Education in North America

The American Revolution deepened the North American affection for using education as a tool of social control. The creation of a liberal republican nation-state on the continent provided a new locus for policy-making and a new imperative for generating political solidarity. In the new United States, one of the few things that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and John Adams could agree upon was the necessity of creating a system of universal education that reinforced the principles of the new nation. Education should be spread widely, they argued, and children should be taught to reject monarchy and to embrace republican democracy. They could be made, wrote the early reformer Benjamin Rush, into "republican machines." It was this impulse to social control, less than the logic of liberal democracy, that spurred the growth of schooling in the new nation.

In Canada, governors and ministers shaken by events to the south sought to consolidate their own political culture by mandating the establishment of schools that reinforced allegiance to the British Crown and to the Church of England. Reformers sought to rationalize and nationalize educational practice, especially in the French-dominated colony of Lower Canada. Government ministers made periodic attempts to graft educational policies generated around the "Irish Question" onto affairs there.

As much as it was shaped by the insecurity of the emerging nation-state and its need to create a compelling internal narrative, the unique character of the universal rights language of the late Enlightenment amplified the universalist educational ideology of the early republican period in the United States. By those ideas, individuals' stations could and should be separated from their inherent status as men, men imbued with qualities, rights, and opportunities that could and should not be abrogated by policy or practice. Among those rights was the right to participate in the establishment of laws and the conduct of government. It became particularly important, in this framework of broad participation, for citizens to possess at least a rudimentary education by which they could assess the strengths of various arguments and positions.

Embedded in the rights language of the late Enlightenment, however, is an even more fundamental proposition supporting individual freedom and fundamental equality, concepts that expanded over the course of the next two centuries to include women, native peoples, freed African slaves, and immigrants. As these groups came to be regarded as inheritors of the same inalienable rights that had traditionally been the province of white men, the need to provide an education that would enable them to exercise those rights within a prescribed set of social norms became critical. From this expansion of language regarding rights and freedoms, combined with the ever-present impulse to use education as a tool of social cohesion, comes the particular North American emphasis on inclusive and universal schooling.

For example, even in the early years of the Republic, educators and political leaders discussed following the internal logic of the Revolution to formalize the education of girls and women as a national priority. Mothers, the argument went, were a child's first teacher, and to educate women well was an important bulwark to the safety of the nation. Importantly, it was this connection between rights of democratic participation and the need to create a national narrative that reinforces order which led to the expansion of educational opportunity across wide swaths of the population in North America over the next two and a half centuries.