"Spark" and School Reform

The headline reads, "With his 1776 Commission on patriotism, Trump helped spark a culture war." The very first paragraph gives the lie to the headline: he was responding, they note, to the 1619 Project. The theme continues throughout.

Trump ripped into “left-wing indoctrination in our schools,” slammed the 1619 Project and asserted that “propaganda” in schools was making students ashamed of their history.

To fix all this, he had a solution: a new 1776 Commission that would promote patriotic education.

A national curriculum is probably a bad idea, but so too are almost all existing state and local curricula. We really need to abolish the public school system and start over. In any case, the idea that this 'divisive' 'culture war' is his fault is silly. It was the earlier revisionism that he was reacting to, angrily because it was based on some outright lies. (The link is to a set of criticisms by no less than the World Socialist; the 1619 Project later admitted that it was "not a history" but a fight to "control the national narrative.")

Replacing public schools with private ones sounds radical to a lot of people, but the earlier schools were better than the ones we have now. Consider this very early school on what was at that time the frontier:

The first recorded school in Jackson County actually predates the formation of the county by 31 years, as a school was started in Cullowhee Township in 1820.... the East LaPorte school started by Professor A.M. Dawson was renowned for its rigor and quality. A summary written for the Historical Committee of Jackson County NCEA in 1954 recounted, “Prof. A.M. Dawson who with Prof. Hughes, Misses Amaria and Jardedie Dawson, and Misses Ida and Lula Rogers, as assistants, conducted a high school at East LaPorte. This school… was the most notable and efficient one ever taught in this county before 1881.

“Dawson had graduated from Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He came to Jackson County from Tennessee. “With well-balanced scholarship, being equally at home in mathematics, history, science and the languages, and with established reputation, Professor Dawson auspiciously began his four-year remarkable career in Jackson County. Arithmetic, Latin, Greek, philosophy and English grammar were the principal subjects of the curriculum taught. Geography and reading were also taught… Mr. Dawson was a strict disciplinarian and exacted thoroughness from his students. Intolerant of laziness, negligence, disobedience or disorder, he was a stern, unrelenting schoolmaster… There were two Literary Societies. They were the Olympiam, which meant ‘lovers of games,’ and the Phylomathin, which meant ‘lovers of learning.’ These societies met on Friday evenings. Dawson was also the first to introduce baseball as a school sport.”

Emphasis added. 

This was not a public school but a private "subscription school," but its presence on the frontier showed that it was not limited to the elites of the day. Voucher programs that aim to replace public school with independent funding would begin to address the downfall our education has suffered by being brought under control of government. 

Switching to a model that provided parents with the means to subscribe to a 'subscription school' would not change the fact that we have a class of teachers who are miseducated themselves; finding the right people to instruct the children could be the chief problem. 

UPDATE: Dad29 sends an eighth-grade final exam from 1895. The arithmetic section's difficulty sometimes turns on the use of what are now unusual forms of measure (bushel, rod), but clearly students were expected to manage complex calculations for the exam. I'm curious what the measure for 'bushel' was myself; the exam treats it both as a measure of volume and a measure of weight. Question 2 expects you to calculate the number of bushels from a given volume; the third one asks you to calculate it from weight. That implies some specialized knowledge that most of us wouldn't have.

Still, pretty interesting to examine.