Events that Accumulated to the Foundation of Public Education

The third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, view education as a way to secure happiness, life, and liberty for the citizens of America. While Jefferson supported the idea of education, he could not foresee how public schools would evolve to include every ethnic group, nationality, and gender to have access to the skills of reading, writing, math, and even problem solving. However, as Jefferson’s breakthrough ideas influenced generations after his lifetime, many factors and events including the strive for a better social class, a changing environment, and the need to shape and mold the younger generations through textbooks soon led to the foundation of the public education America has in the twenty-first century.
In the United States, the dream to grasp out to new opportunities for prosperity and success had always been in the hearts of the students. Many movements, including the Scottish Enlightenment, persuaded the masses the enhancement of life is an achievable perception (Reese, 2005, p. 18). However, society had developed the concept of social class to categorize people into three different groups: lower, middle, and upper classes. As this structural level reflects the divisions in the society and threaten the stability of the country, the hope of social stability and human enrichment lie in the hands of education. Several of education reformers realize stability could be achieved if schools became accessible to the public to reduce the diversity of the social classes. Horace Mann, an American education reformist and secretary of the Massachusetts State Board of Education, claimed the public school would create “social harmony” and diminish the differences in all the classes (p. 11). On the assumption that s...

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... (Sass). He believed shaping today’s children would guarantee the country would have many tomorrows.
Despite all these events and factors happened on their own time and reason, they all led to the formation of public education. Reformers of early America saw potential problems with the country’s future could be resolved if education was accessible to the public. Some reformers believed America was along the path of repeating the history of peasants and nobles from the gap between the social classes. Others saw a need to not fall behind the changing environment and a desire to produce skilled workers to urbanize the land. While other reformers required a method that would shape the younger generations into respectable American citizens. As these reformers attempted to solve the country’s problems, it eventually contributed to the foundation of a public education.