So if the remedy for all that ails our schools can be found in the era before the progressive movement, what did that world look like? That’s the question that historian Adam Laats sets out to answer in his fascinating and timely new book, Mr. Lancaster’s System: The Failed Reform That Created America’s Public Schools. Alas, it was not quite the Eden imagined by the religious right or depicted in Hegseth and Goodwin’s rendering, in which children received a Christian education, “gain[ing] wisdom by studying history and the classics.” In Laats’s account, the pre-public education era was chaotic, inadequate, and expensive. Parents who could afford tutoring or private schools paid for these themselves; those with few resources sent their kids either to “pauper schools” or off to work. “Children were often workers first and learners second,” wrote Laats in Slate. In Trumpian parlance, “the next Generation of American Students and Workers” was either/or, not both/and.
Travel back two hundred years and the tabloid newspapers of the day were as full of lurid crime tales as today’s New York Post. Stories of kids-gone-bad held a particular queasy fascination for the public. In one high-profile case, members of a New York City street gang known as the Spring Street Fencibles refused to step aside to allow a carriage transporting prominent businessmen to pass. As Laats recounts, the young drunken rowdies “blew cigar smoke in the gentlemen’s faces, called them dandies, and tried to trip them.” Menace became blows, and one of the carriage occupants would end up dying as a result of a Fencible punch to the stomach.
The message, delivered again and again in the press, was that American cities were overrun by “wild packs of near-feral children.” Urban reformers seized on the rising panic to broadcast their own dire warning: get these kids into school, or else. Young children, they warned, were getting an education—but it was from the streets and the wharves, producing a generation of young criminals all too adept “in the arts of begging, skillful in petty thefts, and familiar with obscene and profane language.” They were, in the words of today’s school reformers, “career ready,” but for lives of crime.
What to do? These street children were going without basic education in literacy and “morals” because in the private system of the time the burden of paying for teachers fell largely onto parents themselves, an obligation most could not afford. And yet as the nineteenth-century urban elites understood, providing teachers for all of these poor youngsters would cost a fortune.