America’s Founding Fathers Were Against School Choice
One of the founding principles of the United States is public education.
We fought a bloody revolution against England for many reasons, but chief among them was to create a society where all people could be educated.
Certainly we had disagreements about who counted as a person. Women? Probably not. Black people? Doubtful. But the ideal of providing a quality education for all was a central part of our fledgling Democracy regardless of how well we actually lived up to it.
In fact, without it, our system of self-government just wouldn’t work. A functioning Democracy, it was thought, couldn’t exist in a nation where the common person was ignorant. We needed everyone to be knowledgeable and enlightened.
That’s why we have public schools – so that an educated citizenry will lead to a good government.
Our founders didn’t want a system of private schools each teaching students various things about the world coloring their minds with religious dogma. They didn’t want a system of schools run like businesses that were only concerned with pumping out students to be good cogs in the machinery of the marketplace.
No. They wanted one public system created for the good of all, paid for at public expense, and democratically governed by the taxpayers, themselves.
Don’t believe me?
More than any other fathers of the Revolution, Thomas Jefferson preached the Gospel of education and its necessity for free governance.
As he wrote in a letter to Dr. Price (1789), “Whenever the people are well-informed, America’s Founding Fathers Were Against School Choice | gadflyonthewallblog:
