Expanding Public Education
- 2. Pioneers in Education: • Horace Mann and John Dewey promote the need for quality education for American children • William Torrey Harris, an educational reformer, viewed the public schools as training grounds for employment and citizenship • Education was viewed as the key to greater security and social status in America
- 3. Expanding Public Education: • Although most states had established public schools by the Civil War, many school-age children still received no formal education • The majority of students who went to school left within four years, and few went to high school • Schools for children required mandatory attendance between the ages of 8 and 14
- 4. Expanding Public Education: • Curriculum emphasized reading, writing, and arithmetic • In 1880, about 62 percent of white children attended elementary school, compared to about 34 percent of African-American children • Not until the 1940s would public school education become available to the majority of black children living in the South
- 5. Expanding Public Education: • The growth of High schools, stemming from the need of advanced technical and managerial skills, expanded the curriculum to include courses in science, civics, and social studies • African Americans were mostly excluded from public secondary education, most went to private schools, which received no governmental financial support
- 6. Expanding Higher Education: • Although the number of students attending high school had increased, only a minority of Americans had a high school diploma • At the same time, an even smaller minority- only 2.3 percent-of America’s young people attended colleges and universities • Major changes in curricula and admission policies in the universities quadrupled college enrollment between 1880-1920
- 7. Expanding Higher Education: • After the Civil War, thousands of freed African Americans pursued higher education, despite their exclusion from white institutions • The prominent African American educator, Booker T. Washington, believed that racism would end once blacks acquired useful labor skills and proved their economic value to society • Washington headed the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, now called Tuskegee University, in Alabama
- 8. Expanding Higher Education: • By contrast, W.E.B. Du Bois, the first African American to receive a doctorate from Harvard (in 1895) strongly disagreed with Washington’s gradual approach • In 1905, Du Bois founded the Niagara Movement, which insisted that blacks should seek liberal arts education so that the African American community would have well-educated leaders • Du Bois proposed that a group of educated blacks, the most “talented tenth” of the community, attempt to achieve immediate inclusion into mainstream American life