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The Founding Fathers, Education, and “The Great Contest”False Start: The Failure of an Early “Race to the Top”

The Founding Fathers, Education, and “The Great Contest”: False Start: The Failure of an Early... [Histories of education in the early United States tend to divide sharply between national and local reforms. On one hand, they describe the Founders’ plans to create virtuous citizens through a national, hierarchical, publicly funded school system; on the other, they describe the chaotic marketplace of privately run academies and charity schools that actually sprang up in urban areas. Almost as a rule these stories do not overlap.2 The push for a national school system fell victim to popular fears about taxes and centralized control while the private sector successfully provided mass education, attracted tax support, and paved the way for public schools a generation later. Yet these divergent outcomes were not preordained and the divide between them was never absolute. At one time, national and local reforms both seemed viable and shared many assumptions about the best practices of teaching, curriculum design, and school organization. In fact, many proposals for national education built on institutions and reforms from particular cities, hoping (in modern terms) to “scale up” those that succeeded. Why, then, did such proposals fail? While localism and parsimony are partly to blame, we tend to overlook the fact that, for ideological reasons, the Founders, too, rejected potentially workable models of national education.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

The Founding Fathers, Education, and “The Great Contest”False Start: The Failure of an Early “Race to the Top”

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References (11)

Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan US
Copyright
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Nature America Inc. 2013
ISBN
978-1-349-44453-3
Pages
69 –83
DOI
10.1057/9781137271020_4
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[Histories of education in the early United States tend to divide sharply between national and local reforms. On one hand, they describe the Founders’ plans to create virtuous citizens through a national, hierarchical, publicly funded school system; on the other, they describe the chaotic marketplace of privately run academies and charity schools that actually sprang up in urban areas. Almost as a rule these stories do not overlap.2 The push for a national school system fell victim to popular fears about taxes and centralized control while the private sector successfully provided mass education, attracted tax support, and paved the way for public schools a generation later. Yet these divergent outcomes were not preordained and the divide between them was never absolute. At one time, national and local reforms both seemed viable and shared many assumptions about the best practices of teaching, curriculum design, and school organization. In fact, many proposals for national education built on institutions and reforms from particular cities, hoping (in modern terms) to “scale up” those that succeeded. Why, then, did such proposals fail? While localism and parsimony are partly to blame, we tend to overlook the fact that, for ideological reasons, the Founders, too, rejected potentially workable models of national education.]

Published: Nov 14, 2015

Keywords: Public School; National Education; Neighborhood School; American Philosophical Society; False Start

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