The First Department of Education

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. To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline http://plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:23Speaker 01

  For he who knoweth his master's will, and knoweth it not, shall be beaten with many strikes.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  You've asked me to give a history of the motives which induced me to undertake the late insurrection.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  In my childhood, a circumstance occurred which made an indelible impression on my mind.

• 1:04Speaker 03

  Hold me as I stand in the heavens.

• 1:07Speaker 02

  I surely would be a prophet as the Lord has shown me things that had happened before my birth.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  We determined to enter the house secretly.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Heart got a ladder and set it against the chimney on which I ascended and hoisting a window, entered and came downstairs.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  Unbarred the door and removed the guns from their places. It was then observed that I must spill the first blood.

• 1:56Rund 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.

• 2:38Speaker 05

  He was deemed to be a literate slave, and he used his literacy to lead an assault against whites in Virginia.

• 2:46Speaker 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.

• 2:57Rund 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.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  I surely would be a prophet.

• 3:20Speaker 05

  The South as a region saw education as a dangerous thing.

• 3:27Speaker 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.

• 3:43Rund 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.

• 3:53Speaker 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.

• 4:07Speaker 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?"

• 4:24Rund 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.

• 4:35Speaker 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.

• 4:55Speaker 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.

• 5:33Speaker 08

  President Carter fulfilled one of his 1976 campaign pledges today. He signed legislation establishing a separate Department of Education.

• 5:41Speaker 09

  Mr. Reagan wants to reduce drastically. President George Bush has dominated the national debate over how schools...

• 5:47Speaker 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.

• 5:56Speaker 11

  The Trump administration is withdrawing Obama-era guidelines that encourage schools...

• 6:00Speaker 10

  President Biden has outlined another round of federal student loan cancellations.

• 6:04Speaker 11

  President Trump wasted no time today announcing next steps in his bid to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education.

• 6:12Rund 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.

• 6:46Speaker 07

  I'm Ramtin Arablouei.

• 6:48Rund Abdelfatah?

  And I'm Randa Abdel Fattah.

• 6:49Speaker 07

  On this episode of Throughline from NPR, the birth, death, and legacy of the first Department of Education.

• 6:59Speaker 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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• 8:35Speaker 16

  Part one, a stick in the dirt.

• 8:40Speaker 07

  In the most basic terms, can you describe what education was like in the United States before the Civil War?

• 8:50Speaker 17

  This was a time when education was a lot more fragmentary.

• 8:54Speaker 07

  This is Michael Studeman.

• 8:56Speaker 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.

• 9:06Speaker 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.

• 9:24Speaker 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.

• 9:47Speaker 07

  The most popular book at the time was The McGuffey Readers. They included famous political speeches.

• 9:53Speaker 17

  It collected up lots of anecdotes.

• 9:55Speaker 18

  Under a great tree in the woods, two boys saw a fine, large nut.

• 10:01Speaker 17

  Very folklore-driven curriculum.

• 10:03Speaker 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."

• 10:13Speaker 17

  A lot of what students were learning in school was not just the ABCs and the basics of mathematics.

• 10:19Speaker 18

  They called an older boy and asked him.

• 10:22Speaker 17

  This was about trying to cultivate a sort of civic culture.

• 10:26Speaker 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.

• 10:38Speaker 17

  There was a sense of, this is about training people to be good people. It was about moral inculcation.

• 10:49Speaker 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.

• 11:02Speaker 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.

• 11:14Speaker 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.

• 11:23Speaker 08

  Of a miserable district school.

• 11:29Speaker 07

  Henry's father once brought him back an orange after being away at sea.

• 11:36Speaker 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.

• 11:48Speaker 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.

• 12:03Speaker 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.

• 12:13Speaker 07

  And he did.

• 12:17Speaker 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.

• 12:31Speaker 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.

• 12:44Speaker 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."

• 12:54Speaker 07

  This became known as the "common school movement," basically free public schools in every state.

• 13:00Speaker 06

  Which is what today we would call a state school system.

• 13:02Speaker 07

  This is Jonathan Zimmerman. He teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania.

• 13:08Speaker 06

  That is something that would bind these small, little schools, mostly one-room, into a system that had, for example, a shared curriculum.

• 13:18Speaker 07

  Shared textbooks.

• 13:19Speaker 06

  A shared duration of school year.

• 13:21Speaker 07

  Shared requirements for teachers.

• 13:23Speaker 06

  The idea was to create something that was common that would bind together all these disparate schools.

• 13:30Speaker 08

  The common school will no longer be regarded as common because it is cheap, inferior, and patronized only by the poor.

• 13:40Speaker 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.

• 13:52Speaker 08

  "Common as the light and the air, because its blessings are open to all and enjoyed by all."

• 14:02Speaker 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?"

• 14:12Speaker 07

  But the common school movement had momentum, and the bill passed.

• 14:16Speaker 06

  And he eventually became the secretary of their new state board of education, which of course he had advocated for.

• 14:23Speaker 07

  What was his basic philosophy for why all these specific changes were necessary? What was the underlying belief that fueled him?

• 14:31Speaker 06

  The underlying motivation was civic.

• 14:38Speaker 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.

• 14:50Speaker 07

  But Barnard didn't just set his sights on Connecticut.

• 14:54Speaker 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.

• 15:07Speaker 07

  In the 1830s, there was growing industrialization, a growing divide between rich and poor, and more and more immigration.

• 15:15Speaker 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.

• 15:53Speaker 07

  Education, they thought, was a way to unify the country.

• 16:01Rund 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.

• 16:29Speaker 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.

• 16:51Speaker 05

  Frederick Douglass, he learned from the mistress of his slaveholder.

• 16:56Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Christopher Span.

• 16:59Speaker 05

  I'm a historian of American education, specialized in African-American education in the 19th century.

• 17:05Rund Abdelfatah?

  He's currently the dean of the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University.

• 17:10Speaker 05

  So as he shares in his autobiography, there was a woman by the name of Mrs. Old.

• 17:14Speaker 19

  A white face beaming with the most kindly emotions.

• 17:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  When Frederick Douglass was a child, she began to teach him to read.

• 17:23Speaker 05

  And she, deeply religious.

• 17:25Speaker 19

  commenced to teach me the A, B, C. She assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters.

• 17:34Speaker 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.

• 17:45Speaker 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.

• 18:00Speaker 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.

• 18:12Speaker 05

  Douglass took this as a sign that he was doing something very good for himself.

• 18:16Speaker 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.

• 18:28Speaker 05

  Anything that would make a slaveholder this mad must be very good for him and must be very bad for the slaveholder.

• 18:34Speaker 19

  From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.

• 18:41Speaker 05

  So Douglass was determined to learn to read regardless.

• 18:49Speaker 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.

• 19:22Speaker 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.

• 19:55Rund 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.

• 20:13Speaker 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.

• 20:33Speaker 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.

• 21:10Rund 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.

• 21:26Speaker 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.

• 21:46Rund Abdelfatah?

  Coming up, Congress debates the very first Department of Education.

• 22:05Speaker 21

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• 23:37Speaker 16

  Part two. Shame, shame, shame.

• 23:45Speaker 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.

• 23:58Speaker 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.

• 24:12Speaker 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.

• 24:35Speaker 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.

• 25:05Speaker 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.

• 25:17Speaker 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.

• 25:29Speaker 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.

• 25:44Speaker 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.

• 26:02Speaker 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.

• 26:10Speaker 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.

• 26:24Speaker 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?

• 26:45Speaker 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.

• 27:04Speaker 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.

• 27:16Speaker 07

  Education was important for cultural reasons, and also for very practical ones.

• 27:23Speaker 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.

• 27:34Speaker 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.

• 27:48Speaker 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.

• 28:07Rund 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.

• 28:19Speaker 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.

• 28:33Speaker 06

  The original goal was to try to collect information about different state systems and local ones.

• 28:41Rund 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.

• 29:05Speaker 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.

• 29:20Rund 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.

• 29:31Speaker 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.

• 29:56Speaker 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.

• 30:10Speaker 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.

• 30:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  Garfield had a lot of faith in what this department could achieve, especially when it came to bringing Southerners back into the Union.

• 30:37Speaker 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.

• 30:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  Garfield and the radical Republicans could take a patronizing tone when it came to the South.

• 30:56Speaker 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.

• 31:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  One by one, the Republicans step onto the floor to make their case for the Department of Education.

• 31:24Speaker 03

  Civilization is nothing more than education.

• 31:29Speaker 17

  So, one figure that is an interesting part of this debate is Minnesota representative named Ignatius Donnelly.

• 31:36Speaker 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.

• 31:52Speaker 17

  At this point, he is just a zealous advocate for schools.

• 31:55Speaker 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.

• 32:21Speaker 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.

• 32:42Speaker 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.

• 33:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  But not everyone was on board with these ideas.

• 33:27Speaker 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.

• 33:39Rund 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.

• 33:50Speaker 24

  Let them carry out and regulate the system of education without interference.

• 33:55Rund Abdelfatah?

  Remember, Southern Democrats weren't present, so it was Northerners like Rogers who were making these comments.

• 34:02Speaker 05

  And many of them come from school communities where local control is the ultimate form of control.

• 34:09Rund 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.

• 34:34Speaker 17

  That this was going to empower the federal government to have an undue influence on what children learned in the classroom.

• 34:42Speaker 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.

• 34:52Speaker 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.

• 35:13Rund Abdelfatah?

  The debate goes on for two days, and Garfield, the person who presented this bill, is taking the hits.

• 35:21Speaker 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.

• 35:32Rund Abdelfatah?

  But Garfield doesn't back down.

• 35:35Speaker 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.

• 35:55Rund Abdelfatah?

  Garfield is basically saying, "We're not going to force education on anyone, but we are going to shame states into doing better."

• 36:05Speaker 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.

• 36:18Speaker 23

  It would shame out of their delinquency all the delinquent states of this country.

• 36:27Rund 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?

• 36:39Speaker 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.

• 37:07Rund 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.

• 37:32Speaker 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.

• 38:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's coming up.

• 38:08Speaker 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.

• 38:20Speaker 01

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• 38:25Speaker 00

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• 38:41Speaker 27

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• 39:05Speaker 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.

• 39:32Speaker 16

  Part Three: A Collection of Floating Matter.

• 39:40Speaker 08

  I have no prejudices of my own to impose on the country.

• 39:45Speaker 08

  It's been my aim to bring to bear the light of past and present experience.

• 39:51Speaker 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.

• 40:05Speaker 06

  It made complete sense for the administration to choose Henry Barnard.

• 40:12Speaker 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.

• 40:24Speaker 06

  By this time, he was the most prominent school leader in the United States.

• 40:30Speaker 07

  Barnard's dream of uniting the country through education was coming true, and he wrote to James Garfield.

• 40:37Speaker 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.

• 40:50Speaker 07

  And it wasn't just Barnard. His friends and colleagues wrote him, full of optimism.

• 40:56Speaker 29

  A new educational era has opened upon us.

• 41:00Speaker 30

  Pride in your promotion and confidence in your success.

• 41:04Speaker 06

  It is an appointment eminently fit to be made.

• 41:07Speaker 31

  So much needed to give efficiency to an appropriate system of measures for the intellectual regeneration of the South.

• 41:17Speaker 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.

• 41:41Speaker 17

  And he goes into it and basically sees his role as kind of what he'd already been doing.

• 41:47Speaker 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.

• 42:08Speaker 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.

• 42:24Speaker 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.

• 42:31Speaker 17

  This was not like a lucrative role by any stretch.

• 42:34Speaker 07

  He asked for more money.

• 42:36Speaker 17

  He was still paying a lot of money out of pocket.

• 42:38Speaker 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.

• 42:49Speaker 17

  A lot of people criticized that he was out of town a lot. He was back in Connecticut at home a lot.

• 42:54Speaker 07

  No one can seem to find Barnard when they need him.

• 42:57Speaker 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.

• 43:06Speaker 31

  You said he occupied an office over a restaurant.

• 43:08Speaker 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.

• 43:25Speaker 07

  And James Garfield, whose bill created the Department of Education, was forced to defend it.

• 43:31Speaker 23

  I am not one of those who seek to pluck out the eyes of the nation.

• 43:37Rund 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.

• 43:49Speaker 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.

• 44:00Speaker 17

  He starts preparing his report.

• 44:08Speaker 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.

• 44:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  It was a lot, and it was kind of random.

• 44:19Speaker 17

  It's mainly bizarre in how much ground it covers.

• 44:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  More than 800 pages.

• 44:26Speaker 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.

• 44:45Speaker 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.

• 45:04Speaker 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?"

• 45:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  Garfield was disappointed.

• 45:23Speaker 17

  It was not what he had envisioned.

• 45:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  And it gave opponents of the department, and even some of its former supporters, more reason to attack it.

• 45:35Speaker 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.

• 45:50Speaker 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.

• 46:02Speaker 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."

• 46:10Speaker 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."

• 46:23Rund 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.

• 46:35Speaker 17

  Ultimately, it just sort of remains this small office to collect stats.

• 46:44Rund Abdelfatah?

  Henry Barnard retired in 1870. He felt burned, and it was the end of his life in public service.

• 46:53Speaker 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.

• 47:05Rund 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.

• 47:28Speaker 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.

• 47:49Speaker 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.

• 48:07Speaker 07

  Wow, so it's like the introduction of the free public school system, but then the slow separation of equality of that education.

• 48:18Speaker 06

  Precisely. Which, let's remember, lasts for a century.

• 48:24Speaker 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.

• 48:45Speaker 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.

• 49:08Rund 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.

• 49:18Speaker 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.

• 50:02Speaker 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.

• 50:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's it for this week's show. I'm Rund Abdelfatah.

• 50:40Speaker 07

  I'm Ramtin Arablouei. And you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 50:44Rund Abdelfatah?

  This episode was produced by me.

• 50:46Speaker 07

  And me, and? Lawrence Wu.

• 50:49Rund Abdelfatah?

  Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg.

• 50:51Speaker 10

  Casey Minor. Christina Kim.

• 50:54Speaker 28

  Devon Katayama.

• 50:55Speaker 10

  Irene Noguchi.

• 50:57Speaker 07

  Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel.

• 51:00Rund 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.

• 51:25Speaker 07

  Thank you to Johannes Dergi, Jessica Payne, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell. This episode was mixed and mastered by Robert Rodriguez.

• 51:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes? Anya Mizani.

• 51:42Speaker 28

  Naveed Marvi. Cho Fujiwara.

• 51:44Speaker 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.

• 52:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  Thanks for listening.

• 52:16Speaker 00

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