M7 – Universal Education

Education has always been the great social equalizer, offering a path to social and economic advancement for those of every class, gender, and ethnic background, as well as those of varying physical and mental abilities. It has opened doors of opportunity and shaped the future for millions of individuals and often successive generations. The story of education in the United States has been the pursuit of the goal to enable everyone to have a path to personal educational advancement.

What we in our day take wholly for granted, the fact that all have access to education, has until fairly recently been the case. Education in the past was a privilege available only to the elite, for those dedicated to working for them, or those who lived in monastic communities and copied manuscripts and sacred texts. Schools in Greece and Rome were private, the exception being military training for those who were to serve as soldiers for the city-state. Later in the Roman Republic, coeducation became more available as a means of socialization and basic educational preparation for Roman children who could pay the fees (Marou, 1982).

Medieval cathedrals are beautiful monuments to the fact that the average person was illiterate and could only “read” the message of the faith in statuary, stained glass and illustration such as icons. In a time before the printing press, clay tablets and manuscripts on papyrus, vellum or handmade paper were expensive to create. The poor and underclass were therefore excluded from learning from texts and instructional opportunities. At this time in Europe, it was the church and the cathedral schools that attended to the work of preserving these texts and educating members of the monastic communities (Marou, 1982).

When literacy and education became more widely available with the invention of movable type, schools associated with universities were established during the Renaissance. It was young men and boys who largely benefited while women, girls and the lower classes were excluded. Schools associated with the church during the Reformation provided greater opportunity for the lower class students, for example, in 1561 the national Church of Scotland established schools in every parish and provided for a school teacher to teach the poor. Schools across Europe for commoners were to follow (Marou, 1982; Rury & Tamura, 2019).

One-room schoolhouse interior in West Branch, Iowa, ca. 1860.

Massachusetts Bay Colony was the beneficiary of a well-educated group of Puritans who were educated at Oxford and Cambridge and who arrived on these shores with a strong commitment to the education of their children, generally those marked for community leadership. This led to the founding of America’s oldest public school, the Boston Latin School which set the tone for public schools being established as the colonies grew. Harvard, Yale and Brown were soon founded with the aim of educating generations of clergy to serve in their pulpits and communities (Rury & Tamura, 2019).

After the War of Independence and War of 1812, laws appeared stipulating that communities should establish public high schools open to all students, Massachusetts being the first. Opportunity for female and minority students expanded as the first college for women was opened in 1837 by Mary Lyon, the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. The same year the African Institute opened as the first school for African Americans in Cheyney, Pennsylvania. By 1848 and 1853 schools to train “feeble-minded children” and those with intellectual disabilities were opened granting opportunities to this previously disenfranchised group of children. Schools for the hearing and visually impaired also found their beginnings in the 19th century. Native American boarding schools, despite their controversial origins, began in 1879 in Carlyle, Pennsylvania (Rury & Tamura, 2019).

1862 saw the “Land Grant Act” passed into law for the purpose o f states receiving public land for:

…the endowment, support and maintenance of at least one college where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.

Thus was established what became the state university system that continues to educate students to this day (Rury & Tamura, 2019).

John Dewey (1859 – 1952) was an American educator who is best known as a proponent of pragmatic philosophy and universal education. With a degree in philosophy from Johns Hopkins University, he would eventually settle in Chicago and teach at the University of Chicago. Within this urban context, through a growing awareness of the poverty and lack of opportunity in the Chicago slums, and aided by social reformers at Hull House he sought to help the plight of the underclass through education for all. With his wife Alice Chapman, he established an experimental school to test his educational theories and pedagogical methods. Following in the footsteps of Rousseau, Dewey stood for educating students for life, with a commitment to “learning by doing.” He called for a non-elitist education that led learners to participate as moral and active contributors to their own wellbeing and the whole of a democratic society (Rury & Tamura, 2019)..

Equally influential was Brazilian educator Paulo Freire who espoused universal education particularly for those who were living under conditions of oppression in the two-thirds world. Pedagogy of the Oppressed was his seminal work. It was his belief that oppressed peoples should become critically conscious learners as their first step toward their liberation and positive social change. For Freire, students need to reflect upon and question their assumptions and then act as informed agents of change. Critical of the blank slate theory, Paulo Freire saw students as co-creators of knowledge and learning. Learning is furthermore not viewed as the end of the process of education, but rather becoming a complete and liberated human being. Freire’s ideas have had wide-spread influence among educators and educational movements around the world (Rury & Tamura, 2019).

Malala Yousafzai is a campaigner who in 2012 was shot for her activist work. As part of WOW 2014, she talked about the systemic nature of gender inequality and bringing about change.

The counter movement to expanding universal education is demonstrated by the pushback to limit education as a means of upholding the status quo. This is not a matter where opportunity for learning had not been available due to circumstance, e.g. with children working in the fields or factories to contribute to the wellbeing and survival of the family. Rather, the case where educational exclusion by intention and policy is recognized as the goal, e.g. of Southern states with regard to the prohibition of education, including reading, of African slaves prior to the Civil War. Whites could be fined and jailed if found attempting to teach and educate blacks. Resistance to opening educational opportunity to African Americans had to pass through the legacy of Plessy vs. Ferguson (separate but equal schools and instruction) and the passage of Brown v. The Topeka Board of Education in 1954 which was upheld by the US Supreme Court, calling racial segregation unconstitutional, before change would begin its slow pace of improvement that yet awaits its full implementation (Rury & Tamura, 2019).

The more recent story of Malala Yousafzai, who as a Pakistani teen was shot in the head by the Taliban for speaking out on behalf of girls’ education, is a grim but hopeful reminder that while such prejudices against universal education continue today, so does the determination to see the effort finally prevail. Even so, UNESCO estimates that universal education in the two-thirds world will likely not be established until some 100 years after the first world countries.

M7- Move towards Fair Labor Laws

With the growth and industrial expansion of the 19th century, a corresponding growth of the working class accompanied it, along with a labor movement that would seek to improve worker’s rights and working conditions.  Large income disparities and the poor treatment of laborers who performed the grunt work for the industry bosses led to efforts to organize workers across industries en masse, into national organizations across Europe and the US.  A significant impetus for the growth of unions were the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (Das Kapital, 1867), whose critique was aimed at capitalist leaders whom they argued exploited their workers,  offering subsistence wages while growing rich at the workers’ expense. By joining together workers became a political force to pursue bargaining power and the rights they felt they were unduly denied.  Unions and union-backed political parties were formed in Britain, Germany and the United States as a vehicle for achieving social change, resulting in benefits such as public housing, safer working conditions and fair wages.

Management inevitably opposed such demands for expanded rights and increased wages, often using the threat of blacklisting, lockouts or more violent means of quelling strikes with armed force, be it the guns of hired guards or the US military.  Such was the case with the use of the US Army to end the Pullman Strike at the end of the nineteenth century or the bloody Colorado labor wars and Lawrence Textile Strike in the early twentieth century (“History of Labor Law in the United States,” n.d.).

Those who worked in U.S.mines and factories were by and large members of the underclass. They included both domestic and foreign laborers; men, women and children.  Working hours were long and conditions in many jobs, especially mining and steel factories were dangerous.  Minimal regard was offered to ensure worker safety. Moreover, rarely would just compensation be paid for those injured on the job. Suing for damages for injuries was beyond the means of most workers. Because management considered accidents a cheap cost, little was done to change industrial methods and practices to provide for worker safety (“History of Labor Law in the United States,” n.d.).

Child labor was a necessity for the income and economic survival of many families and grew quickly with the Industrial Revolution.  Immigrants came across the water and families moved from rural areas to the urban manufacturing centers where there was a constant need for workers. Often separated from their families, children were at times preferred by employers as they cost less to hire, were more manageable and were less apt to strike.  In Britain in the late 18th century, in conditions that could only be described as enslavement, children were housed, fed and worked without pay.  In this country, boys as young as 5 were employed in the full range of workplace settings: mines, glass and textile factories, agriculture, and canneries, as messengers, newsboys, bootblacks and peddlers.  They were required to work 10 to 12 hour days, six days a week in hazardous and unhealthful conditions.  By 1911, more than 2 million children under the age of 16 were employed in domestic industries (“History of Labor Law in the United States,” n.d.).

View Conditions of child laborers in the Industrial Revolution:

Over the course of time, labor activists and child welfare advocates began to effect positive change with the passing of legislation that improved conditions for children, women and men who worked in hazardous and unhealthy conditions. President Wilson signed the Keating-Owen Act, the first child labor law in 1916 only to have it struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional on the ground that congressional power to regulate interstate commerce did not extend to the conditions of labor. It was not until 1938 under FDR that congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act regulating those under 16 or 18 years of age, legislation that would pass constitutional muster.  However, as agricultural work was excluded in this legislation, children still work in the fields and orchards with the risk of exposure to harmful pesticides and herbicides to this day (“History of Labor Law in the United States,” n.d.).

As with the struggle to win civil and human rights for women and minorities in order that they might have a place at the table,  the struggle for class based opportunities for the many to receive an education and the right for children to have a childhood was a long, laborious and difficult struggle.  While these history making campaigns have brought over-due and inherent liberties, the inequities in these very areas of public life and policy still remain. The fight for opportunities that contribute significantly to the wellbeing and success of young and old, male and female, cisgender and transgender, privileged and underprivileged, as well as persons of all ethnicities and racial identities must continue as long as inequalities in human and legal rights remain (“History of Labor Law in the United States,” n.d.).