Public Education In The 1800's

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This controversial issue paper will give you some insights on the past of our vast system of public education. Public education in the 1800’s went from non-existent to a broad system incorporating rich, poor, African Americans, and women. I will be discussing how Thomas Jefferson brought to the attention to the people of how public education will help shape society for a better future. How Benjamin rush states that Christianity and the bible should be incorporated in the school system to help create obedient children, and how women need to have more access to education. I will speak of the common school system and its structures, and how during the reconstruction era accomplished many positives in education. After the revolution certain…show more content…
This bill proposed a structure to a education free to all. It stated that each county should have its own district within a 5-6 mile radius. And within that district there be an established school for reading, writing, and arithmetic. Additional schools would be put in place to teach other subjects such as grammar, geography and higher arithmetic. It instilled the focus that the more talented you were the more free higher education you would get. He also spoke of how there needed to be a library and gallery with public access. Teaching more lessons in Grecian, Roman, European and American history were brought up instead of teaching bible testament due to the fact that children are not at the age where they can execute judgment on religious enquiries. 2 3 Unfortunately this bill would not come to pass but would be later used as a building block for future…show more content…
In 1930 it was illegal to teach a slave to read or write, there were considered dangerous if they were literate, but even with the law some slave owners still taught slave children to read.10 By the 1860’s only 10% of the African American population were literate. But with the reconstruction era brought state supported schools for white and black children, although they were segregated by race. This is a vast accomplishment for the poor whites and blacks that just a few years earlier had no access to any form of education. 11 For a society of America as a whole it seems that the years from late 1700’s to mid to late 1800’s brought a lot of social change in the school system. I believe that Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Rush sparked the ideas for the future, with Horace Mann as the engineer who created the mold of the two ideas into a whole common idea. Structure and discipline for the child in school will bring a well-rounded American. Public education opened up more opportunity for women to be independent , it also paved the way for poor whites and blacks to better educated well rounded citizens in which I believed paved the way for everyone to be considered the same for the
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