The First Department of Education

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Speaker 3 For he who knoweth his master's will

Speaker 3 and doeth it not shall be beat with many stripes.

Speaker 4 You've asked me to give a history of the motives which induced me to undertake the late insurrection.

Speaker 4 In my childhood, a circumstance occurred which made an indelible impression on my mind.

Speaker 3 Behold me as I stand in the heavens.

Speaker 4 I surely would be a prophet as the Lord has shown me things that had happened before my birth.

Speaker 4 We determined to enter the house secretly.

Speaker 4 Hart got a ladder and set it against the chimney on which I ascended and hoisting a window entered and came downstairs.

Speaker 4 Unbarred the door and removed the guns from their places. It was then observed that I must spill the first blood.

Speaker 7 What you just heard was written in a pamphlet called The Confessions of Nat Turner. It was written by a white lawyer days before Turner's execution for the crime of insurrection.

Speaker 7 While scholars have debated its accuracy, what is known for sure is that over the course of an August night in 1831, Nat Turner led a revolt of enslaved black people that ended in the killing of at least 55 white men, women, and children.

Speaker 7 It was something that white slave owners had always feared. And in its wake, slaveholding states zeroed in on one major culprit, literacy.
Nat Turner knew how to read.

Speaker 9 He was deemed to be a literate slave, and he used his literacy to lead an assault against whites in Virginia.

Speaker 4 The manner in which I learned to read and write not only had great influence on my own mind, as I acquired it with the most perfect ease.

Speaker 7 Nat Turner lived in Virginia at a time when it was illegal to teach enslaved people to read. But he managed to learn anyway.

Speaker 7 He read the Bible, and he believed he was a prophet who would free his people.

Speaker 9 The South as a region saw education as a dangerous thing.

Speaker 9 The black population was the majority population in a handful of states. Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama was nearly 50%, Florida was nearly 50%.

Speaker 9 The ultimate means of social control is to make sure they don't have a lot of knowledge.

Speaker 7 After Nat Turner's rebellion, most of the slaveholding states passed or expanded laws to prevent enslaved people from learning to read and write.

Speaker 9 Every southern state had some anti-literacy or anti-assemblage law, which really forbade African Americans from going to school. And that was a mechanism to control for slavery.

Speaker 9 The last thing you want is enslaved people finding just a little bit of free time to sit around, use their literacy to say, should I be enslaved?

Speaker 9 Because there are people across this country saying otherwise.

Speaker 7 While these laws were suppressing black education in the South, reformers in the North were kicking off a national education movement. It was an uphill climb.

Speaker 11 The word education doesn't appear in the United States Constitution.

Speaker 11 The people who founded this country with names like Thomas Jefferson and Noah Webster and Benjamin Rush, they were great advocates for education, of course,

Speaker 11 including its civic function, especially its civic function. But they didn't imagine education organized at the federal level.

Speaker 12 But the Civil War changed all that. Suddenly, the question of education became existential for the United States and for the formerly Confederate South.

Speaker 12 As black people were emancipated and Reconstruction began, Congress created the first Department of Education. A year later, it was basically shut down.

Speaker 12 The story of what happened, why it was created, and why it failed is the prologue to decades of debate over the federal government's role in education.

Speaker 14 President Carter fulfilled one of his 1976 campaign pledges today. He signed legislation establishing a separate Department of Education.
Mr. Reagan wants to reduce drastically.

Speaker 14 President George Bush has dominated the national debate over how schools.

Speaker 4 President Clinton signs a bill that sets nationality.

Speaker 13 President Bush has signed into law one of the most far-reaching education.

Speaker 11 The Obama administration had states compete for the money.

Speaker 19 The Trump administration is withdrawing Obama-era guidelines that encourage the United States.

Speaker 17 President Biden has outlined another round of federal student loan cancellations.

Speaker 20 President Trump wasted no time today announcing next steps in his bid to dismantle the U.S.

Speaker 3 Department of Education.

Speaker 7 The Department of Education that we know has only existed for about 50 years.

Speaker 7 Today, it oversees billions of dollars for schools, civil rights complaints, a federal student loan program, and it's responsible for ensuring equal access to education.

Speaker 7 It's much bigger than the first Department of Education ever was.

Speaker 7 But the questions that drive the debates around it about the purpose of education, who it's for, and what role, if any, the federal government should play, they're all rooted in that very first effort.

Speaker 12 I'm Ramteen Arab Louis.

Speaker 7 And I'm Rand Abdel Fatah.

Speaker 12 On this episode of Through Line from NPR, the birth, death, and legacy of the First Department of Education.

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Speaker 6 Part one,

Speaker 20 a stick in the dirt.

Speaker 12 In the most basic terms, can you describe what education was like in the United States before the Civil War?

Speaker 23 This was a time when education was a lot more fragmentary.

Speaker 12 This is Michael Studeman.

Speaker 23 I am an assistant professor of rhetoric at Penn State University, and I studied the history of education policy in the United States and how Americans have argued about it.

Speaker 12 In the early 1800s, there was no federal school system. There were hardly any state school systems.
Schools were run by churches or untrained teachers, sometimes even the students themselves.

Speaker 12 But at their core was basic reading, math, and writing.

Speaker 23 A lot of it wouldn't be too unfamiliar. Usually, students sat in rows.
A lot of the assignments they did would be be very much examination and recitation driven.

Speaker 23 This was a time where pedagogy relied very heavily on shame.

Speaker 23 And so public exhibitions were a big way that evaluations happened.

Speaker 12 The most popular book at the time was The McGuffey Readers. They included famous political speeches.

Speaker 23 It collected up lots of anecdotes.

Speaker 24 Under a great tree in the woods, two boys saw a fine, large nut.

Speaker 23 Very folklore-driven curriculum.

Speaker 24 It is mine, said John, for I was the first to see it.

Speaker 24 No, it is mine, said James, for I was the first to pick it up.

Speaker 23 A lot of what students were learning in school was not just the ABCs and the basics of mathematics.

Speaker 7 They called an older boy and asked him.

Speaker 23 This was about trying to cultivate a sort of civic culture.

Speaker 24 He took the nut. and broke the shell.
This half of the shell, said he, belongs to the boy who first saw the nut.

Speaker 24 And this half belongs to the boy who picked it up.

Speaker 23 There was a sense of, this is about training people to be good people. It was about moral inculcation.

Speaker 12 But this kind of education wasn't happening everywhere. Depending on where you were in the country, a one-room schoolhouse could be a log cabin.
The McGuffey reader might be accompanied by a Bible.

Speaker 23 That was the situation that a lot of the reformers, like Henry Barnard, were responding to at the time, was a sense of fragmentation.

Speaker 12 Before he was a reformer, Henry Barnard was a kid who hated the little red schoolhouse he attended in Hartford, Connecticut.

Speaker 25 He said he was a victim of a miserable district school.

Speaker 12 Henry's father once brought him back an orange after being away at sea.

Speaker 12 An orange from a strange distant land that brought him wonder.

Speaker 12 Out there was a whole world to be discovered if he wasn't in school.

Speaker 12 When Henry was 12 in the 1820s, he hated school so much that he decided to run away with a friend.

Speaker 12 They planned to leave the following night. go to a seaport and find work as sailors.

Speaker 12 Henry's father, having overheard their plan through an open window, told Henry the next day that he could transfer out of his school.

Speaker 12 And he did.

Speaker 12 In his new school, Henry Barnard excelled. He went to Yale at just 15 years old, was near the top of his class, and he went on a mission to change the entire education system in America.

Speaker 25 Ever since I was conscious of any purpose, the aim of my life has been to gather and disseminate knowledge. Useful knowledge.
Knowledge not always available by the many, but useful to all.

Speaker 11 What happened in the ante-bellum era starting the 1830s is figures like Horace Mann and Henry Barnard started to advocate for something called a common school system.

Speaker 12 This became known as the common school movement. basically free public schools in every state.

Speaker 11 Which is what today we would call a state school system.

Speaker 12 This is Jonathan Zimmerman. He teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania.

Speaker 11 That is something that would bind these small little schools, mostly one room, into a system that had, for example, a shared curriculum, shared textbooks, a shared duration of school year, shared requirements for teachers.

Speaker 11 The idea was to create something that was common that would bind together all these disparate schools.

Speaker 25 The common school will no longer be regarded as common because it is cheap, inferior, and patronized only by the poor.

Speaker 12 Henry Barnard was in his mid-20s when he became a state lawmaker in Connecticut in 1837. The following year, he gave a speech in support of a bill to establish a new state board for common schools.

Speaker 25 Common as the light and the air, because its blessings are open to all and enjoyed by all.

Speaker 11 There were a lot of people that said, why should this be a state concern at all? This is a waste of money or it's unfairly impinging on local control. Why do we need a state system at all?

Speaker 12 But the common school movement had momentum and the bill passed.

Speaker 11 And he eventually became the secretary of their new state board of education, which of course he had advocated for.

Speaker 12 What was his basic philosophy for why all these specific changes were necessary? What was the underlying belief that fueled him?

Speaker 11 The underlying motivation was civic.

Speaker 11 The idea was we're going to be a republic of self-governing people, and the only way we're going to do that well or competently is if we get the skills of citizenship. So that was the motivation.

Speaker 12 But Barnard didn't just set his sights on Connecticut.

Speaker 23 An important thing to know about Henry Barnard is that he was a Whig politician. And Whig politicians were very concerned about what they perceived as the fragmentation of American society.

Speaker 12 In the 1830s, there was growing industrialization, a growing divide between rich and poor, and more and more immigration.

Speaker 23 It's not a coincidence that the Common School Movement emerged in Connecticut and Massachusetts and New England, where there was a huge population of Irish immigrants coming to the United States.

Speaker 23 A degree of nativism informed this movement.

Speaker 23 They were worried about people coming to the United States that did not share the same political views, did not share the same religious beliefs because so many people coming to the country were Catholic.

Speaker 23 These were people that were, in many ways, anxious about democracy and about the implications of what full democracy and the enfranchisement of lots of people really meant.

Speaker 12 Education, they thought, was a way to unify the country.

Speaker 7 Since Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831, the country had been splitting further apart. In the North, calls for abolition were growing louder.

Speaker 7 In the South, defenders of slavery were digging in and passing laws aimed at preventing black people from gathering or learning. But that didn't stop them.

Speaker 9 Many people would sneak out at night.

Speaker 9 They would learn from this kind of self-taught teacher,

Speaker 9 someone who was already literate in the slave community.

Speaker 9 And then they would go ahead and resume their activities in the daylight hours as if nothing would have happened.

Speaker 9 Frederick Douglass, he learned from the mistress of his slaveholder.

Speaker 7 This is Christopher Spann.

Speaker 9 I'm a historian of American education, specializing in African-American education in the 19th century.

Speaker 7 He's currently the dean of the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University.

Speaker 9 So as he shares in his autobiography, there was a woman by the name of Mrs.

Speaker 26 Auld, a white face beaming with the most kindly emotions.

Speaker 7 When Frederick Douglass was a child, she began to teach him to read.

Speaker 26 And she, deeply religious, commenced to teach me the ABC.

Speaker 26 She assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters.

Speaker 9 And when Mr. Auld saw Mrs.
Ald teaching Frederick Douglass how to read, he just became furious at the process and really forbade her from teaching him to read any further.

Speaker 9 It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable and have no value to his master.
As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm.

Speaker 9 It would make him discontented and unhappy.

Speaker 26 These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought.

Speaker 9 Douglas took this as a sign that he was doing something very good for himself.

Speaker 26 I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty, to wit, the white man's power to enslave the black man.

Speaker 9 Anything that would make a slaveholder this mad must be very good for him. It must be very bad for the slaveholder.

Speaker 26 From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.

Speaker 9 So Douglas was determined to learn to read regardless.

Speaker 9 Knowing that he couldn't go to Mrs.

Speaker 9 Ald anymore, the white school children who had access to school, he would follow those kids to school and ask them questions, or he would meet them on their way home from school and ask them questions.

Speaker 9 Almost little challenge games. I bet I could read this passage better than you.
I bet I could write this letter better than you. I bet I could spell this word better than you.

Speaker 9 And so the side of a barn became the chalkboard. A stick in the dirt became a pencil.

Speaker 9 And rote memorization and competition tests allowed him to gain the acquisitions of reading and writing in ways that others simply would not.

Speaker 9 Douglas became so literate that he literally wrote his own pass to freedom, that when he stepped on the train to escape from slavery, he wrote himself a pass that allowed him to escape.

Speaker 9 And that's how he made his way out of Maryland and into the Northeast and eventually landing in a place like Massachusetts.

Speaker 7 Douglas got to Massachusetts in 1838, the same year that Northern school reformer Henry Barnard was appointed to lead the brand new school board in neighboring Connecticut.

Speaker 7 And soon, Barnard and Douglas would both be advocating for more federal involvement in education.

Speaker 9 Now, as the nation was beginning to develop these more structural ways for people to become knowledgeable and to become schooled in this sense, it coincided with a nation also challenging whether slavery should exist by law or not.

Speaker 9 People like Frederick Douglass and others immediately equated knowledge and literacy and schooling with freedom and emancipation and social mobility and the very essence of what it would mean to become a citizen in society.

Speaker 9 And so they only had to look around them to see that a literate person could read contracts.

Speaker 9 A literate person could ensure that they would not only do manual labor, but they would be able to do the other kinds of labor that required a little bit more of the mind than the hands.

Speaker 7 Reading was a gateway to freedom, education, a way to enlighten and influence.

Speaker 7 And when Northern troops began arriving in Alexandria, Virginia in 1861, the black community began opening up schools there.

Speaker 9 By the time he is witnessing the Civil War, Frederick Douglass becomes one of the chief advocates for this push for education as a means of social mobility because he's living proof of it himself.

Speaker 7 Coming up, Congress debates the very first Department of Education.

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Speaker 6 Part 2.

Speaker 6 Shame, shame, shame.

Speaker 16 I will not insult the intelligence of this house by waiting to prove that money paid for education is the most economical of all expenditure. It is cheaper to reduce crime than to build jails.

Speaker 12 On June 8th, 1866, James Garfield, a representative from Ohio, takes the floor to make the case for something that the nation had never seen before, a National Department of Education.

Speaker 13 Schoolhouses are less expensive than rebellions. A tenth of our national debt expended in public education 50 years ago would have saved us the blood and treasure of the late war.

Speaker 13 A far less sum may save our children from still greater calamity.

Speaker 12 Garfield was speaking to a Congress that looked very different than it had just a few years prior. The Civil War had just ended.
Reconstruction had begun.

Speaker 12 Even the building was undergoing a renovation. At this point, many Southern lawmakers had left or had been expelled by Congress during the Civil War and were not even in the room when Garfield spoke.

Speaker 12 The hard work of rebuilding the country was beginning. Garfield and others argued that teachers should lead the way.

Speaker 23 School teachers are going to be the ones that are able to rebuild Southern culture and rebuild our society in a way that is more cohesive.

Speaker 23 Basically, where soldiers set down their arms, school teachers need to pick up their books.

Speaker 12 And the need was urgent. The 13th Amendment abolishing slavery had just been ratified in 1865, and the 14th Amendment granting equal protection was on its way.

Speaker 9 And the greatest clamor coming from 4 million people who were enslaved in the South is this demand that they be properly educated to become citizens of this country.

Speaker 9 And it's amazing because it's not just the 4 million newly freed people that they're working with.

Speaker 12 Many white people in the South also had no schooling. So the federal government knew they had to address this and they did so by establishing the Freedmen's Bureau.

Speaker 12 The Bureau supported newly freed African Americans as well as Southern white refugees who were formerly in the Confederacy.

Speaker 23 Particularly poor Southern whites. So people that did not have plantations, did not have slaves, did not have access to the money and wealth.

Speaker 12 The Bureau provided food, shelter, clothing, medical aid, and schooling. As part of that effort, the Bureau also offered military protection against people who opposed Black education.

Speaker 23 It was always this very fine line that Congress had to walk.

Speaker 23 They wanted to say that we're promoting the cause of education, but whenever they made the case that they were directly promoting black education in schools, then it created all of these anxieties about, oh, are you indoctrinating them?

Speaker 23 Oh, are the federal schools going to be used to train this political force in the South?

Speaker 12 At this point, the South had virtually no schools compared to the North, and James Garfield saw this as an opportunity. Since he was a teenager, he'd been deeply interested in education.

Speaker 12 So by the time he took his seat in Congress after fighting for the Union in the Civil War, he was ready to take action.

Speaker 23 Congress reconvened after the Civil War, and

Speaker 23 there was a sort of flurry of proposals that it was like everybody was ready with all these plans for like, how are we going to do Reconstruction? Let's go.

Speaker 12 Education was important for cultural reasons and also for very practical ones.

Speaker 23 Any hope they had of a meaningful political coalition in the South depended on Black people having the right to vote and the right to participate in politics.

Speaker 12 And the Radical Republicans had every intention of enfranchising Southern Black people.

Speaker 12 So things that we might consider very basic education today, knowing how to count, being able to read and write, were essential.

Speaker 23 That you can read the ballot and be able to vote for the candidate that you want to because you have enough literacy to be able to select that correctly. And so that's where Garfield steps in.

Speaker 7 Which brings us back to that June day in 1866. Garfield opens up the debate in the House by describing his vision for a federal department of education.

Speaker 13 That there shall be established at the city of Washington a Department of Education for the purpose of collecting such statistics and facts as shall show the condition and progress of education in the several states and territories.

Speaker 11 The original goal was to try to collect information about different state systems and local ones.

Speaker 7 Garfield is basically saying that the department would keep track of how schools were being managed and what teaching methods they were using.

Speaker 7 Then the department would present that information to every state in the union. But going into the debate, Garfield knows that he has to tread carefully.

Speaker 7 Because remember, up until this point, local communities handled their own education systems.

Speaker 23 So his position was if we come out with a Bureau of Education that tries to impose upon the country its will, that tries to say to states, here's how you're going to educate, people will reject that.

Speaker 23 That was his opinion.

Speaker 7 But he had a plan for that. The department would gather statistics.
At this time, statistics was an emerging science that Garfield fully embraced.

Speaker 23 In his view, statistics were basically like interpreting God's word in a sense. It was, this is revealing the shape of the social world to us so that we can make very wise political decisions.

Speaker 23 So he had a ton of faith in what could happen if schools were approached in a way that emphasized statistics.

Speaker 13 According to the census of 1860, there were 1,200,000 inhabitants in the United States over 21 years of age who could not read nor write, and 800,000 of those were American-born citizens.

Speaker 23 So his opinion was that this Bureau would have the ability to create a fairly uniform national system, enough to prevent future civil war and future tensions and so forth, purely by sharing information, by making it visible what is going on in states that don't have school commitments.

Speaker 7 Garfield had a lot of faith in what this department could achieve, especially when it came to bringing Southerners back into the Union.

Speaker 16 We must pour upon them all the light of our public schools.

Speaker 13 We must make them intelligent, industrious, patriotic citizens, or they will drag us and our children down to their level.

Speaker 7 Garfield and the radical Republicans could take a patronizing tone when it came to the South.

Speaker 23 Because this population was so uneducated, they did not share the common feelings that Northerners held, and they also lacked the intelligence to be able to discern wise political messages.

Speaker 23 And so they followed the plantation leaders into the war because they were susceptible to demagoguery.

Speaker 7 One by one, the Republicans step onto the floor to make their case for the Department of Education.

Speaker 28 Civilization is nothing more than education.

Speaker 23 So, one figure that is an interesting part of this debate is a Minnesota representative named Ignatius Donnelly.

Speaker 28 We excel the past because we have select a wider field of observation. We possess the accumulations of a greater number of generations of workers.

Speaker 28 We are ourselves happier, wiser, better because we know more.

Speaker 23 At this point, he is just a zealous advocate for schools.

Speaker 28 We thus strike out at one blow a large proportion of the ignorance of the South.

Speaker 28 We shame the whites into an effort to educate themselves, and we prepare thus both classes for the proper exercise of the right of suffrage.

Speaker 27 In order to make education universal, what do we want? What is the crying necessity of this nation today?

Speaker 23 Another figure in the house was a man named Samuel Moulton from Illinois.

Speaker 27 Why, sir, we want a head. We want a pure fountain from which a pure stream can be poured upon all the states.

Speaker 23 The kind of thrust of his argument was that we're basically proposing to do for the nation what we already did in the state of Illinois.

Speaker 27 The very object of establishing a Bureau of Education is that these different systems may be brought together.

Speaker 23 And that has created, he argues, a sort of more cohesive culture in the state of Illinois. And it's made for a better, more effective system.

Speaker 27 We want all these school systems all over the land brought under one head so that they may be nationalized, vitalized, and made uniform and harmonious as far as possible.

Speaker 7 But not everyone was on board with these ideas.

Speaker 29 I am content, sir, to leave this matter of education where our fathers left it, where the history of this country has left it, to the school systems of the different towns, cities, and states.

Speaker 7 Andrew Rogers, a Democrat from New Jersey, was against creating a Department of Education. He argued that states and local jurisdictions should handle their own business.

Speaker 29 Let them carry out and regulate the system of education without interference.

Speaker 7 Remember, Southern Democrats weren't present, so it was Northerners like Rogers who were making these comments.

Speaker 9 And many of them come from school communities where local control is the ultimate form of control.

Speaker 7 The Democrats that were left in the room pointed out that a federal education department was never written into the Constitution.

Speaker 7 And after hearing all the radical Republicans talk about just how much this new department would do to change the country, well, they didn't like the idea of handing the federal government so much power.

Speaker 7 And so they feared what the Radical Republicans would end up doing if the Department of Education was established.

Speaker 23 This was going to empower the federal government to have an undue influence on what children learned in the classroom.

Speaker 29 There is no reason or necessity for this bill at all because the education of the people will be attended to and it always has been attended to.

Speaker 23 So, on one side of the issue, you have people that are challenging this bureau because it's not going to do anything. They're like, what are you talking about? That's not enough.

Speaker 23 On the other hand, you had people that condemned this bureau for being this centralizing force that was going to make everything all, you know, make all the schools the same and take away all of the local schools' power and so forth.

Speaker 7 The debate goes on for two days. And Garfield, the person who presented this bill, is taking the hits.

Speaker 23 And so he kind of gets attacked in two completely contradictory ways for his proposal because he's promising that it will do so much and yet what it will actually do on paper is not a lot.

Speaker 7 But Garfield doesn't back down.

Speaker 17 The general government has no compulsory control over this matter, and we propose none in this bill.

Speaker 13 But we do propose this, that we shall use that power so effective in this country, the power of letting in light on subjects and holding them up to the verdict of public opinion.

Speaker 7 Garfield is basically saying, we're not going to force education on anyone, but we are going to shame states into doing better.

Speaker 23 We can pit different groups, different states, different populations against each other if we show them where they stand, and that will motivate them to try to do better for themselves.

Speaker 13 It would shame out of their delinquency all the delinquent states of this country.

Speaker 7 In the end, the radical Republicans prevail. Congress votes to create the Department of Education.
Now the question was, was President Andrew Johnson going to sign this?

Speaker 23 He was not someone who was really friendly to the idea of public schooling as a national institution and certainly not the education of black people in the South.

Speaker 23 But he was persuaded by people that this bureau would basically have no meaningful power.

Speaker 23 They're going to gather up facts, they're going to send them out, no meaningful influence over what schools are actually doing. It's fine.

Speaker 7 The following year, Johnson signs the bill. The first Department of Education comes into existence on March 2nd, 1867.

Speaker 7 It would be made up of one commissioner, three clerks, and a small budget of $15,000, roughly $300,000 today.

Speaker 7 Now all that was left to do was to find the department a leader.

Speaker 12 I watched the progress of the bill through the House and Senate with the deepest interest.

Speaker 12 All the more from a presentiment that if it became a law, that you would be placed at the head of the department.

Speaker 12 I have faith that the acorn will become a thriving plant and grow into a sturdy oak under your skillful nurture.

Speaker 7 That's coming up.

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Speaker 20 Part 3 a collection of floating matter

Speaker 25 I have no prejudices of my own to impose on the country.

Speaker 25 It's been my aim to bring to bear the light of past and present experience.

Speaker 25 My belief is that anything worth preserving has its roots in the past. And to make us grow, we need all the light which can be brought to bear from every country.

Speaker 11 It made complete sense for the administration to choose Henry Barnard.

Speaker 12 After President Andrew Johnson signed the bill creating the Department of Education in March of 1867, appointing the well-known northern school reformer Henry Barnard as commissioner made sense.

Speaker 11 By this time, he was the most prominent school leader in the United States.

Speaker 25 Barnard's dream of uniting the country through education was coming true, and he wrote to James Garfield, May you live a thousand years and your shadow and that of your wife never be less.

Speaker 25 But I don't believe you will ever do a work more beneficial and fruitful.

Speaker 12 And it wasn't just Barnard. His friends and colleagues wrote him, full of optimism.

Speaker 28 A new educational era has opened upon us.

Speaker 19 Pride in your promotion and confidence in your success.

Speaker 20 It is an appointment eminently fit to be made.

Speaker 18 So much needed to give efficiency to an appropriate system of measures for the intellectual regeneration of the South.

Speaker 12 They'd promised a lot.

Speaker 12 James Garfield and Henry Barnard had essentially argued that the Department of Education would do everything from unify the morals and citizenry of the country to encouraging the development of new schools.

Speaker 12 But Barnard had been thinking about this moment for the last 30 years and writing about it for the last decade in his independent American Journal of Education.

Speaker 23 And he goes into it and basically sees his role as kind of what he'd already been doing.

Speaker 12 And so Barnard continues putting out his journal.

Speaker 12 In it was everything from from notes about school architecture and teacher training programs to information about schools in Europe and women's education.

Speaker 12 It was his entire vision for education in America. A vision that some lawmakers didn't ask for.

Speaker 23 And this becomes a point of controversy because they're like, why is he making the office's focus the like aggregation and continued publication of this independently published education journal.

Speaker 23 That's a peculiar choice.

Speaker 12 And that wasn't the only issue.

Speaker 11 We're talking about one dude, Henry Barnard, and three clerks.

Speaker 12 He didn't have a lot of help.

Speaker 23 This was not like a lucrative role by any stretch.

Speaker 12 He asked for more money. He was still paying a lot of money out of pocket, but Congress wouldn't give it to him.
And he was complaining about it.

Speaker 11 One of the controversies was Barnard asked for another clerk.

Speaker 12 Yeah, not in the budget. But there's another problem.

Speaker 23 A lot of people criticize that he was out of town a lot. He was back in Connecticut at home a lot.

Speaker 12 No one can seem to find Barnard when they need him.

Speaker 23 He did receive office space, but he was shuffled around DC from office to office to where you would have people making jokes about it.

Speaker 27 You said he occupied an office over a restaurant.

Speaker 19 Well, is that anything against him?

Speaker 15 It is very convenient.

Speaker 23 And so there was this sense of like, what is Barnard doing? He's out of town a lot.

Speaker 23 There were a lot of concerns that he was just kind of continuing to do his own independent work and not really promote the cause of education.

Speaker 12 And James Garfield, whose bill created the Department of Education, was forced to defend it.

Speaker 13 I am not one of those who seek to pluck out the eyes of the nation.

Speaker 7 But the pressure was mounting. What was Barnard even doing other than using the department as his own personal publishing house? And soon, Garfield writes to Barnard, you got to help me out here.

Speaker 13 An early presentation to Congress of the valuable reports which you have so nearly ready will enable the friends of education of the department to save it from abolition.

Speaker 23 He starts preparing his report.

Speaker 23 A lot of what he included in that report was information that was sort of pulled from this journal of education he'd been publishing for the past decade or so.

Speaker 7 It was a lot, and it was kind of random.

Speaker 23 It's mainly bizarre in how much ground it covers.

Speaker 7 More than 800 pages.

Speaker 23 I have it pulled up here. I can read like some of the topics.
European observations on American schools and education. Art, education, and the District of Columbia.
It's just not focused.

Speaker 23 Let me share a description from one of the critics of the Bureau that was trying to get rid of it. So a senator named Thomas Hendricks from Indiana.

Speaker 30 It is a compilation and collection together of scraps. I will will not say scraps.
I take that back because there's a speech in there from a member of Congress and of course that is not scraps.

Speaker 30 But it is a collection together of floating matter.

Speaker 30 Wow.

Speaker 23 Remember, this was pitched to Congress as we're going to gather statistics and we're going to use these statistics to reveal what's going on.

Speaker 23 And so people were looking at this and they're just like, what

Speaker 23 is it supposed to do exactly that will help some kids in a school somewhere?

Speaker 7 Garfield was disappointed.

Speaker 23 It was not what he had envisioned.

Speaker 7 And it gave opponents of the department and even some of its former supporters more reason to attack it.

Speaker 23 There are several criticisms of the reports when they come out that suggest that these reports are inadequate, that they're not covering the things that this department was charged to cover,

Speaker 23 and that it was kind of failing to meet those responsibilities.

Speaker 11 What was happening was that, in many ways, they created this office as window dressing because it couldn't really do much without employees.

Speaker 11 And it was shortly after that that the whole thing comes unglued.

Speaker 23 This is but a glass eye, it has no sights in it, it has no power, it cannot inspect the system of education anywhere in the United States.

Speaker 31 What is the Bureau of Education? It is the gathering up of these facts by a worn-out man who embodies them in his report.

Speaker 7 In July of 1868, about one year after it was created, Congress demoted the Department of Education, making it an office within the Department of Interior.

Speaker 23 Ultimately, it just sort of remains this small office to collect stats.

Speaker 7 Henry Barnard retired in 1870. He felt burned, and it was the end of his life in public service.

Speaker 25 All my experiences with wild beasts and stolid asses in an experience of 30 years did not lead me to expect what I am now receiving.

Speaker 7 But what Henry Barnard and the Department of Education had established was a federal foothold in education that never went away.

Speaker 7 As part of southern states' readmission into the Union, they guaranteed education in their new state constitutions. But it kicked off another era, a new battle for education in the United States.

Speaker 12 The year Barnard retired, the 15th Amendment was ratified, giving black men the right to vote.

Speaker 12 But once Reconstruction ended in 1877 and the federal troops departed the South, many southern states started enacting new laws enforcing segregation and limiting voting and access to education.

Speaker 11 Here's another sad irony.

Speaker 11 I mean, the Civil War, it is the engine of the creation of the state school systems in the South, but the end of Reconstruction is also the beginning of this massive, deeply inscribed inequality between what black and white kids receive from these school systems.

Speaker 12 Wow, so it's like the introduction of the

Speaker 12 free public school system, but then the slow separation of the quality of that education.

Speaker 11 Precisely. Which, let's remember, lasts lasts for a century.

Speaker 12 But even though that department of education was essentially reduced to just collecting stats, those stats were and are still important to understanding how well we're doing at providing education across the country and how far we've come.

Speaker 12 For example, before the Civil War, about one in 10 enslaved people were literate.

Speaker 9 If you get to 1900, roughly 40 years later, they're talking about seven in ten formerly enslaved people are now literate. That is massive.

Speaker 9 So, as a historian, I'm deeply appreciative of all the statistics that have been gathered because it allows me to tell a fuller, richer narrative as to what actually happened in that region.

Speaker 7 As the federal government's role in education grew in the 20th and 21st centuries, so have the arguments over the role it plays in schools.

Speaker 23 A lot of this

Speaker 23 anxiety over the role of the federal government in education is there regardless of what the agency is doing.

Speaker 23 This debate speaks to something about the structure of our government and our federalist system that we have in the United States that makes the idea of a national spokesperson for education particularly controversial.

Speaker 23 in ways that it has not been in other countries.

Speaker 23 Still today, I don't think it is as powerful as people ascribe it to be. Despite that, though, it is such a lightning rod.

Speaker 23 I mean, the same thing that happened in 1867 when you created this institution. A year later, you had people trying to get rid of it.
Another year later, you had people trying to get rid of it.

Speaker 23 All of these anxieties, anxieties about coming into the local classroom and usurping the parent's role, you know, all of that was there from the beginning. And now we're having the exact same debates.

Speaker 23 I think that like early version of the Bureau that we saw in the 1800s is foreshadowing everything that we saw that came after.

Speaker 7 That's it for this week's show. I'm Randabdit Fattah.

Speaker 12 I'm Ramteen Adab Louis, and you've been listening to Through Line from NPR.

Speaker 7 This episode was produced by me and me and Lawrence Wu.

Speaker 12 Julie Kane.

Speaker 1 Anya Steinberg Casey Minor Christina Kim Devin Katayama Irene Noguchi Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vochl.

Speaker 7 Thanks to D.L.

Speaker 7 Blair, Luther Pearson, Justin Hicks, Cody Klasna, Ryan Muzzie, Paul Lancour, Amber C, Eli Blonde, Jonathan Bastion, Allison Grant, Bowie Alexander, Jason DeVina Gracia, Blaise Adler-Ivinbrook, and Shonari J.

Speaker 7 Edwards for their voiceover work. Thanks also to the New York University Archives.

Speaker 12 Thank you to Johannes Durgee, Jessica Payne, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell. This episode was mixed and mastered by Robert Rodriguez.

Speaker 7 Music for this episode was composed by Ramteen and his band, Drop Electric, which includes Anya Mizani, Naveed Marvy, Sho Fujiwara.

Speaker 12 If you get a chance, check out Michael Studemann's book that's coming out soon called Absence of National Feeling, Education Debates in the Reconstruction Congress.

Speaker 12 And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at throughline at mpr.org and make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify, or the NPR app.

Speaker 12 That way, you'll never miss an episode.

Speaker 7 Thanks for listening.

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