Since April 1983, when the National Commission on Excellence in Education published its famous report, "A Nation at Risk," our public schools have been the targets of a rising crescendo of criticism. Lamentations about the sorry state of American public education echo from every side. From the left, from the right, from the middle and from both inside and outside academia, public schools have been subjected to relentless attacks for their failures, both real and imagined.

Educators have launched scores, if not hundreds of education "reforms," many of which, in the words of historian David Tyack, "have been shooting stars, meteors that attracted attention but left little deposit." Some professional educators have confronted the critics of public schools more directly by challenging their intentions and questioning the validity of many of their criticisms.

What we have here is a full-fledged political struggle, a real cat fight, over our schools, which is part of a broader conflict about the nature of American society and culture.

How did we get from the decision of the founding fathers to separate church from state and to leave education to the states or the people, to the point when many Americans seem to be willing to abandon the basic principle that public funds should be used only to support public schools? This is a long, complicated, fascinating story.

American Education in the Early Republic
The absence of any reference to schooling in the Constitution does not mean that early Americans were not interested in education. Indeed, under the Articles of Confederation, Congress enacted two landmark pieces of legislation: the Land Ordinance of 1785, which provided for the survey of public lands and reserved the sixteenth section of each township specifically "for the maintenance of public schools within each township," and the Land Ordinance of 1787, which stated that "religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged."

Why, then, was education not mentioned in the Constitution? One can never know with certainty, but historians have identified several possible reasons for this apparent anomaly. First, some of the founders may have concluded that the land ordinances had already established a process by which the federal government could subsidize if not control education. Closely related to this idea was the widespread belief that the war-ravaged nation simply could not afford a significant commitment of funds to education on a national scale. Thus, continuing to set aside public land for schools represented a relatively easy way for the new government to support public education without levying new taxes or using out-of-pocket funds or making this assistance a constitutional obligation. Still, some Americans were opposed on philosophical grounds to federal involvement in education and resisted giving the central government any more power than was absolutely necessary. Moreover, education had traditionally been the responsibility of individual colonies, states, local communities and private groups.

Most Americans were apparently satisfied with this approach and saw no pressing need to create an expensive national system of education that might intrude on their local or state prerogatives. However, it is important to note that in spite of the absence of an organized national commitment to education, many American children, including girls, gained greater access to schooling after 1787. Using both public and private institutions and a mixture of public funds, tuition and private endowments, white Americans, who were still overwhelmingly a rural people, provided basic literacy training for most of their children. As Carl Kaestle put it, "America had schools" during the first forty years of its existence, "but except in large cities America did not have school systems." Americans provided their children with opportunities for basic literacy training and were willing to look elsewhere, to informal educational processes, to create the basic social cohesion expressed in their national motto, E Pluribus Unum, or "out of many one."

The Campaign for Common Schools
What, then, led Americans to begin building public school systems? The years between 1830 and 1860 brought great instability, conflict and change to American life and transformed American attitudes toward education. These years brought remarkable economic growth accompanied by periods of severe depression and highly visible poverty, as well as political upheaval, religious revivals, increasing regional differences, especially in relation to slavery, incipient industrialization, the appearance of factory child labor and juvenile delinquency, and last but not least, a flood of Irish and German immigrants.

In response to these conditions, an articulate minority of Americans began to argue that building a system of public elementary schools was indispensable to maintaining the stability, health and growth of the young republic. They developed a powerful and extensive network of people and institutions to promote the establishment of "common schools" throughout the nation, especially in the Northern and Midwestern states. By the 1850's they had created a broad social movement that laid the foundation for the modern American public school system.

The campaign for public education in America was long and difficult. Although Massachusetts passed a compulsory school attendance law in 1852, Mississippi did not enact similar legislation until 1918, almost one hundred years after the movement for public education began.

We may take most of this public education system for granted today, but this program was not easy to sell to most Americans in the 1840's and 1850's, in part because the campaign for common schools included two very coercive elements: the power to tax and the power to compel attendance. Not surprisingly, some parents and political conservatives resisted the intrusion of the state into what was viewed as private matters and feared a more powerful centralized government. Others did not want to lose the benefits of children's labor, while some simply resented paying for the education of other people's children. Members of ethnic or religious minorities such as the Germans and Irish suspected with good reason that the proposed common schools were designed to strip their children of their ethnicity or religion and make them into "real Americans." And some Protestants objected to what they perceived as the secular character of the public schools. Of course, white southerners were usually opposed to extending educational opportunities to blacks. Finally, many citizens simply did not believe that the high cost of public education was justified. For these and other reasons, the advocates of common schools faced a difficult, challenging task.

How and why did those who supported public education overcome these difficulties and succeed? Gradually, over several decades, the common school model became the norm in most parts of the United States, including the South after the Civil War. What kind of arguments did proponents of public education use to win others to their cause?

Among the many arguments used to advance the cause of common schools were the following:

• Common schools are necessary because a republican form of government depends on an educated citizenry.
• Common schools will provide equality of opportunity for future citizens.
• A system of common schools will further establish the United States as a progressive nation worthy of the respect of other nations.
• Common schools will protect America from the decline of cultures standards as its people rush to settle the "uncivilized" West.
• Common schools will "Americanize" the children of immigrants and prepare them for the proper exercise of American citizenship.
• Common schools will serve as a relatively cheap and effective police force and reduce the need for more government, as children will be taught to be law-abiding and respectful of authority, thus reducing the threat of juvenile delinquency.
• Common schools are the best means of social reform because education by definition enhances the knowledge, skills, and abilities of individuals and makes them more receptive to efforts to improve society, including combating poverty, alcoholism, crime and even slavery.
• Common schools will promote economic prosperity.

It is obvious that some of these arguments for common schools were incompatible, but this did not seem to trouble those who worked to create them. In retrospect, it is also clear that the system of public education that emerged in the United States was inherently unfair to Germans and the Irish, to Catholics and Jews, and, of course, to African Americans and Native Americans who were at first excluded from the common schools. Yet it is also true that this system expanded educational opportunities for millions of Americans. By 1880, over 65 percent of American children, ages 5-17 were enrolled in public schools. Attending elementary school had become a virtually universal experience for American children, even in the South, which had been slow to provide public education, especially for its African American children.

Expansion of the System
This significant expansion of educational opportunity involved only part of the American system of public education, its elementary schools. In 1880, less than two percent of American high school-age children were enrolled in school. According to Martin Trow, there have been three transformations in American education:

1. the extension of elementary education to most children,
2. the creation of the American public high school and its remarkable growth after 1920 when attendance rates rose from around 30 percent of the high-school age population to over 70 percent by 1950, and over 90 percent by 1990, and
3. the rapid growth of higher education, especially after World War II.

I would add a fourth transformation to Trow's list: the continuing expansion of educational opportunity stimulated by the 1954 Brown v. Topeka Board of Education case that ended legal segregation and the enactment of Public Law 94-143 (1975) providing educational services to children with disabilities.

Today, Americans have created a system of public education with more than 60 million students (almost one-fourth of the total U.S. population), over 3.5 million teachers, and expenditures of over $560 billion (7.4 percent of Gross Domestic Product). American public education is an enormous enterprise, the product of more than 200 years of increasing access to education.

Implications for the Future
I think that as one considers how and why the American system of public education developed, two basic points become clear that have important implications for the future. First, the consensus supporting American public education evolved over a period of almost two hundred years, and is therefore deeply embedded in the fabric of American culture. Second, the system was not imposed, top down, on Americans by a powerful central government or political elite. Instead, it was created by a broad, complex, grass-roots, social movement that drew support from disparate groups who wanted a system of public education for their own, sometimes contradictory, reasons.

Those who built the American system of public schools were successful in large measure because they were able to build a consensus composed of three critical elements:

1. the power to tax,
2. compulsory attendance laws, and
3. the idea that all children in a community should be encouraged if not required to attend a common school.

Clearly, the weakest element in the tripartite foundation for American public education is the idea of the common school. It was always so. Common schools have depended for their long-term survival on a consensus that their primary purpose was to create, strengthen, and then reflect a common culture by insuring that most, if not all children in a community attend school together. I do not have to tell you that this ideal was never fully realized in the United States. All one has to do is point to the Catholic parochial school system created in response to Protestant prejudice in the 1850's, the time-honored preference of the wealthy to send their children to private schools and the persistent pattern of segregation by race and class in spite of busing, magnet schools and other experiments designed to create common schools. And who does not recognize that the current debate about multiculturalism in public schools is part of a fundamental reconsideration of the nature of our democracy and who defines it?

Closely related to this issue is the growing dissatisfaction among fundamentalist, conservative and some moderate Protestants with what they see as the amoral, anti-social, and anti-religious culture increasingly dominating the nation's public schools. This trend is significant because Protestants were central to the creation and maintenance of the consensus supporting common schools. If their disaffection continues to grow, the whole concept of a common school will be seriously weakened.

These trends should give serious pause to all who favor common schools. Some Americans are beginning to think of public education without common schools—that is, they support public funding for compulsory schooling, but not necessarily in common schools. Indeed, there is a danger that declining support for common schools will eventually weaken support for the whole concept of public education among those disaffected parents who do not wish to continue to pay taxes to support schools where they are very reluctant to send their children. As we debate the future of public education, what will we choose to preserve?

N. Ray Hiner, Ph.D. is Budig Teaching Professor at the University of Kansas School of Education. This article is excerpted from his October 1998 lecture to the Kansas School of Education National Advisory Board.