The history of American education – out of sight, out of mind?

Over 54 million kids in the United States are heading back to school in the United States this month.

Many of us whose school memories include the screech of chalk on blackboards, the irresistible smell of freshly mimeographed worksheets, and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance  – now look back with nostalgia on those formative years of promise and progress. We probably didn’t realize it then, but that final line of the Pledge – “with liberty and justice for all” – didn’t automatically mean access to quality K-12 education nationwide. And it still doesn’t.

Throughout more of this nation’s history than we’d like to admit, access to schooling has been predicated on gender and race. Other factors like socioeconomic level, cultural hegemony, and immigration status also have had a significant bearing on differences in educational opportunities for school-aged children living in America.

And yet, it’s important to acknowledge the strides we’ve made over the last 250 years.

In 1789, the same year the U.S. Constitution was adopted, grammar schools in Boston began to admit girls, although they weren’t allowed to attend class at the same time as boys. A few other areas followed suit.

A few years back, the World Economic Forum published a review of the historical struggle for female education in the U.S. It showed that questions about female intellectual capacity prevailed in the 19th century. One Harvard professor, for example, suggested that girls who studied advanced subjects like algebra might harm their ovaries.

Keep in mind that this delicacy of approach was expressed in the midst of the industrial era, when it was common for both boys and girls to be put to work on farms and in factories. (Industrial child labor wasn’t outlawed until 1938!)

And yet, with late 19th and early 20th century influxes of immigrants into American cities, social workers and others began to clamor for urban schools to transform those youngsters into Americans as expeditiously as possible. Likewise, with territorial expansion and settlement, one-room schoolhouses were popping up across the western landscape. Practicality pointed to allowing those classrooms to be filled with all comers. Coeducation established itself.

But other educational gaps remained.

With settlers usurping the homelands of indigenous tribes and disrupting their long-accustomed ways of life, U.S. policymakers turned their attention to “the Indian problem” following the Civil War. Embracing the narrative of manifest destiny and advancing civilization, the federal government’s efforts to resettle Native American tribes often turned into extermination campaigns instead. Survivors were rounded up to live on reservations, where they were deprived of their customary resources and ways of life.

Native American children, however, were often removed from their families. White reformers urged that with the proper education, these children could be assimilated into the dominant culture, just as was happening with immigrant children.

The Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School, founded in 1879 in Pennsylvania, was the first to put that assertion to the test. Army officer Richard Henry Pratt, known for his “Kill the Indian, Save the Man” motto, was behind this effort. Indian children were transported by train from their reservations hundreds of miles away. Upon arrival, their hair was cut, they were outfitted in uniforms, and they threatened with punishment if they didn’t speak English. Pratt’s daily military-style regimen for students included physical exercise, a basic educational curriculum, and emphasis on vocational training. Students were expected to remain at the school for years, and their contact with family members was strictly limited.

The Carlisle model was replicated by the federal government at 24 other sites across the country.

Estelle Reel, who served as national superintendent of the Indian School system from 1898 to 1912, boasted about the government’s “serious attempt made to foster in the wild red soul the instinct for a fixed home….”

Increasing runaways and suicide attempts indicated that many of the students were finding boarding school life intolerable, but these schools – out of sight and out of mind for the general public – operated for half a century before outsiders began to pay heed to the mistreatment of the children.

Segregation in schools looked different in different places.

During World War II, the U.S. government’s broad-brush response to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor was to imprison over 120,000 Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. Given only a few days’ notice in the Spring of 1942, entire Japanese American communities were ousted from their homes and shipped to desert locations to live in crudely built barracks surrounded by barbed wire.

For the thousands of kids who had been pulled out of their classrooms, initial schooling at these veritable concentration camps was nonexistent – no furniture, no textbooks, no teachers. Themselves disoriented, the adults in the community established makeshift classes, but in some cases it took more than two years for the government to convert barracks buildings into classrooms. Again, these child prisoners – most of them American citizens, mind you – were out of sight, and out of mind.

In an NPR interview conducted last year, 98-year-old Mary Murakami recalled what it was like for her as a child in the camp:  “being taken without being able to communicate… and to these camps that were not made for humans to live in, and your education is stopped. You don’t know how long you’re going to be there.”

That was then. But that is also again.

The elderly survivors of those ill-begotten concentration camps of the 1940s – and their descendants – have been among the most vociferous critics of the current administration’s ICE Family Detention program in Dilley, Texas. These families, too, have been yanked from their homes, locked away, and neglected. And according to a report on PBS Newshour, the kids have been given only minimal educational instruction while being held for weeks on end.

That same tired refrain: out of sight, out of mind.

Let’s stay in Texas, and consider a simple adobe schoolhouse that was built in Marfa in 1909. The Blackwell School was constructed to accommodate Latino students who lived in the area but had been denied admission into local public schools because they were not white.

Blackwell School, now designated as a National Historic Site, reminds people of the longstanding prejudice against students of Latino heritage and the de facto segregation that prevailed for generations. At one time, there were several other schools like this throughout the Southwest, particularly in Texas and California.

But in 1947, a group of Mexican American families in Southern California challenged the same kind of “separate but equal” concept that was being practiced in Marfa. The lead plaintiffs were parents Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez, who brought suit against the Westminster School District when it refused to register their children on the basis of their Mexican ethnicity.

The federal court hearing the case agreed with the plaintiffs, ruling that arbitrarily segregating Mexican students into separate “Mexican schools” was unconstitutional discrimination. This decision rendered California as the first state in the union to end school segregation officially.

In 2022, the City of Westminster marked the 75^th anniversary of that landmark decision with the opening of Mendez Tribute Monument Park. The centerpiece of the park includes two statues: one of the Mendez parents, and another of two students who are walking together to school. Earlier this year, the City added to the park with the opening of a two-mile-long interpretive  Mendez Freedom Trail.

The Mendez lawsuit preceded another civil rights case concerning school segregation that went all the way to the Supreme Court: Brown v. Board of Education.

In Topeka, Kansas, in 1950, third-grader Linda Brown had to walk across train tracks every day to get to her bus-stop for the school bus that would take her to a school a mile away. On her daily walk to the bus-stop, Linda passed by a much closer elementary school that wouldn’t allow her to attend because she was Black.

That school, Monroe Elementary, is now the site of the the Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park. In 1951, Linda’s father, Oliver Brown, decided to sue the school district.  Twelve other Black families in Topeka joined him in filing a class action lawsuit that challenged Topeka’s segregated schools as the status quo. The case was heard by the Supreme Court and, in a unanimous decision in 1954, the Court overturned the infamous “separate but equal” Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine that had enabled rampant segregation, particularly in the American South, for nearly 60 years.

The Court went on to order states to “desegregate” with what they called “deliberate speed.” While some folks paid attention to the word “speed,” there were diehard segregationists who interpreted “deliberate” as “slow.”

Arkansas demonstrated that mixed response. Out of all the states that once had been part of the Confederacy, the Fayetteville School Board was the very first to vote on approving desegregation, just four days after the Brown v. Board of Education decision was announced. And Charleston, Arkansas, was the first city anywhere in the south actually to implement integration of its schools.

School desegregation in the capital city of Little Rock, however, was a different matter. The Little Rock School Board dallied another couple of years before announcing it would introduce a gradual and very limited integration of previously all-white Little Rock Central High School. The plan was that in September, 1957, nine Black high school students, chosen for their exemplary attendance records and excellent grades, would be allowed to join the high school’s white student body of nearly 2,000 students.

Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, a segregationist, was defiant. He did not want this to happen in his town on his watch. He ordered the National Guard to station themselves outside of the high school “to maintain or restore the peace and good order of this community.” His intention was to block the Black students from entering the building, and white racists in the community heard him loud and clear. An emboldened mob of them showed up on the first day of school to harass the incoming Black students verbally and physically.

Anticipating this type of trouble, the local NAACP chapter had arranged to escort the Black students safely to school, but they hadn’t been able to contact one of the students, Elizabeth Eckford.

So Eckford showed up alone on that first day of school, wearing a stylish white shirtwaist dress with a full skirt that she had sewn herself from a Vogue pattern. She wanted to make a good first impression at Little Rock Central. But arriving before the other Black students showed up in the pre-arranged contingent, Eckford was assailed by the full force of the white mob’s hatred.

She had seen the Governor on television the night before, but she’d been so busy putting the final touches on the outfit she’d sewn, that she hadn’t paid close attention to his remarks. She thought Faubus had called out the troops to protect the arrival of the Black students.

But that morning, as she tried every entrance to the school, she was blocked by the armed troops, not protected by them. Retreating down the street to a city bus stop, Eckford was followed and harassed by the mob until the bus came and she could disappear through its doors.

The hateful encounter received nationwide press coverage. It took almost three weeks, but President Dwight Eisenhower eventually sent the 101^st Airborne Division of the Army to Little Rock to escort the Black students into the school. It was a very lopsided, uneasy integration, but it was a first step.

Today the Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site operates a visitor center across the street from the high school. The school still serves students, so only limited, ranger-guided tours are allowed, and must be arranged well in advance through the visitor center.

The courageous “Little Rock Nine” also are memorialized a short distance away on the State Capitol Grounds in a poignant sculpture installation called “Testament.” The memorial, created by sculptor John Deering, includes bronze likenesses of each of the nine students. Plaques  embedded in the pavement include quotations from each of the students, reflecting on that momentous  experience in their lives, and in American history.

One of the Little Rock Nine, Melba Pattillo-Beals, wrote: “The task that remains is to embrace our interdependence – to see ourselves reflected in every other human being, and to respect & honor differences.”

Racial integration of schools has proven to be a long and tumultuous journey in some parts of the country. While the mobs in front of schools have petered out, more recent racism-tinged responses have included white flight, homeschooling, and a demand for private school vouchers. Other exclusionary attitudes can be detected in fights over textbook content, school library book bans, and the posting of the Ten Commandments in classrooms and on school grounds. All of these suggest a failure to understand that diversity and inclusion efforts are what have made the American experiment in democracy a continuing work toward… liberty and justice for all.

For a different chapter in improved access to education, we can look to another civil rights milestone that occurred in 1975 when President Gerald R. Ford signed the Education for All Handicapped Children Act into law. For the first time in history, that landmark legislation guaranteed kids with disabilities access to a free, appropriate public education.

So how does the 21^st century stack up as far as access to education goes?

For a couple of decades now, there has been a push to get laptops into the hands of every schoolkid in America and broadband into every corner of the country. This has democratized access to the Information Age, which is a good thing. But it’s also amplified exposure to mis- and disinformation.

At the same time, Big Tech, as represented by the Gates Foundation and others, also aggressively advanced the argument for STEM-heavy curriculum. Remember the urgency just a decade ago, when coding was touted as the career of the future? Now AI has tech companies shedding employees faster than a Maine Coon Cat sheds fur.

In any event, the current domination of screens in our lives requires a bold response from educators everywhere. Today’s kids have been exposed to screens from infancy, and many parents, distracted by their own screens, have abdicated vital parenting to the virtual babysitter. This is an unsettling new twist on the out of sight, out of mind phenomenon. There’s a strong possibility that kids’ values are being shaped more by their screens than by their parents. And there’s no doubt that society is seeing the harmful dependency and alienation that can result from excessive screen time.

So for all students at all levels of schooling in the 21^st century, media literacy should be a priority woven into every school day – understanding the insidiousness of algorithmic bias, authenticating information, and identifying hidden agendas.

But even more importantly – kids shouldn’t be sitting in front of a screen all day, or have a cell phone on their person at all times.

One quick anecdote from the Tukwila School District in Washington State: when kids were told they couldn’t look at their cell phones even during lunchtime, there was consternation throughout the cafeteria. But the schools brought in Foosball tables and other games to fill the void. Now, instead of scrolling on their phone through lunch, kids are interacting with each other.

“They’re learning how to make friends again,” one school official rejoiced.

And in the 21st century, to spark imaginations rather than simply turn out worker drones, education needs to be broadened to include exposure to the marvelous, tangible world: the arts, mechanical skills, carpentry, sewing, cooking, agronomy, habitat restoration, the sheer fun of physical movement – and what else?

We aren’t naïve. Schools everywhere are facing challenges: funding, staffing, the growing specter of gun violence, and the growing incursion of AI. But succumbing to despair will get us nowhere.

Look what people like the Mendez family and the Browns and the Little Rock Nine achieved because they believed they could make things better.

Let’s take those lessons to heart, and let’s share them with those 54 million kids. Working together, let’s see if we can create the next positive turning point in America’s history of education.

Barbara Lloyd McMichael is a freelance writer living in the Pacific Northwest. Check out her Pacific Rim Story Laboratory website