From a reader:

Though I always enjoy reading the Corner, I’ve been particularly interested in the debate over public schooling in response to your article. My dissertation (which will be finished by next spring—fingers crossed) deals with many of the issues running throughout The Corner as of late. Benjamin Franklin was concerned about German immigrants not becoming Anglicized and becoming potential subversive threats in the 1750s. He feared that their insistence on using German and their increase in numbers would eventually force the Pennsylvania Assembly to hire German translators to “tell one half of our Legislators what the other half say.” I believe he was also concerned with the competition their German printing presses gave his own business in Philadelphia as well. He had tried and failed to print a successful paper in German. Franklin also fought a losing battle over content in the Academy he helped establish. The Academy had three schools; the Latin school, the English school, and the charity school. You can almost think of them in terms of three social or economic classes; the rich, the middle class, and the laboring poor which roughly corresponded with each school.
While he wanted it to focus on practical subjects like reading, writing, arithmetic, accounting, history, geography, pronunciation and speaking, drawing, natural history, most of the financial supporters were more interested in supporting the Latin school where their children would study Greek and Latin in preparation for college and a more distinguished career in medicine or law. There were no classes in theology or Christianity and though this made it distinct from most other schools of the time, it did, like other schools of the time, use the Bible as one of the principal texts. Unfortunately, Franklin brought in a rector named William Smith who emphasized the Latin school at the expense of the charity school and the English school within the Academy. They had a falling out and eventually Smith, too, became unpopular with the Pennsylvania Assembly for his political attitudes. He and many of the Trustees were suspected Tories, and many had stayed in town during the British occupation. They also had little in common, either socially or economically, with those coming to power in the new Assembly. When a dismal financial report of the college was presented to the Assembly, they cleaned house in the school’s administration and replaced virtually everyone in the former Academy and made it into a university.
Until the 1820s and 30s, at least in Pennsylvania (those dates vary slightly throughout the early nation, slightly earlier in the Northeast, slightly later in the South) most people opposed paying taxes for education, preferring to allow families to pay for their own education and occasionally raising money themselves to help pay for less fortunate families. In fact, many families were reluctant to accept charity education, since that was an embarrassing social mark to be forced to accept public charity. (Much different from today.) Many educational historians have focused on the bureaucratic organization or the theoretical developments in education or psychology as integral to the success of public schooling, but convincing people to shift their attitudes and agree to pay for public education through taxes was crucial.
Until then, there were numerous other alternatives that were tried. Some of them failed immediately, some may have continued to work well except for the spreading of public schools. Many of the original public schools in Pennsylvania were actually Sunday schools converted to be public schools. Many of the buildings, classrooms, and teachers were simply meshed into the new system emerging in the 1830s.
Many of the other problems in education are not new problems, they’re old problems in new forms. School violence, both between students and between students and their teachers, has a long history. Questions of funding, of authority, of how to teach religion/morals, of which subjects to teach have long been hotly debated. There has been much discussion over the exact purpose of education as well—is it primarily for the wealthy, is it a place to teach democracy and equality, is it simply a place to learn vocational skills, is it’s primary goal to create patriotic Americans? I’m currently working on a chapter in which I look at about a dozen plans from the 1780s and 90s trying to deal with all of these questions. And there was no consensus then, either. Some wanted a national university (including Washington and Jefferson). Some wanted to give each teacher a home, a garden, and a plot of land to farm when he was teaching to be self-sufficient. One argued that we needed to give everyone land of their own and an education to make them truly independent. Others wanted to create very complex systems of schools stretching from country school houses to state universities. A few even began thinking of including other groups to be educated. Benjamin Rush strongly argued that young women should be educated in schools as well. (Wealthy daughters had long been taught by tutors and some girls had been taught in Quaker schools during the 18th century). Other Quakers like Anthony Benezet emphasized the ability of blacks to benefit from education and taught them himself in classes for decades.
One of the points I try to make in the dissertation is that there were a lot of alternatives to public education. There was nothing inevitable about it. And I think I would respectfully disagree with Ramesh in arguing that it would be revolutionary to abolish public schools, though I agree it is extremely unlikely to come to pass. Public education is actually much younger than other forms of education such as tutoring and the university. I hadn’t thought about it before, but one might even argue that charter schools are older (in the sense that groups of parents in small communities often pooled their resources to hire a tutor to teach all of their children.)
Anyways, sorry for the horribly long email. And thanks for all the great ideas and discussion on the Corner. Keep up the great work.