Oct 10, 2026 · 57 min · 13 segments
**The Little Red Schoolhouse** The Constitution never explicitly gives the federal government responsibility for education. So how did America's public schools become such an essential part of our…
Steve HermanHost
Bill BernardoniHost
To understand how we got here, we have to start well before there was anything resembling the modern American public school system.
Johan Neeme is a professor of history at Western Washington University, whose work focuses on the American Revolution, the early republic, and the history of education.
He's the author of Democracy Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America, a history of how Americans came to see publicly supported schools as part of the work of building and sustaining a republic.
Before public education became something Americans simply expected to exist, who was actually responsible for educating a child?
Professor, the Constitution never gives the federal government a, a real explicit responsibility when it comes to education.
So at the founding, what did education in America actually look like, and who was responsible for providing it?
So there's something really important that happens, um, during the Revolution and the decades after, which is education goes from being largely a private and limited good, a parental responsibility, to becoming a public good provided by public schools, supported by taxes, and accessible to all kids.
Um, now we know looking back, their definition of all kids might be different than ours, but the principle was common access through taxes.
In the 1785 Land Ordinance, and later in the Northwest Ordin- which later becomes part of the Northwest Ordinance, the federal government did require new territory to have some land set aside to fund schools.
So it did expect that public schools would exist, and that the state would play a role in supporting it, but it was primarily a state and local responsibility.
And many of the new revolutionary state constitutions said explicitly that, that education now is a responsibility of states because we live in a republic, and that included, for example, I'll just read one.
The Georgia Constitution of 1777 says, "Schools shall be erected in each county and supported at the general expense of the state." That's something new and different.
At the time of the Revolution, how educated or how literate of a country were we?
So again, region, there was regional divergence, but literacy rates, I don't have the numbers on me, but literacy rates were very high for boys and girls in the Northeast.
In the South, the literacy rates were much lower, and the gender gap was quite high.
The other thing to remember is this was also an oral culture, so often things like Tom Paine's Common Sense would be read out loud, and people would understand it, or sermons.
To understand how we got here, we have to start well before there was anything resembling the modern American public school system.
Johan Neeme is a professor of history at Western Washington University, whose work focuses on the American Revolution, the early republic, and the history of education.
He's the author of Democracy Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America, a history of how Americans came to see publicly supported schools as part of the work of building and sustaining a republic.
Before public education became something Americans simply expected to exist, who was actually responsible for educating a child?
Professor, the Constitution never gives the federal government a, a real explicit responsibility when it comes to education.
So at the founding, what did education in America actually look like, and who was responsible for providing it?
So there's something really important that happens, um, during the Revolution and the decades after, which is education goes from being largely a private and limited good, a parental responsibility, to becoming a public good provided by public schools, supported by taxes, and accessible to all kids.
Um, now we know looking back, their definition of all kids might be different than ours, but the principle was common access through taxes.
In the 1785 Land Ordinance, and later in the Northwest Ordin- which later becomes part of the Northwest Ordinance, the federal government did require new territory to have some land set aside to fund schools.
So it did expect that public schools would exist, and that the state would play a role in supporting it, but it was primarily a state and local responsibility.
And many of the new revolutionary state constitutions said explicitly that, that education now is a responsibility of states because we live in a republic, and that included, for example, I'll just read one.
The Georgia Constitution of 1777 says, "Schools shall be erected in each county and supported at the general expense of the state." That's something new and different.
At the time of the Revolution, how educated or how literate of a country were we?
So again, region, there was regional divergence, but literacy rates, I don't have the numbers on me, but literacy rates were very high for boys and girls in the Northeast.
In the South, the literacy rates were much lower, and the gender gap was quite high.
The other thing to remember is this was also an oral culture, so often things like Tom Paine's Common Sense would be read out loud, and people would understand it, or sermons.
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