Tuesday, February 6, 2018

‘The public school is not as American as apple pie’

Harvard professor Paul E. Peterson reminds us:
For the entire colonial period and well into the first decades of the nineteenth century, schooling was the responsibility of churches, private tutors, and fee-paid, itinerant schoolmasters like Washington Irving’s Ichabod Crane. The hodgepodge worked pretty well. In 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville reported to his French readers that the American people “appear to be the most enlightened community in the world.”

No comments: