School. It’s a universal obligation for kids across the United States.
But why?
In the 1700s, communities did their own things. There were church-sponsored schools, schools organized by parents, traveling schoolmasters who charged tuition, boarding schools for rich kids, charity schools for poor kids, and parents who homeschooled. Most often, school was for white kids and it wasn’t free.
In the years surrounding the American Revolution, some Northeastern schools had established free local public schools, but it wasn’t typical. In the rural South, children often didn’t have access to schools.
But, the Founding Fathers saw education as an essential part of democracy. Soon after the war ended, famous names like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams went to work creating a system of free publicly funded schools. They started by giving lots of land to new states — as long as the states agreed to use some of it in support of public schools.
The idea of public schools wasn’t super popular at first, but over the next 50 years, the land-grant plan helped to create communities. It turns out that the act of coming together with your neighbors to build schoolhouses, hire teachers, collect taxes — that kind of thing — is a team-building experience.
By the 1830s, many U.S. schools were part of the Common School movement. These schools taught the classic “three-R” subjects — they don’t actually each start with R, but reading, writing, and arithmetic — plus history, geography, civics, and more. The idea was that educating all children — not just the ones whose parents could afford tuition — would strengthen the U.S. economy.
And following the Civil War, as immigrants from Europe poured into America’s ports, supporters of public schools hoped that educating a diverse group of children in the same schools would help them to learn to appreciate their differences and get along with all kinds of people.
The way it played out, though, didn’t quite hit that mark.
Jim Crow laws interrupted the hope of educating Black children in the South. Schools weren’t always open to girls — and when they were, they didn’t typically offer girls an education equal to that for boys. Immigrants were expected to check their culture at the door. Catholics formed their own network of private schools to escape discrimination from Protestants. Children with disabilities often had no opportunities for public school education.
Court rulings — including the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark case Brown v. Board of Education — and federal legislation throughout the mid-1900s helped put the U.S. on track to equalize education for all American children.