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Early Colonial Period to the American Revolution: A Free Market in Education
"Early colonial America was arguably the freest civil society that has ever existed. This freedom extended to education, which meant that parents were responsible for, and had complete control of, their children's schooling."
Revolution to the 1830s: New England's First Experiment with Government Schools
"In drafting its new state constitution in 1780, Massachusetts decided to reinvigorate its earlier model of tax-funded schools. So it was that Boston, at the time of the nation's birth, laid the foundation for the first tax-funded school system in any American city. But it was hardly like the system of today: Primary education was still left to families' private and voluntary arrangements and children had to already be literate in order to enter the tax-funded grammar schools at age seven. There were no compulsory attendance laws and private schools flourished alongside the new tax-funded schools. In fact, most parents preferred private schools to the government ones."
The 1830s and 40s: Horace Mann, the End of Free-Market Education, and the Rise of Government Schools
"The fight to bring education under the control of government was essentially a fight over the schools' role in shaping the character of the American people. The goal, implicitly religious, was social integration through the inculcation of certain common beliefs selected for their "uplifting" character."
The 1850s and Beyond: States Strengthen Government's Role in Education and Restrict School Choice
"Although none of the original state constitutions of the United States prohibited the use of public funds to assist church-related education, the inclusion or addition of such prohibitions in state constitutions occurred only in isolated instances up to the 1850s. However, the growth of nativist and anti-Catholic sentiments in the country hastened the movement to add such restrictions beginning in the mid-1800s."
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