Puritan vs. Prussian vs. Parochial. Prussian wins.

Also, high schools weren’t really a thing before 1900.

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Prerequisites: Basic knowledge of American history.

Originally Written: August 2021.

Confidence Level: This is the result of a Wikipedia dive. I am not an expect in educational history.

Scope: My focus here is the institutions of schooling, as experienced by a student in the school system. There are other ways to tell the history of schooling, but I think that this one is particularly important and unknown. I am mostly focusing on grade schools and only mention universities at the end. This about American schooling, although I also briefly discuss European school systems that have heavily influenced the US. I will also not talk about more recent educational reforms.

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Puritan Education System

The Puritans who colonized New England were Calvinists, who are some of the most reformed of the churches of the Protestant Reformation. They thought that it was extremely important for everyone to be able to read the Bible and designed the first American education system accordingly.

Education was formally established in law in Massachusetts by the Old Deluder Satan Act of 1647.^[1]The General School Law of 1642 was actually first, but it doesn’t have nearly as good of a name. Then there’s the Massachusetts Evil Code of 1660, which also addresses education. It required all towns with at least 50 households to hire and maintain a teacher to teach all children how to read the scriptures.

Education for children was compulsory (but not free). Most towns had a one-room schoolhouse. They largely used the monitorial system, where the older students would help teach the younger students. This system spread from Massachusetts across the northern United States.

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Prussian Education System

Following the Prussians’ early defeats in the Napoleonic Wars, Wilhelm von Humboldt^[2]Brother of the great scientist Alexander von Humboldt. led significant reforms in education. Many of these reforms were brought to the US by Horace Mann and others in the 1840s.

Some of the Prussian reforms already existed in the (northern) US. In the 1780s, Noah Webster^[3]Author of the dictionary. had promoted a mostly secular education designed to develop civic virtue. His ‘Blue-backed Speller’, a textbook for children, standardized English spelling and was used for generations. Webster also encouraged children to learn English grammar before learning Latin, which had previously been taught together in ‘grammar schools’ for teenagers preparing for university.

Prussian schools grouped children by age. All students would learn the same material at the same age. Instruction consisted of lectures, taught by professional teachers who had been trained in ‘normal schools’. Children would transfer between classes at the ringing of a bell. The state would provide all the funding for the schools, decide the curriculum, and measure if the teachers were being successful. These institutions were designed to give children of all classes a common learning experience and to prepare children for a reformed Prussian military, which allowed more initiative for smaller groups of men.^[4]EDIT: I originally said that one of the goals of the Prussian reforms was to prepare children for factory work. At the time, factory work was more associated with the Madras, Lancaster, and Bell … Continue reading

Horace Mann became the first Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education in 1837. He immediately began introducing reforms, traveling to every school in the state, organizing teachers’ conferences, and founding The Common School Journal. He visited Prussia in 1843 at his own expense to learn more. Mann worked tirelessly to promote the Prussian system, both within Massachusetts and around the country.

Throughout the rest of the 1800s, there was competition between the Puritan and Prussian education systems. Puritan systems were more prevalent in rural areas, while Prussian systems were more prevalent in urban areas. Urban areas have larger populations that support larger schools and are more likely to be following global trends in education reform.

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Education in the South

So far, I have been talking about education in the northern United States. Education in the South was significantly less developed. The South was settled by Anglicans, who are some of the least reformed by the Protestant Reformation. They did not have the same commitment to everyone reading the scriptures that the Puritans did.

Wealthy southerners would hire tutors for their children or send them to private schools, often in England. There existed a few schools funded by charity in the Antebellum South. But for the most part, poor white children did not receive any education and black children were legally forbidden from receiving education.

The first federally supported schools were build in the South during Reconstruction. Thousands of (segregated) schools were built to teach both poor whites and the newly freed slaves. When Reconstruction ended and Jim Crow began, these schools were controlled by the states. White schools were much less likely to be compulsory than in the North. Black schools were severely neglected and, despite the efforts of Booker T. Washington and others, they provided a much worse education.

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Catholic Parochial Schools

Catholic schools have existed since the colonial era, particularly in Louisiana and Maryland. There were only a few of them until the late 1800s, after immigration from Ireland and Germany, then Poland and Italy.

Catholic schools were run by the local parish. They were ethnically homogeneous and were often taught in the language of the old country. They taught an explicitly religious education, in contrast to the increasingly secular and definitely non-sectarian education in the public schools. The teachers were nuns and usually had less pay and less education than teachers in other school systems.

Other immigrant communities, including German Lutheran, Dutch Calvinists, and Orthodox Jews, also founded parochial schools.

Parochial schools were often opposed by the Protestant majority. They feared that these schools, controlled by a non-democratic institution and taught in a language other than English, would keep immigrant children from becoming good Americans. In 1876, President Grant and Congressman Blaine proposed a constitutional amendment that would ban any public funding of parochial schools. While this failed, the amendment was added to the state constitutions of most states. In 1922, Oregon went farther and required compulsory education in the public school system, banning parochial schools. The Supreme Court struck down this law in Pierce v. Society of Sisters. Parochial schools can exist, but do not receive state funding.

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Progressive Era & Great Depression

The Progressive Era (1896-1920) saw the Prussian system gain increasing control over school systems, although there were also some new systems that lasted until the Great Depression.

The number of schools increased dramatically during the Progressive Era. School boards became increasingly technocratic, replacing political control that often gave out teaching jobs as patronage.

The leading intellectual of progressive education was John Dewey, who advocated for learning by doing and critical thinking to better educate children for democracy. His ideas were only implemented by a handful of schools due to resistance from the increasingly bureaucratic school systems. Maria Montessori also visited the US from Italy. She was popular among some intellectuals, but was only able to influence a few schools. Both systems died out during the Great Depression, and Montessori was reintroduced from other countries in the 1950s.

After 1910, Catholic schools deemphasized ethnicity and adopted most of the institutions of public schools, although they only replaced nuns with professional teachers in the 1970s.

High schools have existed in the US since the Old Deluder Satan Act required towns with at least 100 households to have a grammar school. But they were uncommon. As late as 1890, only 7% of teenage Americans were enrolled in high school. Between 1890 and 1920, the number of high schoolers increased from 200,000 to 2,000,000.^[5]From 7% to 32%. The new high schools mostly used the same system of education as the elementary schools.^[6]I am a bit hesitant to call this the Prussian system because the Prussian educational reforms of the early 1800s also included secondary school. They are not like this. There are separate Gymnasium, … Continue reading

Vocational high schools also spread widely during the Progressive Era, following the example of Gary, Illinois. These programs were cut during the Great Depression.

FDR thought educators were elitist. The Civil Works Administration did build school buildings, but the New Deal did not provide education funding. There were some people involved in the New Deal who wanted to promote education, but this was counteracted by e.g. the Civilian Conservation Corps specifically avoiding teaching skills that would allow their workers to compete with union members. The GI Bill, which paid for college for the veterans, was passed while FDR was president, but he did not advocate for it.

High school enrollment rates passed 80% in 1955, up from 50% in 1940 and 32% in 1920. Since the 1950s, public high schools for everyone, with institutions derived from Prussian primary schools, have been ubiquitous in the US. The 1950s is also when the Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools are unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education.

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Today

The Prussian system is the norm for grade schools in the US. Students are divided by age and transfer between classes taught by professional teachers at the ring of a bell. Most other educational institutions for children and teenagers have followed public schools in using this system.

I know of only one institution that still uses the Puritan system: the Boy Scouts of America. Boy Scout troops are about the size of a one-room schoolhouse and are not divided by age (unlike even Girl Scouts and Cub Scouts). Instead, they are divided into patrols that combine boys of different ages. There is an emphasis on having the older boys teach the younger boys outdoorsmanship. Twelve year old boys are more likely to listen to sixteen year old boys than to adults, and it provides the older boys with valuable leadership experience.

Universities in the US are not modeled on the Prussian system of primary education. Classes are gated by prerequisites, not by age. There is significant specialization, and little or no shared curriculum. Students spend a much smaller amount of time in the classroom, so most of their learning occurs during unstructured time. I will not go through the history of how the university education system developed,^[7]In part because I don’t know enough about it. but I do want to note how different it is.

As we think about what schooling systems are best for today, it is helpful to look at the history of how our current system developed and what other systems have worked in the past.

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Further Reading

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_the_United_States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_School_Laws

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monitorial_System

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Webster

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Mann

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_school

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Catholic_education_in_the_United_States

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parochial_school#United_States_and_Canada

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_education

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dewey

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_education_in_the_United_States#History