The people who founded public schools in the U.S. were not household names like George Washington. Rather, they were local community leaders. They tended to disagree ferociously about many issues, but there was one idea that united them. One primary purpose of their schools, as the founders of a public school in Deptford, New Jersey declared on December 5, 1774, was to bring together “the Children of the Rich & Poor.” These ambitious municipal leaders were far from alone. There was widespread agreement that public schools—real, American public schools—had to do more than just teach the three Rs. They had to foster a bold new equality among America’s rising generation.
To be sure, that vision usually did not cross the color line. Early public schools were either rigidly segregated by race or (often) for white children only. But not always. In the case of the first public schools in New York City, for example, an ambitious 1795 law declared that the public schools would be for “the children of white parents or descended from Africans or Indians.”
Passing that law, however, was far removed from making integrated American public schools a reality. As I argue in my new book, Mr. Lancaster’s System: The Failed Reform that Created America’s Public Schools, public schools had a long, messy beginning, evolving in fits and starts between the 1770s and the 1830s. Even with all the messiness, however, the people who created America’s public schools did not dispute one central goal. In cities and villages, North and South, one vision of public education was preeminent. As the founders of Philadelphia’s modern public-school system insisted, public schools would provide an “equality that no other system can afford.” Their main goal was a new kind of school: “Public Schools for the education of ALL CHILDREN, the offspring of the rich and the poor.”
In the first few decades of America’s nationhood, this vision was ubiquitous. In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for instance, the founders imagined that their new public-school system could “level the artificial distinctions of society.” Their first priority was that “All meet on equality; on the broad and delightful ground of the pursuit of knowledge.”
The true founders of America’s public schools took for granted their goal to bring together rich and poor. As one working-class pundit wrote in 1829, real public schools could only exist if they were attended “by both rich and poor; otherwise we lay the foundation of inequality.”
