The Anchors of American Education

America needs education. This has been a popular sentiment ever since the original colonies were founded… the sentiment at surface level, at least. Digging deeper into the history of American education reveals a more complex picture of education’s direction and significance, to the point that being a learned individual “for education’s sake” is found to be the exception rather than the rule. For as much as society harps on the need to educate its youth, this perceived necessity is more often than not a mere sound byte and byproduct spewed out by external religious and political factors.

During America’s earliest beginnings, “the emphasis laid on religious instruction… was very characteristic of the colonial period” (Beginnings, 12). Several early towns were founded as a means to avoid religious persecution abroad. Thus, it can’t be too surprising that when it came time to address the needs of a new world community, Christianity would provide a moral and spiritual backbone. As a means of instilling strong work ethic and a sense of good behavior in growing boys, young, adolescent men were surrounded by the teachings of the Bible seven days a week, at church and in the schoolhouse. Education was not so much about broadening one’s mind intellectually as it was about keeping delinquents off the street and reinforcing long-existing doctrines from the motherland.

The power of religion over what America’s students eventually lessened, making way for post WWII scientific progress. But again, this was not the result of a sudden intellectual enlightenment in America. Rather, the “greater emphasis on science and mathematics (was) a means of winning the weapons race with the Soviet Union” (Education, 321). This emphasis would make its way to higher education as well, for “resistance to federal aid to education rapidly disappeared on October 4, 1957, when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I” (Education, 334). Stressing academics over social development in the classroom was an easy sell to liberals and conservatives at the time, given anti-Communist sentiments, the desire to educate servicemen, and arguably moderate federal government of the 1950s. But while “education in the name of intellectual progress” might have served as a rallying cry, “education in the name of politics” provides a more accurate picture.

The war of classroom control in the late 20th and 21st century has a certain timelessless, for better or for worse. In 1995, when I was in second grade and had just been accepted into my elementary school’s Talented and Gifted (TAG) Program, I recall having a discussion with a non-TAG friend, wondering why he wasn’t in the program. I told him what my TAG instructor told our, that “any student can be in TAG”. Little did I know that programs such as TAG were first introduced in public schools – or what Conant dubbed “social sorting institutions” – as a means to set a greater intellectual pace for children considered to have greater potential for studies beneficial to the country. That friend of mine who was never selected as a candidate for TAG enrollment, attended a predominantly religious university, and ironically became a Physics teacher. I, on the other hand, attended a state university, studied communications, and now work for an entertainment company. As much as I treasure my job, surely my friend is doing more to influence the country’s youth than I am. With this in mind, our two lives suggest that the anchors of American education have little bearing on decisions made about life, that religious and secular (and, to an underlying extent, political) institutions are merely assumed to lead students down preconceived paths. So it would be an interesting social experiment to toss away the anchors, and to see what happens when students young and younger come to education not as a duty to God or to country, but as a duty to themselves and their own educational interests.