I'm not sure I've made myself clear. Apart from any substantive criticisms of American education, there are those who wish to delegitimize the entire concept of government-funded and -run education. That is their starting point.
That's not mine. My starting point is that government-funded and -run education is constitutional, was not unknown to the Founders, and in fact, was already getting into full-swing by the time of the Revolution (to the degree that such a sparsely populated country could sustain a “full-swing” in public education).
It isn't un-American. With regard to Horace Mann, often the conversation about him is used to suggest that perhaps public education was legitimate, American, up through the first half-century of the the 19th century, but then due to the nefarious efforts of this evil-doer, this conspirator against all that is holy and American, that public education in America was driven off course. Folks seem to often throw in the words "Prussian model" to emphasize just how un-American it all is.
I'm not dealing with the actual merits of the educational ideas of which he was perhaps the most articulate spokesman. All I'm saying is that he wasn't some evil conspirator nearly single-handedly ruining public education. Rather, he was typical of the educational reformers of the time. Here in Maryland, the discussions in our legislature about things like state funding of schools through dedicated taxes, state control versus local control of schools and curricula, creation of standards, etc. started in the late 1700s and percolated through the early part of the 19th century. After seeing legislation in the 17th and 18th century, the first attempts in the 19th century at legislating some of this stuff came in something like 1817, and then again in 1825.
The way we got this stuff wasn't through the evil deeds of a small elite of Illuminati or Freemasons or some other secret, anti-American group. The way we got this stuff, at least here in Maryland, was through rough-and-tumble, give-and-take politics, through legislative votes, through little victories for one side or other and little defeats, through two steps forward and one step backward (or perhaps, depending on the point of view, two steps backward and one step forward).
We got it through the playing out of representative democracy.
Thus, the place to start to fix public education isn't through trying to delegitimize it, saying it's fundamentally un-American or unconstitutional.
I think that over time, American public education has accreted a lot of baggage that seems to my non-expert eyes to be unconstitutional (Federal Dept of Education?? National testing standards??). Whether constitutional or not, I think there's a lot of bad stuff to fix in public education.
But the views expressed herein by some are unbalanced, don't accurately represent our history going back to the founding era, and thus aren't especially helpful in talking about education, whether public, private or homeschooling.
sitetest
Horace Mann himself was a Unitarian humanist, and advocate of phrenology. His quixotic effort to transform America and American education through a system of certifying teachers and imposing a uniform curriculum, was only made possible by the contemporary anti-Catholic hysteria and subsequent compulsory attendance laws.
This malignant birth of compulsory schooling was followed by the permeation of Darwinism and behavioral psychology in the Prussian-modeled teacher colleges, like Columbia.
From its birth, compulsory schooling in America has been a malignant social force.
I highly recommend any of John Gatto's YouTube videos.