, despite the fact that he never viewed a Prussian school in operation.