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Compulsion Schooling
The center of the scheme was Massachusetts, the closest thing to a theocracy to have emerged in
America. The list below is a telling record of the long gap between the Massachusetts compulsory
law of 1852 and similar legislation adopted by the next set of states. Instructive also in the
chronology is the place taken by the District of Columbia, the seat of federal government.
Compulsory School Legislation
1852 Massachusetts 1875 Maine
1865 District of Columbia New Jersey
1867 Vermont 1876 Wyoming Territory
1871 New Hampshire 1877 Ohio
Washington Territory 1879 Wisconsin
1872 Connecticut 1883 Rhode Island
New Mexico Territory
Illinois
1873 Nevada Dakota Territory
1874 New York Montana Territory
Kansas
California
Six other Western states and territories were added by 1890. Finally in 1918, sixty-six years after
the Massachusetts force legislation, the forty-eighth state, Mississippi, enacted a compulsory
school attendance law. Keep in mind Cubberley’s words: everywhere there was "strenuous
opposition."
De-Moralizing School Procedure
But a strange thing happened as more and more children were drawn into the net, a crisis of an
unexpected sort. At first those primitive one-room and two-room compulsion schools—even the
large new secondary schools like Philadelphia’s Central High—poured out large numbers of
trained, disciplined intellects. Government schoolteachers in those early days chose
overwhelmingly to emulate standards of private academies, and to a remarkable degree they
succeeded in unwittingly sabotaging the hierarchical plan being moved on line. Without a carefully
trained administrative staff (and most American schools had no administrators), it proved
impossible to impose the dumbing-down process 1 promised by the German prototype. In addition,
right through the 1920s, a skilled apprenticeship alternative was active in the United States,
traditional training that still honored our national mythology of success.
Ironically, the first crisis provoked by the new school institution was taking its rhetorical mandate
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