The Concept of American Public Education Was Initiated by Our Founding Fathers
What once was idealized as community centers for learning civil morality for better citizenship has become community centers with government overreach and a root Cause For the Loss of Parental Rights
Equal access to education is an idea put forth by our Founding Fathers that was developed in the late 1700s. Post-American Revolution, Thomas Jefferson wanted his citizens to have access to public education to create civil morality and better citizenship in the future. In the 1900s influential families of America put forth a Prussian style of learning overhaul to what educational standards would mean in America. The 2000s began with the era of No Child Left Behind and the government overreach into a family’s life and the erosion of privacy and Parental Rights. A far cry from the intent of Thomas Jefferson’s outlook of civic morality and proficiency he felt the American children deserved to lead our nation into its future.
The concept of American public education was initiated by our Founding Fathers.
“The Founding Fathers maintained that the success of the fragile American democracy would depend on the competency of its citizens. They believed strongly that preserving democracy would require an educated population that could understand political and social issues and would participate in civic life, vote wisely, protect their rights and freedoms, and resist tyrants and demagogues. Character and virtue were also considered essential to good citizenship, and education was seen as a means to provide moral instruction and build character. While voters were limited to white males, many leaders of the early nation also supported educating girls on the grounds that mothers were responsible for educating their own children, were partners on family farms, and set a tone for the virtues of the nation.”
Source: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED606970.pdf
A paper written by graduate a graduate student of Education and Human Development.
Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and other early leaders believed in having a unified system to create unified citizenship in America. Later on, this idea would be carried on as a means to a country with less poverty. An educated nation with common principles would project the nation and its citizens forward with common grounds in what many hoped would be despite a child’s economic status and birthright.
However, I find it interesting that this forced the families with a means to have to pay for a lesser education than their child would have been given privately, theoretically, all the while now having to pay for not only their child’s education but the less wealthy family’s child in their community.
I also would like to highlight that while the Founding Fathers thought American Democracy depended on competency, the parents of the children of the nation agreed it seems that mothers were actually those responsible for the education of the nation’s children, not the government. In the 1800s schools were founded on the principles of the community, however, the expectation became children were educated outside of the home and not within it.
“While voters were limited to white males, many leaders of the early nation also supported educating girls on the grounds that mothers were responsible for educating their own children, were partners on family farms, and set a tone for the virtues of the nation.”
Source: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED606970.pdf
Thomas Jefferson so truly believed in equal access to education that he created his own university. He, himself, created the curriculum for the first years of the university. Jefferson was also the man behind the separation of church and state, religion, and education.
With the ideals of Jefferson’s philosophy of the future of his country’s citizens, he in turn became the federalist he always fought against in election. With the principles of our public education system to have a centered civic morality, the parents have since lost their rights over their children to government overreach and gained little morality in our modern world. The government now controls what the children learn with state standards that are competitive on a federal level. A school is no longer a place for civic morality in its community and beyond. It has become a place of mass compliance with political agendas. So who do public school educators benefit now? The child or the state?
Our public school system has a very complicated history, one that is truly fascinating. What began as an idea for a new nation that everyone has a right to an education, has now presently become a discussion of who has the authority over a child’s education: the parent or the government? I think that is further substantiated with a recent statement by our current president, Joe Biden, declaring on national television, “There’s no such thing as someone else’s child”.
Schools have always been used as a community resource. A way to enhance children in organized group thinking. As a community center, the parents were influential in civic duty learning alongside math, English, and misc school subjects. What has changed so prominently since Lyndon B. Johnson, and the 1960s American reform of educational standards in public schools, is the increasing overreach of the public school, the shaming of home based education, and the loss of a parent’s right into the child’s classroom.
Public Schools have had huge moments of change throughout our American history. I do believe we are living through what will be seen as one of those huge moments in our American history. I do think parents are opening up to the realization of the loss of education a child will receive in a public school environment.
However, more importantly, there is a monumental question of who ultimately has control of your children. Presently, and moving forward, will you, the parent, continue to have control of your children, or does the state? As Joe Biden said, “ there’s no such things as someone else’s child.”
Look at California for example. The huge headline is transgender rights and the classroom. However, beyond that, the government will do what it wants with your child with no consequence. The only one with consequence in the relationship between parent, child, and school, is the parent for interfering with the relationship between child and state. The state and government believe it has the right to the development of your child.
An interesting quote from a surprising source is the following from a USA Today article:
“Jason Bedrick, an education research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, says Clinton was referring to the government superseding parents. That's true for Biden, too.
Biden's statement that there's ‘no such thing as someone else's child’ and the ‘nation's children are all our children’ is even more openly calling for the government to supplant parents, Bedrick told me. "
Even left-leaning news sources are starting to correlate there is a huge shift occurring over the possession of rights to children in America. The youth of tomorrow will increasingly become Biden’s youth, Newsom’s youth, not ours.
Who Has More Rights to the Betterment of Your Child: the Government? Or You? We will have to fight to retain the rights we still have. They will be stripped from us if we are unwilling to fight to protect our own children and our parental rights to self-govern.