America has done this before — creating, then decapitating a federal department of education. It was right after the Civil War, it wasn’t pretty, and the toxic debate surrounding it sounds familiar today.
The brief experiment born in 1867 and enacted by Southern Democrat President Andrew Johnson was fueled by two interests — scholarly ambition to sculpt American schools into world-class institutions, and abolitionists’ fervor for equality.
It was fraught with conflict over scope, budget, mission and staffing. The word “Yankee” was used in much of the debate, and not kindly.
“The President and Congress have quite enough to do without undertaking to run the schools,” sniffed a skeptical 1866 editorial in the Council Grove Democrat, a newspaper in Morris County, Kansas.
But ultimately, the postwar attempt to expand and manage education for all Americans was also doomed by the everlasting culture war that the United States can’t shake. Today we’d call it a red state/blue state conflict.
A newly reunited nation was bound to be lopsided and needed “to enforce education without regard to color,” Radical Republican Rep. Ignatius Donnelly of Minnesota said when he introduced the idea of a Department of Education in 1866 to the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, according to “The Life of Henry Barnard.”
This idea had been circulating in educational circles for some time as Horace Mann and Henry Barnard, two influential thinkers on the early shaping of schools in America, had been leading a national conversation on the idea of federal involvement. Education at the time was entirely in the hands of states thanks to the 10th Amendment, which delineated federal and states’ rights.
The preamble to Donnelly’s resolution, which passed the House by a large majority, said an education department was needed because “republican interests can find permanent safety only upon the basis of the universal intelligence of the people,” and because “the great disasters which have afflicted the Nation and desolated one-half its territory are traceable, in a great degree, to the absence of common schools and general education among the people of the lately rebellious States.”
Donnelly argued that making education accessible and standardized in America is a way “to make every man who votes an intelligent, conscious, reasoning, reflecting being.”
Those who weren’t considered part of the Northern abolitionist elites dismissed it as poppycock, Yankee meddling and another federal power grab that was characteristic of Reconstruction.
“The schoolhouses of the country will go under the control of the General Government,” that editorial in the Council Grove Democrat said. “Churches, I suppose, are to follow next.”