Pod Insights Throughline The First Department of Education About this episode Whose job is it to educate Americans? Congress created the first Department of Education just after the Civil War as a way to help reunify a broken country. A year later, it was basically shut down. But the story of that first department's birth – and death – set the stage for everything that's come since.
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Transcript 7,453 words · 34 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:23 Speaker 01 For he who knoweth his master's will, and knoweth it not, shall be beaten with many strikes.
0:45 Speaker 02 You've asked me to give a history of the motives which induced me to undertake the late insurrection.
0:57 Speaker 02 In my childhood, a circumstance occurred which made an indelible impression on my mind.
1:04 Speaker 03 Hold me as I stand in the heavens.
1:07 Speaker 02 I surely would be a prophet as the Lord has shown me things that had happened before my birth.
1:21 Speaker 02 We determined to enter the house secretly.
1:29 Speaker 02 Heart got a ladder and set it against the chimney on which I ascended and hoisting a window, entered and came downstairs.
1:43 Speaker 02 Unbarred the door and removed the guns from their places. It was then observed that I must spill the first blood.
1:56 Rund Abdelfatah? What you just heard was written in a pamphlet called "The Confessions of Nat Turner." It was written by a white lawyer days before Turner's execution for the crime of insurrection. While scholars have debated its accuracy, what is known for sure is that over the course of an August night in 1831, Nat Turner led a revolt of enslaved Black people that ended in the killing of at least 55 white men, women, and children. It was something that white slave owners had always feared. And in its wake, slaveholding states zeroed in on one major culprit: literacy. Nat Turner knew how to read.
2:38 Speaker 05 He was deemed to be a literate slave, and he used his literacy to lead an assault against whites in Virginia.
2:46 Speaker 02 The manner in which I learned to read and write not only had great influence on my own mind, as I acquired it with the most perfect ease.
2:57 Rund Abdelfatah? Nat Turner lived in Virginia at a time when it was illegal to teach enslaved people to read, but he managed to learn anyway. He read the Bible, and he believed he was a prophet who would free his people.
3:10 Speaker 02 I surely would be a prophet.
3:20 Speaker 05 The South as a region saw education as a dangerous thing.
3:27 Speaker 05 The Black population was the majority population in a handful of states: Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama was nearly 50%, Florida was nearly 50%. The ultimate means of social control is to make sure they don't have a lot of knowledge.
3:43 Rund Abdelfatah? After Nat Turner's rebellion, most of the slaveholding states passed or expanded laws to prevent enslaved people from learning to read and write.
3:53 Speaker 05 Every Southern state had some anti-literacy or anti-assemblage law, which really forbade African-Americans from going to school. And that was a mechanism to control for slavery.
4:07 Speaker 05 The last thing you want is enslaved people finding just a little bit of free time to sit around, use their literacy to say, "Should I be enslaved because there are people across this country saying otherwise?"
4:24 Rund Abdelfatah? While these laws were suppressing black education in the South, reformers in the North were kicking off a national education movement. It was an uphill climb.
4:35 Speaker 06 The word "education" doesn't appear in the United States Constitution. The people who founded this country with names like Thomas Jefferson and Noah Webster and Benjamin Rush, they were great advocates for education, of course, including its civic function, especially its civic function, but they didn't imagine education organized at the federal level.
4:55 Speaker 07 But the Civil War changed all that. Suddenly, the question of education became existential for the United States and for the formerly Confederate South. As black people were emancipated and Reconstruction began, Congress created the first Department of Education. A year later, it was basically shut down. The story of what happened, why it was created and why it failed, is the prologue to decades of debate over the federal government's role in education.
5:33 Speaker 08 President Carter fulfilled one of his 1976 campaign pledges today. He signed legislation establishing a separate Department of Education.
5:41 Speaker 09 Mr. Reagan wants to reduce drastically. President George Bush has dominated the national debate over how schools...
5:47 Speaker 10 President Clinton signs a bill that sets national education... President Bush has signed into law one of the most far-reaching educ... The Obama administration had the states compete for the money.
5:56 Speaker 11 The Trump administration is withdrawing Obama-era guidelines that encourage schools...
6:00 Speaker 10 President Biden has outlined another round of federal student loan cancellations.
6:04 Speaker 11 President Trump wasted no time today announcing next steps in his bid to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education.
6:12 Rund Abdelfatah? The Department of Education that we know has only existed for about 50 years. Today, it oversees billions of dollars for schools, civil rights complaints, a federal student loan program, and it's responsible for ensuring equal access to education. It's much bigger than the first Department of Education ever was. But the questions that drive the debates around it, about the purpose of education, who it's for, and what role, if any, the federal government should play, they're all rooted in that very first effort.
6:46 Speaker 07 I'm Ramtin Arablouei.
6:48 Rund Abdelfatah? And I'm Randa Abdel Fattah.
6:49 Speaker 07 On this episode of Throughline from NPR, the birth, death, and legacy of the first Department of Education.
6:59 Speaker 12 Hi, this is MK Lovell from St. George, Utah, and you're listening to Throughline from NPR. Thanks for making me a better American.
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8:35 Speaker 16 Part one, a stick in the dirt.
8:40 Speaker 07 In the most basic terms, can you describe what education was like in the United States before the Civil War?
8:50 Speaker 17 This was a time when education was a lot more fragmentary.
8:54 Speaker 07 This is Michael Studeman.
8:56 Speaker 17 I am an assistant professor of rhetoric at Penn State University, and I studied the history of education policy in the United States and how Americans have argued about it.
9:06 Speaker 07 In the early 1800s, there was no federal school system. There were hardly any state school systems. Schools were run by churches or untrained teachers, sometimes even the students themselves. But at their core was basic reading, math, and writing.
9:24 Speaker 17 A lot of it wouldn't be too unfamiliar. Usually, students sat in rows. A lot of the assignments they did would be very much examination and recitation-driven. This was a time where pedagogy relied very heavily on shame. And so, public exhibitions were a big way that evaluations happened.
9:47 Speaker 07 The most popular book at the time was The McGuffey Readers. They included famous political speeches.
9:53 Speaker 17 It collected up lots of anecdotes.
9:55 Speaker 18 Under a great tree in the woods, two boys saw a fine, large nut.
10:01 Speaker 17 Very folklore-driven curriculum.
10:03 Speaker 18 "It is mine," said John, "for I was the first to see it." "No, it is mine," said James, "for I was the first to pick it up."
10:13 Speaker 17 A lot of what students were learning in school was not just the ABCs and the basics of mathematics.
10:19 Speaker 18 They called an older boy and asked him.
10:22 Speaker 17 This was about trying to cultivate a sort of civic culture.
10:26 Speaker 18 He took the nut and broke the shell. This half of the shell, said he, belongs to the boy who first saw the nut. And this half belongs to the boy who picked it up.
10:38 Speaker 17 There was a sense of, this is about training people to be good people. It was about moral inculcation.
10:49 Speaker 07 But this kind of education wasn't happening everywhere. Depending on where you were in the country, a one-room schoolhouse could be a law cabin. The McGuffey Reader might be accompanied by a Bible.
11:02 Speaker 17 That was the situation that a lot of the reformers, like Henry Barnard, were responding to at the time, was a sense of fragmentation.
11:14 Speaker 07 Before he was a reformer, Henry Barnard was a kid who hated the little red schoolhouse he attended in Hartford, Connecticut. He said he was a victim.
11:23 Speaker 08 Of a miserable district school.
11:29 Speaker 07 Henry's father once brought him back an orange after being away at sea.
11:36 Speaker 07 An orange from a strange, distant land that brought him wonder. Out there was a whole world to be discovered if he wasn't in school.
11:48 Speaker 07 When Henry was 12 in the 1820s, he hated school so much that he decided to run away with a friend. All right, let's go. They planned to leave the following night, go to a seaport, and find work as sailors.
12:03 Speaker 07 Henry's father, having overheard their plan through an open window, told Henry the next day that he could transfer out of his school.
12:13 Speaker 07 And he did.
12:17 Speaker 07 In his new school, Henry Barnard excelled. He went to Yale at just 15 years old, was near the top of his class, and he went on a mission to change the entire education system in America.
12:31 Speaker 08 Ever since I was conscious of any purpose, the aim of my life has been to gather and disseminate knowledge, useful knowledge, knowledge not always available by the many, but useful to all.
12:44 Speaker 06 What happened in the Anti-Bellam era, starting in the 1830s, is figures like Horace Mann and Henry Barnard started to advocate for something called a "common school system."
12:54 Speaker 07 This became known as the "common school movement," basically free public schools in every state.
13:00 Speaker 06 Which is what today we would call a state school system.
13:02 Speaker 07 This is Jonathan Zimmerman. He teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania.
13:08 Speaker 06 That is something that would bind these small, little schools, mostly one-room, into a system that had, for example, a shared curriculum.
13:18 Speaker 07 Shared textbooks.
13:19 Speaker 06 A shared duration of school year.
13:21 Speaker 07 Shared requirements for teachers.
13:23 Speaker 06 The idea was to create something that was common that would bind together all these disparate schools.
13:30 Speaker 08 The common school will no longer be regarded as common because it is cheap, inferior, and patronized only by the poor.
13:40 Speaker 07 Henry Barnard was in his mid-20s when he became a state lawmaker in Connecticut in 1837. The following year, he gave a speech in support of a bill to establish a new state board for common schools.
13:52 Speaker 08 "Common as the light and the air, because its blessings are open to all and enjoyed by all."
14:02 Speaker 06 There were a lot of people that said, "Why should this be a state concern at all? This is a waste of money, or it's unfairly impinging on local control. Why do we need a state system at all?"
14:12 Speaker 07 But the common school movement had momentum, and the bill passed.
14:16 Speaker 06 And he eventually became the secretary of their new state board of education, which of course he had advocated for.
14:23 Speaker 07 What was his basic philosophy for why all these specific changes were necessary? What was the underlying belief that fueled him?
14:31 Speaker 06 The underlying motivation was civic.
14:38 Speaker 06 The idea was we're going to be a republic of self-governing people. And the only way we're going to do that well or competently is if we get the skills of citizenship. So that was the motivation.
14:50 Speaker 07 But Barnard didn't just set his sights on Connecticut.
14:54 Speaker 17 An important thing to know about Henry Barnard is that he was a Whig politician. And Whig politicians were very concerned about what they perceived as the fragmentation of American society.
15:07 Speaker 07 In the 1830s, there was growing industrialization, a growing divide between rich and poor, and more and more immigration.
15:15 Speaker 17 It's not a coincidence that the Common School Movement emerged in Connecticut and Massachusetts and New England, where there was a huge population of Irish immigrants coming to the United States. A degree of nativism informed this movement. They were worried about people coming to the United States that did not share the same political views, did not share the same religious beliefs, because so many people coming to the country were Catholic. These were people that were, in many ways, anxious about democracy and about the implications of what full democracy and the enfranchisement of lots of people really meant.
15:53 Speaker 07 Education, they thought, was a way to unify the country.
16:01 Rund Abdelfatah? Since Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831, the country had been splitting further apart. In the North, calls for abolition were growing louder. In the South, defenders of slavery were digging in and passing laws aimed at preventing Black people from gathering or learning. But that didn't stop them.
16:29 Speaker 05 Many people would sneak out at night. They would learn from this kind of self-taught teacher, someone who was already literate in the slave community. And then they would go ahead and resume their activities in the daylight hours as if nothing would have happened.
16:51 Speaker 05 Frederick Douglass, he learned from the mistress of his slaveholder.
16:56 Rund Abdelfatah? This is Christopher Span.
16:59 Speaker 05 I'm a historian of American education, specialized in African-American education in the 19th century.
17:05 Rund Abdelfatah? He's currently the dean of the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University.
17:10 Speaker 05 So as he shares in his autobiography, there was a woman by the name of Mrs. Old.
17:14 Speaker 19 A white face beaming with the most kindly emotions.
17:18 Rund Abdelfatah? When Frederick Douglass was a child, she began to teach him to read.
17:23 Speaker 05 And she, deeply religious.
17:25 Speaker 19 commenced to teach me the A, B, C. She assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters.
17:34 Speaker 05 And when Mr. Old saw Mrs. Old teaching Frederick Douglass how to read, he just became furious at the process and really forbade her from teaching him to read any further.
17:45 Speaker 20 It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable and have no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.
18:00 Speaker 19 These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought.
18:12 Speaker 05 Douglass took this as a sign that he was doing something very good for himself.
18:16 Speaker 19 I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty, to wit, the white man's power to enslave the black man.
18:28 Speaker 05 Anything that would make a slaveholder this mad must be very good for him and must be very bad for the slaveholder.
18:34 Speaker 19 From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.
18:41 Speaker 05 So Douglass was determined to learn to read regardless.
18:49 Speaker 05 Knowing that he couldn't go to Mrs. Old anymore, the white schoolchildren who had access to school, he would follow those kids to school and ask them questions, or he would meet them on their way home from school and ask them questions. Almost little challenge games. I bet I could read this passage better than you. I bet I could write this letter better than you. I bet I could spell this word better than you. And so, the side of a barn became the chalkboard. A stick in the dirt became a pencil.
19:22 Speaker 05 And rote memorization and competition tests allowed him to gain the acquisitions of reading and writing in ways that others simply would not. Douglas became so literate that he literally wrote his own path to freedom, that when he stepped on the train to escape from slavery, he wrote himself a path that allowed him to escape. And that's how he made his way out of Maryland and into the Northeast, and eventually landing in a place like Massachusetts.
19:55 Rund Abdelfatah? Douglas got to Massachusetts in 1838, the same year that northern school reformer Henry Barnard was appointed to lead the brand-new school board in neighboring Connecticut. And soon, Barnard and Douglas would both be advocating for more federal involvement in education.
20:13 Speaker 05 Now, as the nation was beginning to develop these more structural ways for people to become knowledgeable and to become schooled, in this sense, it coincided with a nation also challenging whether slavery should exist by law or not.
20:33 Speaker 05 People like Frederick Douglass and others immediately equated knowledge and literacy and schooling with freedom and emancipation and social mobility and a very essence of what it would mean to become a citizen in society. And so, they only had to look around them to see that a literate person could read contracts. A literate person could ensure that they would not only do manual labor, but they would be able to do the other kinds of labor that required a little bit more to mind than the hands.
21:10 Rund Abdelfatah? Reading was a gateway to freedom. Education, a way to enlighten and influence. And when northern troops began arriving in Alexandria, Virginia in 1861, the Black community began opening up schools there.
21:26 Speaker 05 By the time he is witnessing the Civil War, Frederick Douglass becomes one of the chief advocates for this push for education as a means of social mobility, because he's living proof of it himself.
21:46 Rund Abdelfatah? Coming up, Congress debates the very first Department of Education.
22:05 Speaker 21 You're listening to Throughline. My name is Deborah. I'm calling from Honolulu, Hawaii. And I am totally delighted by your coverage of the constitutional amendment. I'm a political scientist, and you are doing a terrific job. Thank you.
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23:37 Speaker 16 Part two. Shame, shame, shame.
23:45 Speaker 23 I will not insult the intelligence of this house by waiting to prove that money paid for education is the most economical of all expenditure. It is cheaper to reduce crime than to build jails.
23:58 Speaker 07 On June 8th, 1866, James Garfield, a representative from Ohio, takes the floor to make the case for something that the nation had never seen before: a national department of education.
24:12 Speaker 23 Schoolhouses are less expensive than rebellions. A tenth of our national debt expended in public education 50 years ago would have saved us the blood and treasure of the late war. A far less sum may save our children from still greater calamity.
24:35 Speaker 07 Garfield was speaking to a Congress that looked very different than it had just a few years prior. The Civil War had just ended. Reconstruction had begun. Even the building was undergoing a renovation. At this point, many Southern lawmakers had left or had been expelled by Congress during the Civil War and were not even in the room when Garfield spoke. The hard work of rebuilding the country was beginning. Garfield and others argued that teachers should lead the way.
25:05 Speaker 17 Schoolteachers are going to be the ones that are able to rebuild Southern culture and rebuild our society in a way that is more cohesive. Basically, where soldiers set down their arms, schoolteachers need to pick up their books.
25:17 Speaker 07 And the need was urgent. The 13th Amendment abolishing slavery had just been ratified in 1865, and the 14th Amendment granting equal protection was on its way.
25:29 Speaker 05 And the greatest clamor coming from 4 million people who were enslaved in the South is this demand that they be properly educated to become citizens of this country. And it's amazing because it's not just the 4 million newly freed people that they're working with.
25:44 Speaker 07 Many white people in the South also had no schooling. So the federal government knew they had to address this, and they did so by establishing the Freedmen's Bureau. The Bureau supported newly freed African Americans, as well as Southern white refugees who were formerly in the Confederacy.
26:02 Speaker 17 Particularly poor Southern whites, so people that did not have plantations, did not have slaves, did not have access to the money and wealth.
26:10 Speaker 07 The Bureau provided food, shelter, clothing, medical aid, and schooling. As part of that effort, the Bureau also offered military protection against people who opposed black education.
26:24 Speaker 17 It was always this very fine line that Congress had to walk. They wanted to say that we're promoting the cause of education, but whenever they made the case that they were directly promoting black education in schools, then it created all of these anxieties about, oh, are you indoctrinating them? Oh, are the federal schools going to be used to train this political force in the South?
26:45 Speaker 07 At this point, the South had virtually no schools compared to the North. And James Garfield saw this as an opportunity. Since he was a teenager, he'd been deeply interested in education. So by the time he took his seat in Congress after fighting for the Union in the Civil War, he was ready to take action.
27:04 Speaker 17 Congress reconvened after the Civil War, and there was a sort of flurry of proposals that it was like everybody was ready with all these plans for like, how are we going to do Reconstruction? Let's go.
27:16 Speaker 07 Education was important for cultural reasons, and also for very practical ones.
27:23 Speaker 17 Any hope they had of a meaningful political coalition in the South depended on black people having the right to vote and the right to participate in politics.
27:34 Speaker 07 And the radical Republicans had every intention of enfranchising Southern black people. So things that we might consider very basic education today, knowing how to count, being able to read and write, were essential.
27:48 Speaker 17 That you can read the ballot and be able to vote for the candidate that you want to because you have enough literacy to be able to select that correctly. And so that's where Garfield steps in.
28:07 Rund Abdelfatah? Which brings us back to that June day in 1866. Garfield opens up the debate in the House by describing his vision for a federal Department of Education.
28:19 Speaker 23 That there shall be established at the city of Washington, a Department of Education for the purpose of collecting such statistics and facts as shall show the condition and progress of education in the several states and territories.
28:33 Speaker 06 The original goal was to try to collect information about different state systems and local ones.
28:41 Rund Abdelfatah? Garfield is basically saying that the department would keep track of how schools were being managed and what teaching methods they were using. Then the department would present that information to every state in the Union. But going into the debate, Garfield knows that he has to tread carefully because remember, up until this point, local communities handled their own education systems.
29:05 Speaker 17 So his position was if we come out with a Bureau of Education that tries to impose upon the country its will, that tries to say to states, here's how you're going to educate, people will reject that. That was his opinion.
29:20 Rund Abdelfatah? But he had a plan for that. The department would gather statistics. At this time, statistics was an emerging science that Garfield fully embraced.
29:31 Speaker 17 In his view, statistics were basically like interpreting God's word in a sense. It was, this is revealing the shape of the social world to us so that we can make very wise political decisions. So he had a ton of faith in what could happen if schools were approached in a way that emphasized statistics.
29:56 Speaker 23 According to the census of 1860, there were 1,200,000 inhabitants in the United States, over 21 years of age, who could not read nor write, and 800,000 of those were American-born citizens.
30:10 Speaker 17 So his opinion was that this bureau would have the ability to create a fairly uniformed national system, enough to prevent future civil war and future tensions and so forth, purely by sharing information, by making it visible what is going on in states that don't have school commitments.
30:29 Rund Abdelfatah? Garfield had a lot of faith in what this department could achieve, especially when it came to bringing Southerners back into the Union.
30:37 Speaker 23 We must pour upon them all the light of our public schools. We must make them intelligent, industrious, patriotic citizens, or they will drag us and our children down to their level.
30:50 Rund Abdelfatah? Garfield and the radical Republicans could take a patronizing tone when it came to the South.
30:56 Speaker 17 Because this population was so uneducated, they did not share the common feelings that Northerners held, and they also lacked the intelligence to be able to discern wise political messages. And so they followed the plantation leaders into the war because they were susceptible to demagoguery.
31:15 Rund Abdelfatah? One by one, the Republicans step onto the floor to make their case for the Department of Education.
31:24 Speaker 03 Civilization is nothing more than education.
31:29 Speaker 17 So, one figure that is an interesting part of this debate is Minnesota representative named Ignatius Donnelly.
31:36 Speaker 03 We excel the past because we have slept a wider field of observation. We possess the accumulations of a greater number of generations of workers. We are ourselves happier, wiser, better, because we know more.
31:52 Speaker 17 At this point, he is just a zealous advocate for schools.
31:55 Speaker 03 We thus strike out at one blow a large proportion of the ignorance of the South. We shame the whites into an effort to educate themselves, and we prepare thus both classes for the proper exercise of the right of suffrage.
32:21 Speaker 17 In order to make education universal, what do we want? What is the crying necessity of this nation today? Another figure in the house was a man named Samuel Moulton from Illinois. Why, sir? We want a head. We want a pure fountain from which a pure stream can be poured upon all the states.
32:42 Speaker 17 The kind of thrust of his argument was that we're basically proposing to do for the nation what we already did in the state of Illinois. The very object of establishing a Bureau of Education is that these different systems may be brought together. And that has created, he argues, a sort of more cohesive culture in the state of Illinois, and it's made for a better, more effective system. We want all these school systems, all over the land, brought under one head so that they may be nationalized, vitalized, and made uniform and harmonious as far as possible.
33:17 Rund Abdelfatah? But not everyone was on board with these ideas.
33:27 Speaker 24 I am content, sir, to leave this matter of education where our fathers left it, where the history of this country has left it, to the school systems of the different towns, cities, and states.
33:39 Rund Abdelfatah? Andrew Rogers, a Democrat from New Jersey, was against creating a Department of Education. He argued that states and local jurisdictions should handle their own business.
33:50 Speaker 24 Let them carry out and regulate the system of education without interference.
33:55 Rund Abdelfatah? Remember, Southern Democrats weren't present, so it was Northerners like Rogers who were making these comments.
34:02 Speaker 05 And many of them come from school communities where local control is the ultimate form of control.
34:09 Rund Abdelfatah? The Democrats that were left in the room pointed out that a federal education department was never written into the Constitution. And after hearing all the radical Republicans talk about just how much this new department would do to change the country, well, they didn't like the idea of handing the federal government so much power. And so they feared what the radical Republicans would end up doing if the Department of Education was established.
34:34 Speaker 17 That this was going to empower the federal government to have an undue influence on what children learned in the classroom.
34:42 Speaker 24 There is no reason or necessity for this bill at all, because the education of the people will be attended to, and it always has been attended to.
34:52 Speaker 17 So, on one side of the issue, you have people that are challenging this bureau because it's not going to do anything. They're like, "What are you talking about? That's not enough." On the other hand, you had people that condemned this bureau for being this centralizing force that was going to make everything all, you know, make all the schools the same and take away all of the local schools' power and so forth.
35:13 Rund Abdelfatah? The debate goes on for two days, and Garfield, the person who presented this bill, is taking the hits.
35:21 Speaker 17 And so, he kind of gets attacked in two completely contradictory ways for his proposal, because he's promising that it will do so much, and yet, what it will actually do on paper is not a lot.
35:32 Rund Abdelfatah? But Garfield doesn't back down.
35:35 Speaker 23 The general government has no compulsory control over this matter, and we propose none in this bill. But we do propose this, that we shall use that power, so effective in this country, the power of letting in light on subjects and holding them up to the verdict of public opinion.
35:55 Rund Abdelfatah? Garfield is basically saying, "We're not going to force education on anyone, but we are going to shame states into doing better."
36:05 Speaker 17 We can pit different groups, different states, different populations against each other if we show them where they stand, and that will motivate them to try to do better for themselves.
36:18 Speaker 23 It would shame out of their delinquency all the delinquent states of this country.
36:27 Rund Abdelfatah? In the end, the radical Republicans prevail. Congress votes to create the Department of Education. Now, the question was, was President Andrew Johnson going to sign this?
36:39 Speaker 17 He was not someone who was really friendly to the idea of public schooling as a national institution, and certainly not the education of Black people in the South. But he was persuaded by people that this bureau would basically have no meaningful power. They're going to gather up facts, they're going to send them out. No meaningful influence over what schools are actually doing. It's fine.
37:07 Rund Abdelfatah? The following year, Johnson signs the bill. The first Department of Education comes into existence on March 2, 1867. It would be made up of one commissioner, three clerks, and a small budget of $15,000, roughly $300,000 today. Now, all that was left to do was to find the department a leader.
37:32 Speaker 25 I watched the progress of the bill through the House and Senate with the deepest interest, all the more from a presentiment that if it became a law, that you would be placed at the head of the department. I have faith that the acorn will become a thriving plant and grow into a sturdy oak under your skillful nurture.
38:02 Rund Abdelfatah? That's coming up.
38:08 Speaker 26 Hi, I'm Angel from Bayona, Colorado. And I listen to Throughline from NPR when I'm painting houses and it makes it feel like I'm not even working at all.
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39:05 Speaker 28 On the latest episode of Sources and Methods, in Israel this week, an election with no clear winner. Next week, in the US, an election that could shift the balance of power in Washington. And in both countries, a defining issue for voters: the war in Iran. We look at where things could be headed in that conflict. Listen this week to Sources and Methods, the national security podcast from NPR.
39:32 Speaker 16 Part Three: A Collection of Floating Matter.
39:40 Speaker 08 I have no prejudices of my own to impose on the country.
39:45 Speaker 08 It's been my aim to bring to bear the light of past and present experience.
39:51 Speaker 08 My belief is that anything worth preserving has its roots in the past. And to make us grow, we need all the light which can be brought to bear from every country.
40:05 Speaker 06 It made complete sense for the administration to choose Henry Barnard.
40:12 Speaker 07 After President Andrew Johnson signed the bill creating the Department of Education in March of 1867, appointing the well-known northern school reformer Henry Barnard as commissioner made sense.
40:24 Speaker 06 By this time, he was the most prominent school leader in the United States.
40:30 Speaker 07 Barnard's dream of uniting the country through education was coming true, and he wrote to James Garfield.
40:37 Speaker 08 May you live a thousand years, and your shadow and that of your wife never be less. But I don't believe you will ever do a work more beneficial and fruitful.
40:50 Speaker 07 And it wasn't just Barnard. His friends and colleagues wrote him, full of optimism.
40:56 Speaker 29 A new educational era has opened upon us.
41:00 Speaker 30 Pride in your promotion and confidence in your success.
41:04 Speaker 06 It is an appointment eminently fit to be made.
41:07 Speaker 31 So much needed to give efficiency to an appropriate system of measures for the intellectual regeneration of the South.
41:17 Speaker 07 They'd promised a lot. James Garfield and Henry Barnard had essentially argued that the Department of Education would do everything from unify the morals and citizenry of the country to encouraging the development of new schools. But Barnard had been thinking about this moment for the last 30 years and writing about it for the last decade in his independent American Journal of Education.
41:41 Speaker 17 And he goes into it and basically sees his role as kind of what he'd already been doing.
41:47 Speaker 07 And so Barnard continues putting out his journal. In it was everything from notes about school architecture and teacher training programs to information about schools in Europe and women's education. It was his entire vision for education in America, a vision that some lawmakers didn't ask for.
42:08 Speaker 17 And this becomes a point of controversy because they're like, why is he making the offices focus the aggregation and continued publication of this independently published education journal? That's a peculiar choice.
42:24 Speaker 07 And that wasn't the only issue. We're talking about one dude, Henry Barnard, and three clerks. He didn't have a lot of help.
42:31 Speaker 17 This was not like a lucrative role by any stretch.
42:34 Speaker 07 He asked for more money.
42:36 Speaker 17 He was still paying a lot of money out of pocket.
42:38 Speaker 07 But Congress wouldn't give it to him, and he was complaining about it. One of the controversies was Barnard asked for another clerk. Yeah, not in the budget. But there's another problem.
42:49 Speaker 17 A lot of people criticized that he was out of town a lot. He was back in Connecticut at home a lot.
42:54 Speaker 07 No one can seem to find Barnard when they need him.
42:57 Speaker 17 He did receive office space, but he was shuffled around DC from office to office, to where you would have people making jokes about it.
43:06 Speaker 31 You said he occupied an office over a restaurant.
43:08 Speaker 17 Well, is that anything against him? It is very convenient. And so there was a sense of like, what is Barnard doing? He's out of town a lot. There were a lot of concerns that he was just kind of continuing to do his own independent work and not really promote the cause of education.
43:25 Speaker 07 And James Garfield, whose bill created the Department of Education, was forced to defend it.
43:31 Speaker 23 I am not one of those who seek to pluck out the eyes of the nation.
43:37 Rund Abdelfatah? But the pressure was mounting. What was Barnard even doing other than using the department as his own personal publishing house? And soon Garfield writes to Barnard, you've got to help me out here.
43:49 Speaker 23 An early presentation to Congress of the valuable reports which you have so nearly ready will enable the friends of education of the department to save it from abolition.
44:00 Speaker 17 He starts preparing his report.
44:08 Speaker 17 A lot of what he included in that report was information that was sort of pulled from this Journal of Education he'd been publishing for the past decade or so.
44:15 Rund Abdelfatah? It was a lot, and it was kind of random.
44:19 Speaker 17 It's mainly bizarre in how much ground it covers.
44:23 Rund Abdelfatah? More than 800 pages.
44:26 Speaker 17 I have it pulled up here. I can read like some of the topics. "European observations on American schools and education." "Art: education in the District of Columbia." It's just not focused. Let me, let me share a description from one of the critics of the Bureau that was trying to get rid of it. So, a senator named Thomas Hendricks from Indiana.
44:45 Speaker 32 "It is a compilation and collection together of scraps." I will not say scraps. I take that back because there is a speech in there from a member of Congress, and of course, that is not scraps. But it is a collection together of floating matter.
45:04 Speaker 17 Wow. Remember, this was pitched to Congress as, "We're going to gather statistics, and we're going to use these statistics to reveal what's going on." And so, people were looking at this, and they're just like, "What is it supposed to do exactly that will help some kids in a school somewhere?"
45:21 Rund Abdelfatah? Garfield was disappointed.
45:23 Speaker 17 It was not what he had envisioned.
45:28 Rund Abdelfatah? And it gave opponents of the department, and even some of its former supporters, more reason to attack it.
45:35 Speaker 17 There are several criticisms of the reports when they come out that suggest that these reports are inadequate, that they're not covering the things that this department was charged to cover, and that it was kind of failing to meet those responsibilities.
45:50 Speaker 06 What was happening was that, in many ways, they created this office as window dressing because it couldn't really do much without employees. And it was shortly after that that the whole thing comes unglued.
46:02 Speaker 33 "This is but a glass eye. It has no sight in it. It has no power. It cannot inspect the system of education anywhere in the United States."
46:10 Speaker 08 "What is the Bureau of Education? It is the gathering up of these facts by a worn-out man who embodies them in his report."
46:23 Rund Abdelfatah? In July of 1868, about one year after it was created, Congress demoted the Department of Education, making it an office within the Department of Interior.
46:35 Speaker 17 Ultimately, it just sort of remains this small office to collect stats.
46:44 Rund Abdelfatah? Henry Barnard retired in 1870. He felt burned, and it was the end of his life in public service.
46:53 Speaker 08 All my experiences with wild beasts and stolid asses in an experience of 30 years did not lead me to expect what I am now receiving.
47:05 Rund Abdelfatah? But what Henry Barnard and the Department of Education had established was a federal foothold in education that never went away. As part of southern states' readmission into the Union, they guaranteed education in their new state constitutions. But it kicked off another era, a new battle for education in the United States.
47:28 Speaker 07 The year Barnard retired, the 15th Amendment was ratified, giving black men the right to vote. But once Reconstruction ended in 1877 and the federal troops departed the South, many southern states started enacting new laws enforcing segregation and limiting voting and access to education.
47:49 Speaker 06 Here's another sad irony. I mean, the Civil War, it is the engine of the creation of the state school system in the South. But the end of Reconstruction is also the beginning of this massive, deeply inscribed inequality between what black and white kids receive from these school systems.
48:07 Speaker 07 Wow, so it's like the introduction of the free public school system, but then the slow separation of equality of that education.
48:18 Speaker 06 Precisely. Which, let's remember, lasts for a century.
48:24 Speaker 07 But even though that Department of Education was essentially reduced to just collecting stats, those stats were and are still important to understanding how well we're doing at providing education across the country and how far we've come. For example, before the Civil War, about 1 in 10 enslaved people were literate.
48:45 Speaker 05 If you get to 1900, roughly 40 years later, we're talking about 7 in 10 formerly enslaved people are now literate. That is massive. So as a historian, I'm deeply appreciative of all the statistics that had been gathered because it allows me to tell a fuller, richer narrative as to what actually happened in that region.
49:08 Rund Abdelfatah? As the federal government's role in education grew in the 20th and 21st centuries, so have the arguments over the role it plays in schools.
49:18 Speaker 17 A lot of this anxiety over the role of the federal government in education is there regardless of what the agency is doing. This debate speaks to something about the structure of our government and our federalist system that we have in the United States that makes the idea of a national spokesperson for education particularly controversial in ways that it has not been in other countries. Still today, I don't think it is as powerful as people ascribe it to be. Despite that, though, it is such a lightning rod. I mean, the same thing that happened in 1867, when you created this institution, a year later, you had people trying to get rid of it.
50:02 Speaker 17 Another year later, you had people trying to get rid of it. All of these anxieties, anxieties about coming into the local classroom and usurping the parents' role, you know, all of that was there from the beginning, and now we're having the exact same debates. I think that, like, early version of the Bureau that we saw in the 1800s is foreshadowing everything that we saw that came after.
50:36 Rund Abdelfatah? That's it for this week's show. I'm Rund Abdelfatah.
50:40 Speaker 07 I'm Ramtin Arablouei. And you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.
50:44 Rund Abdelfatah? This episode was produced by me.
50:46 Speaker 07 And me, and? Lawrence Wu.
50:49 Rund Abdelfatah? Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg.
50:51 Speaker 10 Casey Minor. Christina Kim.
50:54 Speaker 28 Devon Katayama.
50:55 Speaker 10 Irene Noguchi.
50:57 Speaker 07 Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel.
51:00 Rund Abdelfatah? Thanks to D.L. Blair, Luther Pearson, Justin Hicks, Cody Klasna, Ryan Muzzi, Paul Lankor, Amber C., Eli Blonde, Jonathan Bastian, Alison Grant, Bowie Alexander, Jason Devina Garcia, Blaze Adler-Ivanbrook, and Shonari J. Edwards for their voiceover work. Thanks also to the New York University Archives.
51:25 Speaker 07 Thank you to Johannes Dergi, Jessica Payne, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell. This episode was mixed and mastered by Robert Rodriguez.
51:35 Rund Abdelfatah? Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes? Anya Mizani.
51:42 Speaker 28 Naveed Marvi. Cho Fujiwara.
51:44 Speaker 07 If you get a chance, check out Michael Studeman's book that's coming out soon called Absence of National Feeling: Education Debates in the Reconstruction Congress. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected] . And make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode.
52:08 Rund Abdelfatah? Thanks for listening.
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