The role of working people in the fight for free, quality education

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For working-class Americans, access to public education constitutes a fundamental right. The United States was exceptional in its commitment to public schooling and high enrollment much earlier than other Western countries. What had been achieved in public schooling in the United States by the mid-19th century wasn't reached in Europe until after World War I, and in some countries, until after World War II.

During colonial times, education began within the church and family. From the earliest times, however, schools began to appear in rented rooms and abandoned cabins, meeting halls, and churches. A massive popular demand for public education existed.

Public primary schools were established first in Boston in 1818, followed by New York in 1832. Elementary schooling was widely available in older and settled areas by the 1820s and '30s. The public-school movement of this time served to spread schooling to newly settled areas and systematize that which already existed.

By 1860, most states had established universal free public school systems. By 1880, 62 percent of white children attended school, but only 34 percent of Black children.

As the shift to an industrial economy progressed and work left the household and entered the factory, shop and market, the role of the family in education declined. Because of a labor shortage, the old European apprenticeship system never took root in the United States. In addition, the lack of the extended family ties-created by emigration and mobility-eroded familial control that had tied generations to one place and one profession.

This trend continued into the modern era and, as households declined in size and influence, public education in terms ot socialization increased in importance.

Labor fought for schooling Unions were always strong supporters of public education. As the schools came under attack, the working class emerged as one of its most effective defenders.

Workingmen's Party and Knights of Labor platforms most often included demands for mass public schooling. Craft unions also gave support, especially in the major port cities of the Northeast. Throughout the latter part of the 19th century and into the Progressive Era, unions supported expanding public education and compulsory attendance. Their efforts were generally tied to the fight to abolish child labor.

When the broad curriculum of Chicago primary schools was attacked as "costly luxuries" for the "children of the masses" by the Tribune in 1893, labor argued for its expanSchools did equalize access to basic primary education. But at the same time, public education adapted to the economic forces of the industrial revolution. Curriculum was standardized, testing introduced, records collected, hours extended, and class size increased.

All reflected the values of industrialism known as "Taylorism," after one of its major proponents. In one study, the actual time required for recitations in Latin versus French was used to argue for the greater "efficiency" of the study of French.

Free, universal education is a right and a social gain; but in the words of one historian, "It never frees without at the same time socializing." (Lawrence Cremin, "Traditions of American Education.")

The establishment and expansion of public education in the United States was part of the ascendency of modern industrial capitalism. Pre-industrial patterns of social control were shattered in the new republic. The capitalists had need of a system of labor training Arthur Rothstein which would permit the costs of training to be borne by the public.

Public education served to transmit the values necessary for a society moving from an agricultural to an industrial economy by teaching punctuality, competitiveness, and respect for authority. This eased the transition into the industrial world of work. Schooling was one method of creating order by socializing children from different social classes and cultures into accepting many of the values and attitudes of the ruling class.

During the Progressive Era, school administration was taken out of the hands of voters, the neighborhoods, and put into those of bureaucracies. Big business, along with a new group of "experts, " led a movement to control public schooling.

Business and civic organizations of the ruling class argued that government (and therefore schools) should be run on school systems imitated the corporate form of policy-making boards and management by experts.

Labor councils and unions fought moves to take control away from working-class parents and campaigned for a return to elected school boards. But without an independent working-class political movement or party to oppose the splitting off of school administrations from local politics, their effect was muted. Increasingly, workers were prevented from having any voice in their children's education.

In the case of Chicago, working-class action was successful in fighting back the tide of business control for many years. There, the teachers unionized early under the leadership of two "lady labor sluggers" (as they were named by one anti-union school board member) and affiliated with the Chicago Labor Council.

One of these women, Illinois suffragist Margaret Haley, rankled the school board and the Chicago Chamber of Commerce by demanding that higher teachers' salaries be financed by taxing business. The union also sought the support of feminists when the school board tried to increase the number of male elementary-school teachers and pay them higher wages.

Throughout the country, elected boards of education and superintendents were replaced by appointed ones. The restructuring of the 1920s removed school administration from public pressure and the electoral process by defining them as "non-partisan" and "beyond politics," the domain of specialists acting in the public interest. By 1930, autonomous school bureaucracies directed by education professionals were a fact of urban life.

Ironically, in the decade when labor emerged as a powerful mass social movement on a national level-the 1930sschool politics were no longer seen in terms of social class.

Workers were represented by union officials on school boards, but the mass base of the labor movement was no longer mobilizing around issues of education. The labor movement began to focus narrowly and exclusively on the issues of pure-and-simple trade unionism for school workers, i.e. teachers' and janitors' pay and benefits.

It is a great loss when the labor movement fails to understand that it is a movement for the advance of society as a whole. Literacy is a basis of freedom. It opens up the world of ideas and gives us the power of self-expression and critical thinking, which are necessary tools for liberation.

Universal education can no longer be taken for granted. The ruling class is content to watch the children of the working class fall through the cracks, as schools close down or degenerate beyond hope. Education is a right that workers must organize themselves to defend and expand as part of the struggle to transform society into a socialist future-a future where the benefit of each is to the benefit of all.