The Public and Its Education

Abstract

The articles in this issue travel across time—from the late eighteenth century to the 1960s—as well as across three continents and a variety of subfields.They range in focus from primary schooling to postsecondary levels of education. And, collectively, they formwhat theHEQ editorial team affectionately calls a “potpourri” issue—onewithout a uniting theme beyond the high quality of the work it contains. While diverse thematically, however, the articles in this issue do offer some new ways of looking at an enduring question that has been on our minds lately: Why do we have public education? The question is salient right now for several reasons. Perhaps most immediately, it’s because the first article in this issue, “The Extent andDuration of Primary Schooling in Eighteenth-Century America,” takes up the question fairly directly. Carole Shammas argues that participation in a transatlantic commercial society was a driving concern behind taxpayer-supported education in the early republic. In making such an argument, she builds on a long tradition of scholars who see the influence of capitalism in the emergence of public schools. And in this case, she offers some compelling new evidence in support of that position. We’ve also been thinking about this question because we have been remembering Carl Kaestle, who passed away in January of this year. Kaestle was a leading figure among a generation that transformed the field in the 1970s and 1980s, giving Americans a newway of looking at the history of education. InPillars of the Republic—a book that mostHEQ readers will have on their shelves—Kaestle advanced the idea that America’s common schools were shaped in form and practice not just by the nascent demands of capitalism, but also by the dominant values of Protestant Christianity and the secular religion of republicanism.1 Of course, the question of the public and its education extends to the postsecondary level, as well. In this issue, Lee Ward’s “John Stuart Mill on the Political Significance of Higher Education” probes the university and its public function in mid-nineteenthcentury Great Britain. Specifically, Ward looks at Mill’s 1867 address as a way of identifying British concerns over which course of studies—classical, liberal, scientific,