Notes from a public school survivor (Part 3)
...Before 1850, when Massachusetts became the first state in the United States to force children to go to school, literacy was at 98 percent. Quoting from Dr. Mary Ruwart's "Healing Our world"...
"schooling was neither compulsory nor free, although private "charity" schools provided education to those too poor to afford formal instruction. Many of those schools taught hundreds of children at a time, using a monitoring method pioneered by the British Quaker schoolmaster Joseph Lancaster. The Teacher would instruct several older children, and they, in turn, would instruct others under the teacher's supervision. Lancaster perfected his method so that he was able to teach a thousand pupils at one time - for free!"
There was a wide variety of private schools, some free, some inexpensive, some expensive. Many immigrant-organized schools taught both English and their native tongue. America was admirably well-educated, and recognized as such around the world. For example, the novel "Last of the Mohicans", in 1818, sold 5 million copies in a population of less than 20 million people....
...The effort to forcibly eliminate private schools was pushed by the Ku Klux Klan, which was quite powerful then. They simply wanted to eliminate Catholic schools, which had been created to counter the Protestant-controlled "public" schools. It's a good illustration of the danger of having a single, government-controlled program of any kind. The KKK only had to influence a few politicians by appealing to bias, a desire for more power, and whatever other incentives they may have offered behind the scenes....