An Insider’s Insider

A bountiful source of clues to what tensions were actually at work back then can be found in Ellwood P. Cubberley’s celebratory history, Public Education in the United States (1919, revised edition 1934), the standard in-house reference for official school legends until revisionist writings appeared in the 1960s.

Cubberley was an insider’s insider, in a unique position to know things neither public nor press could know. Although Cubberley always is circumspect and deliberately vague, he cannot help revealing more than he wants to. For example, the reluctance of the country to accept its new yoke of compulsion is caught briefly in this flat statement on page 564 of the 1934 revision:

The history of compulsory-attendance legislation in the States has been much the same everywhere, and everywhere laws have been enacted only after overcoming strenuous opposition [p.624 →]

Reference here is to the period from 1852 to 1918 when the states, one by one, were caught in a compulsion net that used the strategy of gradualism:

At first the laws were optional [...] Later the law was made state-wide in application, but the compulsory period each year was short (ten to twelve weeks) and the age limits low (nine to twelve years). After this the struggle came to extend the time, often little by little, [...] to extend the age limits downward to eight and seven and upward to fourteen, fifteen, or sixteen; to make the law apply to children attending private and parochial schools as well as public schools, and to require co-operation from such schools in the enforcement of the law; [...] to institute some state supervision of local enforcement; and to connect school-attendance enforcement with the child-labor legislation of the State through a system of working permits and state inspection of mills, stores, and factories. [p.624 →]

Noteworthy is the extent to which proponents of centralized schooling were prepared to act covertly in defiance of majority will and in the face of extremely successful and inexpensive local school heritage. As late as 1901, after nearly a half-century of such legislation—first in Massachusetts, then state by state in the majority of the remaining jurisdictions—Dr. Levi Seeley of Trenton Normal School could still thunder warnings of lack of progress. In his book Foundations of Education, he writes, "while no law on the statute books of Prussia is more thoroughly carried out [than compulsory attendance]..." He laments that "...in 1890, out of 5,300,000 Prussian children, only 645 slipped out of the truant officer’s net..." but that our own school attendance legislation is nothing more than "dead letter laws":

We have been attempting compulsory education in a halfhearted way for a whole generation, and cannot be said to have made much progress [...] Let us cease to require only twenty weeks of schooling, twelve of which shall be consecutive, thus plainly hinting that we are not serious in the matter[p.153 →]

Seeley’s frustration clouded his judgment. Somebody was most certainly serious about mass confinement schooling to stay at it so relentlessly and expensively in the face of massive public repudiation of the scheme.