The Purpose of Public Education

BY STEVE NUZUM

Before the United States had a constitution, our founders believed the nation needed a public education system. The United States was an experiment in democracy unlike anything the world had ever seen, turning away from a government dominated by elites and hoping that the common man could rule himself. They believed that if this experiment had any chance of standing the test of time, the nation needed to ensure everyday citizens had access to learning opportunities that prepared them for self-government.

- Derek Black, Schoolhouse Burning: Public Education and the Assault on American Democracy

I once asked my Honors English 2 students what the purpose of school was. (This was in the context of a discussion of WE, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, an early, genre-defining dystopian satire in which all news, all education, and all art are pure tools of state propaganda.) 

“We’re here to learn,” one student told me. 

“Sure,” I said, “But why?”  

I didn’t expect the look of legitimate horror he gave me, but as the discussion continued it quickly became clear that a large portion of the class-- many from upper-middle-class families with significant histories of educational attainment-- saw education as a series of obligatory hoops to jump through, or as a way of weighting the scales towards future business success, or simply as something they had to do to avoid punishment from their parents. 

I had put them in a Catch-22 situation in which I, the teacher, was asking them to answer a question that I hadn’t prepared them in advance to answer, about the very nature of the thing we were doing. And I think American schools had predisposed them to think that it was impolite to say something like “so that we can make more money in the future,” while also foolish to say something like, “so that we can grow as people”.  

Ursula K. Le Guin, in her own "ambiguous utopian” novel The Dispossessed, describes a kind of horror in the opposite direction, when her protagonist Shevek (who comes from a moon-world of egalitarian anarchists) encounters students that sound a lot like mine for the first time in his life: 

“He asked his students to write a paper on any problem in physics that interested them, and told them that he would give them the highest mark, so that the bureaucrats would have something good to write on their forms and lists. To his surprise a good many students came to him to complain. They wanted him to set the problems, to ask the right questions; they did not want to think about the questions, but to write down the answers they had learned.” 

In Shevek’s mind (as in mine), the main reason to learn is because people are designed to learn. As I used to tell my students (and as I still believe), we only stop learning when our brains stop working and we die. We learn to survive, to make meaning of our lives, to give purpose to our existence. As Socrates supposedly said, the unexamined life is not worth living. 

Many of my “honors students” didn’t buy it. I think some legitimately thought I was trying to trick them by asking the question, that there was a right answer and that it would be on a test. 

Which is all fine-- they were kids, after all, and the education system had certainly reinforced their view of school with an endless, gamified parade of state tests, pre-tests to prepare for the state tests, quizzes and benchmarks to prepare for the pretests, and busywork to accustom them to the rest of the busywork. 

But their confusion about the question also exemplified, for me, the way America has both come to take the availability of public education as a given (something that becomes increasingly dangerous as powerful forces move to take it away from us piece by piece), and the way we have gotten very far from where we started in terms of the very clear imperatives that led people to create public education institutions in the first place.

How did we get here? 

South Carolina today might seem like an unlikely state to have created, by some measures, the first integrated, state-funded public education system in the South. 

Arguably that’s because a very different South Carolina accomplished it, through the 1868 Constitution, drafted by a majority Black delegation just a few years after the end of the Civil War. (The same Constitution greatly benefited the state’s other non-wealthy residents, as well, doing away with the requirement that voters and elected officials be property holders, and giving the poor of every race their first systematic access to the world of education.) 

The 1868 Constitution required, for the first time, a “liberal and uniform system of free public schools throughout the State,” as well as “the division of the state into suitable School Districts”. 

Not incidentally, it also required that, “No religious sect or sects shall have exclusive right to, or control of any part of the school funds of the State, nor shall sectarian principles be taught in the public schools”. We’ll come back to that. 

Most importantly, the Constitution required that “All the public schools, colleges, and universities of this State supported in whole or in part by the public funds, shall be free and open to all the children and youths of the State, without regard to race or color.” It was radical enough to make school free for the first time, but those schools would also be open to all students, and racially integrated.

The timing was not an accident, nor is it a coincidence that a Constitution centrally focused on establishing civil rights for all people, especially formerly enslaved people, was so specific in its educational requirements. As legal scholar Derek Black explains in his book Schoolhouse Burning, a major requirement for Southern states to rejoin the union was the inclusion of public school systems in new state constitutions. (While framers of the federal Constitution like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had pushed for state funding of public schools nearly a century before, they saw mixed success, and it wasn’t until the end of the Civil War that the federal government had enough leverage to push states to add public education to their constitutions as a requirement for rejoining the Union.)

Citizens, officials, and philosophers have debated the larger purposes of “education” since the beginning of recorded history. 

A century before the 1867 Constitutional convention in SC, John Adams wrote that, “reformation must begin with the Body of the People which can be done only, to affect, in their Educations. the Whole People must take upon themselvs [sic] the Education of the Whole People and must be willing to bear the expences [sic] of it.” On the other hand, in 350 BCE Aristotle praised education as necessary for people to learn their roles in a state, and wrote at the same time that “For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.”  

In the aftermath of the Civil War, states had to decide whether schools were meant to make people better subjects of their supposed betters, or better citizens in a democratic society. 

Ultimately, the purpose of public education as it was established in South Carolina in 1868 was clear. It was driven by the desire of free Black Americans to be truly free, to participate in society, to protect their rights, and to create a better society. In South Carolina, this goal was never achieved for Black or non-Black residents and citizens until the new Constitution took effect in 1869. 

Unfortunately, that victory was short-lived.

The Jim Crow Constitution

It’s also no accident that in the reactionary Constitution of 1895, whose convention was convened by avowed white supremacist (and then- U.S. Senator) “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman, the system of free schools, which had benefited all of South Carolina, would now be segregated by race: “Separate schools shall be provided for children of the white and colored races, and no child of either race shall ever separate be permitted to attend a school provided for children of the other race.” 

Importantly, the 1895 Constitution doubled down on the prohibitions against funding religious institutions: “The property or credit of the State of South Carolina, or of any County, city, town, township, school district, or other subdivision of the said State, or any public money, from whatever source derived, shall not, by gift, donation, loan, contract, appropriation, or otherwise, be used, directly or indirectly, in aid or maintenance of any college, school, hospital, orphan house, or other institution, society or organization, of whatever kind, which is wholly or in part under the direction or control of any church or of any religious or sectarian denomination, society or organization.” (South Carolina voucher advocates have claimed that this prohibition, which survives in our current Constitution, originated with Tillman; clearly the early 1868 constitution also prohibited funding religious schools with public funds.) 

In these two early state Constitutions, we can see two forces at work that are still powerfully involved in current education debates.  

The 1868 Constitution represents an attempt to use public schools as a way to provide opportunity to all children as individuals, and, in a bigger sense, to create a state in which people of all races and backgrounds could participate in public life. 

The 1895 Constitution represents an attempt to destroy the egalitarian mission of public schools by segregating them racially, presumably while holding on to the benefits (to White constituents) that South Carolinians had grown accustomed to receiving from the state. 

In many ways, the 1895 Constitution’s view won out. It’s no coincidence that Tillman’s statue has stood in front of the South Carolina State House since 1940, adorned with an outrageous plaque that reads, “Loving them he was the friend and leader of the common people. He taught them their political power and made possible the education of their sons and daughters.” And it’s also probably no coincidence that some members of the General Assembly are set on making sure any member of the public viewing that statue today would have no context for what makes the statement so outrageous.  

For over a decade, the South Carolina General Assembly has been transfixed with the mission of unconstitutionally funding private schools with public dollars, and in doing so it has refused again and again to require those schools receiving those funds to abstain from discriminating students on the basis of gender, religious belief, sexual orientation, or disability status. 

This version of “school vouchers” has its direct antecedent in the “independent schools” movement of the Jim Crow era, and it’s not surprising that although federal law prevents participating schools from discrimination based on race, many proponents of “school choice” are happy to allow these schools to continue to choose their students based on other identity categories. 

That doesn’t mean that everyone who supports private schools is a segregationist, any more than it means every person who supports public schools does so as an effort to create a more inclusive and more democratic society. 

But we can’t have both.  

Whether or not South Carolina continues to ignore the constitutional prohibition against funding private schools (or attempts to amend the Constitution to make vouchers legal), we can’t uphold the goals of both the 1868 and 1895 Constitutions at the same time. 

We can’t segregate and also equally serve all students. We can’t defund the system of free public schools the 1868 Constitution required while also letting the state choose winners and losers through funding schemes that send disproportionate amounts to rural and urban schools.  We can’t have a system that is meant to promote better citizenship and better participation in the democratic process, while using state funds to create a system of “educational choice” that basically boils down to subsidies for people to pick and choose the realities they want their children to live in. (Case in point: the Department of Education’s use of public funds to pay for homeschool programs that have absolutely no requirements in terms of curriculum, or even of tuition, was a bridge too far even for the senator who wrote the current voucher bill.) 

Since 2021, the General Assembly has made it largely illegal to discuss this tension: since 2021, legislators have rolled over a budget proviso that makes it illegal to teach students that “meritocracy,” as a concept, is, among other things, “racist or sexist”. 

This language allows an end run around the kind of questions I’m raising. After all, if you argue (by ignoring the historical record) that South Carolina hasn’t systematically disenfranchised citizens based on race, gender identity, income, etc., and you argue (by relying on historical fantasies) that we live in a society where hard work and “merit” are systematically rewarded regardless of race, class, or gender, then you are implicitly saying some groups simply didn’t earn success. 

But when the state picks winners and losers, it is the state which has made a lie out of “meritocracy” and which has aligned the concept with racism, sexism, and other types of undemocratic discrimination. 

After all, a society governed by those who had merit (and who had the opportunity, for the first time in state history, to demonstrate that merit regardless of race) was the society envisioned by the 1868 Constitution. 

By 1895, a central part of that dream had been formally destroyed by the state. 

And in some ways that dream has never been repaired.