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Running head: HISTORICAL INFLUENCES ON EDUCATION

Essay # 5 - Historical Influences on Education

Márcio Padilha

College of Southern Idaho

EDUC 201 – Hurley

Fall/2006
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Historical Influences on Education

Throughout the historical process, the American educational experience has been

influenced by a variety of factors which progressively developed from old Dame School

paradigm into the current structured schooling model we have today.

The 1647 Old Deluder Satan Act, reflecting the era’s status quo, strengthened

preexisting laws and required every Massachusetts town of 50 families or more families

to pay for a teacher to teach the children reading and writing so they read the Bible and

thwart Satan, who would assuredly try to keep people from understanding the scriptures.

Although this was a totally non metaphysical and polarized approach, reasoning such as

this was pivotal for launching the formalization of the educational process in America.

Eventually, Town Schools were formed, later evolving into District Schools, a

New England type of school created in light of townships being divided in districts, each

having its own school, its own schoolmaster and funded by the town treasury. In light of

the District School, the need for an administrative body came into existence in the form

of School District, which, in turn, eventually created the curriculum and a hierarchical

chain of command: the Superintend of Schools, the Local Board of Education, the State

Department of Education and The State Board of Education.

Next the 1862 Federal US Legislation referred to as the Morris Act granted each

state federal land to establish colleges for the study of agriculture and mechanical arts

whereas the 1874 Kalamazoo case, a US Supreme Court Case further formalized the

schooling in the United States by uphold the right of states to tax citizens to create public

high schools. Subsequent to that, Plessy v. Ferguson, a 1896 Supreme Court decision,

quickly applied to schools, upheld the constitutionality of separate but equal

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accommodations for African Americans, which was later reinforce by the 1959 Brown v.

Board of Education of Topeka Decision which made racial segregation in public schools

illegal; a bold social reconstructionist move for the time.

As schooling in the United States took the structure it now possesses, the need for

funding became clearer. In light of that, the US Federal government developed the

Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), its single largest investment in

elementary and secondary education, which includes Title I, a section of the 1965 ESEA

which delivers funds for local districts and school for the education of low-income and

low-achieving students. Furthermore, there is Head Start, which also started in mid-

1960s and provides additional educational services to young children suffering the effects

of poverty.

In its most current reauthorization, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act

is referred to as No Child Left Behind, which has added many more requirements for

states and school districts as to increase accountability of results for the grant money.