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to be sought after in the main by those best able to pay for them, and to be paid for by those who seek them, and not by general tax."

Justice Cooley said he had to "confess to no little surprise" at the proposal of such a doctrine, as "against the right of the State to furnish a liberal education to the youth of the State in schools brought within reach of all classes." Education, "not merely in the rudiments, but in an en larged sense" was, he thought, an important practical advantage to be supplied to all, not merely to "those whose accumulated wealth enabled them to pay for it."

The analysis that followed carefully reviewed the legal precedents for this position, beginning with the Northwest Ordin ance of 1787, which required that "schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." Justice Cooley drew parti cular attention to the principle involved in an 1827 Michigan law calling for "the establishment of common schools" after the fashion of "laws which from a very early period had been in existence in Massachusetts...." The complainants, he said, had no grounds for asserting that "common schools" could offer only elementary in struction and lacked authority to support "higher grade of learning." Summing up, Justice Cooley held that the record "clearly and conclusively" demonstrated that it had been a "general State policy since 1817 to bring within reach of all children, free education including the elements of classi cal education."

A

fter 1874, courts of other States confronting challenges to public high schools invariably turned to Kalamazoo. It is incidentally worth noting that in the 15 years following the Cooley decision, the number of high schools in Michigan increased from 107 to 278, with a similar growth in the States nearby.

In time, Stuart v. Kalamazoo came to affect more than high schools, heartening and reinforcing proponents of such other unorthodox variations on public education as kindergartens, vocational training, community colleges, technical institutes, and special education for the handicapped and the gifted. These efforts to make learning more widely available (Cooley on Kalamazoo may be understood to have said) are, like high schools, indispensable parts of a system of education envisioned by the Founding Fathers and entrenched in each of the 50 State constitutions.

-HARRY L. SELDEN Program Manager, OE's Division of State Assistance

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EDUCATION'S
EVOLVING ROLE

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The third force has been social, initially the blending of disparate elements into a more unified whole and more recently a striving to provide equal opportunities for all.

Woven throughout these three forces, an integral part of each, has been an idealistic and inspirational human quality epitomized by a passion for change, improvement, reform, and renewal.

The indispensable condition, the sine qua non of the American experience, has been the first of these forces - the political. Although important economic factors also were involved, it was basically certain deep philosophical and pragmatic differences between England and the American Colonies over the form and function of government that led to the upheaval of the American Revolution and the subsequent creation of an entirely new and unusually dynamic political structure. Similarly,

Dr. Pierce is Executive Director of the Education
Commission of the States.

BY WENDELL PIERCE

from the beginning of American history,
government has been the central force in
developing an educational system, and
education and politics have been
inextricably linked. In the Middle and
Southern Colonies, the establishment of
education came about when the governing
bodies gave permission to various religious
groups to establish schools or granted
educational charters to businessmen or
landowners. In the New England Colonies,
the governing bodies used the authority
they had received from the crown and
parliament themselves to establish,
support, and administer schools and
colleges. Thus colonists setting out to
found a new town in Massachusetts were

Founding Fathers met in Philadelphia during that hot summer of 1787 to design a new form of government, schools and colleges were but two of many educational institutions. The family, the farm, the shop, and the churches were of equal if not greater importance.

Few conceived that the aim of formal education should be to give all children an opportunity to develop to their full potential. Common schools for youngsters of differing religions and backgrounds were rare, and the children of the poor usually received no schooling at all. When the Constitution went into effect in 1789, American education served for the most

part to maintain the kind of class

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required to reserve one building lot for the distinctions characteristic of Europe at support of education.

was

It is interesting to note that the legislature of the Massachusetts Bay Colony chartered the first college in Colonial America in 1636 (Harvard), that three years later the first public school supported by direct taxation established, and that three years after that the first locally elected school board was formed. Thus, more than 100 years before the American Revolution, were created the basic models for the governance of American education. Two principles had emerged: educational institutions derive their authority to operate government sanction, and local schools should have some degree of local control. The broad application of those principles, however, was to come about only with the gradual evolution of the Nation itself.

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that time. Formal educational endeavors were not considered of sufficient national bearing to warrant inclusion among the basic laws establishing the new Federal republic. Instead, education was one of the responsibilities reserved, under the Bill of Rights, to the individual former Colonies that collectively had become the United States of America. Events were in fact to render education the single most important prerogative of the Colonial legislatures that evolved into the governing bodies of the quasi-independent States of the new Federal union.

Very soon after ratification of the Constitution it became apparent that the new form of government required a new view of education. A government of the people, deriving its powers from the consent of the governed, required an educated populace. President George Washington recognized this proposition in his Farewell Address. "It is essential that public opinion should be enlightened," he said on that occasion, and he went on to urge the people to promote "institutions

for the general diffusion of knowledge." Similarly, Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, said that "any nation that expects to be ignorant and free. expects what never was and never will be"; and James Madison, a prime mover in the development of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, declared that "knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."

In any case, under the newly developed. Federal system of "shared power," responsibility for providing the means by which the people could arm themselves for popular government was retained by the several States. The States thereby found themselves held accountable for the success or failure of popular government itself, both within their own borders and throughout the young republic. Their deliberate but successful response to this challenge was to become the signal feature of American federalism.

By 1827 - 38 years after the founding of the new Republic - all of the original 13 States and all but two of the 11 that had since joined the union had made some provision for public or popular education, either through their State constitutions or by legislation. The Indiana constitution of

and learning generally diffused through a community being essential to the preservation of a free government,. shall be the duty of the general assem

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bly. .to provide by law for a system of education, ascending in regular gradation from township schools to a State university, wherein tuition shall be gratis, and equally open to all."

Thus was developed during the early and middle years of the 19th century the structure and substance of a completely new kind of school system, created and sustained by State governments. Given the latter circumstance, it was natural that the impetus, both philosophical and practical, should come not from professional educators but from persons active in the political arena. It was the politicians who took the lead in institutionalizing the educational component essential to the success of the new Constitution. The philosophical foundations had been provided earlier by such national statesmen as Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin. The practical process of implementation was led by State legislators, notably Henry Barnard of Connecticut and Horace Mann of Massachusetts.

Jefferson and Madison, although agreeing on the need for some kind of basic education for all, were from a classical

1816, for example, stated: "Knowledge Newcomers-to America and the schools. tradition that considered Latin and Greek

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Before child labor laws were enacted, youngsters were as apt to be spending as much time in the factories as in the schools.

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