Common school

And you can go all the way back to Horace Mann, and you see the exact same argument where there were— Episcopalians, Congregationalists saying, well, okay, Horace Mann, you want these public schools, and you'd say, well, you could, you know, you can maybe have the Bible in there, although he spends, I think it's his last annual report, basically defending himself against this argument he wanted to remove the Bible, because they said, you want to remove anything that is particular to any given denomination.

you want the bible to be there but you say it would be read without commentary and they said you know what that renders the public school or the common school it renders it a unitarian school and you horseman and many others are unitarians so de facto you're getting the schools you want the public schools you want but we are not and so part of the reason for writing this book is The debates we see today are not actually new.

They are inherent to the idea of a single school or school system for everybody.

Unless everybody's the same, that inherently leads to debates about what the schools teach or don't teach or what their policies are or their policies aren't.