Pity poor Horace Mann, Henry Bernard and other ‘educationists’ trying to sell modern schooling to such people. They had to convince such an educated population to hand over their children’s education to experts. Basically, the educators failed to convince Americans. Mann started pitching Prussian schooling, otherwise known as compulsory age-segregated classroom instruction, before 1837, but it took a dozen years and special circumstances to get the first school off the ground. That first school in 1848 in Boston snuck by because it targeted immigrants. ‘Real’ Americans didn’t send their kids there; those ‘real’ Americans became convinced that it was a good to use the state’s power to beat a little of the right kind of Jesus into the skulls of the Irish Papists kids that were showing up in Boston in large numbers at that time (the Irish Potato Famine began in 1845). From the very beginning down to this day, schooling is seen by the self-appointed Enlightened as a way to correct the moral defects – Catholicism back then, all the ‘bigotry’ and ‘hatred’ today (which of course includes Catholicism) – of the unwashed masses.
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Trivia that matter