Just over two decades after the Pilgrims’ arrival, Massachusetts Bay Colony legislators passed the colonies’ first compulsory education statute. The General School Law of 1642 required families to ensure the “good education” of their children. The law strayed from English precedent by shifting education oversight from clergy to selectmen. This early law emphasized a developing state interest in compulsory education, but it was not yet narrowly focused on schooling, and parents remained responsible for their children’s education.8 Education was separate and distinct from schooling.

Five years later, in 1647, Massachusetts Bay passed its second compulsory education law, the “Old Deluder Satan” bill. It said that children should be educated enough to read the Bible and understand how to avoid evil and vice. This second and more consequential law required towns with fifty or more families to hire a teacher, and towns with one hundred or more families to open and operate a grammar school. These schools were not compulsory in the sense that schooling is today; rather, it was the town that was compelled by the state to offer such a school for any families who wanted to use it. Towns, not parents, were punished for not complying with this early compulsory education statute. The implementation and enforcement of these initial compulsory education laws were scattered, with many towns refusing to comply and instead paying a fine.9

Over the following decades of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, similar compulsory education laws spread throughout the mid-Atlantic and southern colonies. As the population grew, more schools were erected and parents could choose whether to send their children there, when to send them, and for how long. The family remained the primary institution of early America, and parents retained full control over the upbringing and education of children.

While parents were responsible for their children’s education, they were not the only ones teaching them. They often hired tutors and relied on apprenticeships. As schools emerged in the early settlements, local parents were frequently the ones responsible for hiring, housing, and firing teachers. Colony schools complemented the ways children learned at home, and early “dame schools” freed parents of young children to do chores and tend to the household. But school was never seen as a replacement for the education provided by parents at home and managed by parents using the wider resources of their community.10 As historian Carl Kaestle declares: “Society educates in many ways; the state educates through schools.”11

The conversation around compulsory education continued through the Revolutionary era, as the Founding Fathers grappled with the understanding that ensuring liberty in a thriving new democracy required an educated citizenry. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, recognized the essential connection between education and freedom, writing in 1816, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”12 Still, the institution of the family prevailed over the interests of the state. Jefferson advocated for a highly decentralized system of education, locally controlled by parents in small districts, or “wards” as he called them, with little government involvement. He also believed that parental rights and individual liberty outweighed mandatory compliance. In 1817, Jefferson wrote, “It is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by forcible asportation and education of the infant against the will of the father.”13 Make education accessible, highly treasured, and free for the poor, Jefferson proposed, but don’t mandate it under a legal threat of force.

In the mid-nineteenth century this all changed. The population grew larger and more diverse, and state institutions concentrated government power in a more centralized way, weakening the once dominant role of the family. Horace Mann, a Massachusetts legislator and state senate majority leader, played an instrumental role in this growing institutionalization of society in the 1800s. Mann, the proclaimed “father of American public education,” also has the distinction of creating the nation’s first mental institution in 1833, shortly before turning his full attention to centralized schooling.14

Mann became enamored with the Prussian model of compulsory schooling. It was orderly and efficient, and it facilitated the inculcation of a uniform set of moral values. The Prussians, who lived in a broad area that now includes modern-day Germany, were among the first in the ...