Moving through the worlds of work: The myth of education as the great equalizer

Abstract

In 1647, the Massachusetts Bay colony implemented the Old Deluder Satan Law. This law was the first conceptualizing public education for civic (and religious) purposes, requiring that every town with at least 50 households appoint a publicly funded teacher to help children learn to read and write, and communities double that size had to ensure that a grammar school existed. More than a century later, Benjamin Rush and Thomas Jefferson would be among the Founding Fathers to describe some form of public education as a necessary component of democratic citizenship education (though for a very narrow slice of the population, admittedly). Eventually, Horace Mann (1849), the first secretary of education in Massachusetts, established a series of public schools throughout the state, led by the belief that public schools would serve as the “great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance wheel of the social machinery” (p. 59). It is this conception of the purpose and benefit of public schools that has carried over into the conventional wisdom of the present day, at least among the general public. But should it? In The Education Trap: Schooling and the Remaking of Equality in Boston, Cristina Viviana Groeger suggests that the answer is far more complex than we think.