The First Department of Education

Summary

Throughline: The First Department of Education
Hosted by Rund Abdelfattah and Ramtin Arablouei
Release Date: June 12, 2025

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Throughline takes listeners on a historical journey to explore the establishment, challenges, and legacy of the first United States Department of Education. This episode delves deep into the post-Civil War era, examining how education became a battleground for national unity, civil rights, and federal authority.

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Introduction: A Nation Rebuilt Through Education

In the aftermath of the Civil War, the United States faced the monumental task of rebuilding not just its infrastructure and economy, but also its societal fabric. Education emerged as a pivotal element in this reconstruction, seen as a means to unify the country, promote civic values, and empower newly freed African Americans. Throughline explores the birth of the first Department of Education, its ambitious goals, and the reasons behind its eventual dissolution.

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Part 1: A Stick in the Dirt – Pre-Civil War Education

Before the Civil War, the American education system was highly fragmented. Schools were predominantly one-room institutions run by churches or untrained teachers, focusing on basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. M.K. Lovell, an assistant professor at Penn State University, explains:

"This was a time when education was a lot more fragmentary." [08:47]

The curriculum often centered around the McGuffey Readers, a series of textbooks that emphasized moral stories and civic virtues. Education was viewed not just as a means of personal development but also as a tool for fostering a cohesive civic culture.

The common school movement, spearheaded by reformers like Henry Barnard and Horace Mann, advocated for free public schooling accessible to all children. Their vision aimed to standardize education across states, ensuring uniform curricula, shared textbooks, and consistent teacher requirements.

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Part 2: Shame, Shame, Shame – The Push for a Federal Department

The turmoil of the Civil War underscored the importance of education in nation-building. With the abolition of slavery and the beginning of Reconstruction, there was a pressing need to educate both newly freed African Americans and impoverished white Southerners. James Garfield, then a representative from Ohio, championed the creation of a national Department of Education. At [23:51], he asserts:

"Schoolteachers are going to be the ones that are able to rebuild southern culture and rebuild our society in a way that is more cohesive."

The Freedmen's Bureau played a critical role in this initiative, providing resources for education among other services. Literacy became synonymous with freedom and citizenship, as exemplified by Frederick Douglass's journey. Despite oppressive laws aimed at suppressing black education, Douglass self-taught himself to read and write, viewing literacy as his pathway to emancipation:

"From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom." [18:25]

Garfield proposed that the new Department of Education would collect educational statistics, promoting transparency and uniformity without imposing strict federal control. However, this vision was met with resistance. Critics feared federal overreach and the erosion of local control, leading to intense debates in Congress.

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Part 3: A Collection of Floating Matters – The Demise of the First Department

Despite initial optimism, the first Department of Education struggled under the leadership of Henry Barnard. Appointed as commissioner, Barnard faced numerous challenges:

• Limited Resources: With a modest budget of $15,000 ([37:00]), Barnard found it difficult to implement meaningful programs.

• Operational Inefficiencies: Frequent absences and disorganized office management led to public criticism.

• Questionable Effectiveness: The department's reports were seen as disjointed and lacking focus, as Senator Thomas Hendricks from Indiana described them [44:12]:

  "It is a compilation and collection together of scraps... a collection together of floating matter."

By July 1868, just a year after its creation, Congress demoted the Department of Education to an office within the Department of the Interior, effectively sidelining its initiatives. Barnard retired in 1870, disillusioned by the department's failures and the political climate.

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Legacy: Seeds of Federal Involvement in Education

While the first Department of Education was short-lived, it laid the groundwork for future federal involvement in education. The statistics and reports it generated provided valuable insights into the nation's educational landscape, influencing subsequent policies and reforms.

However, the end of Reconstruction marked a regression in educational equality. Southern states enacted segregation laws and severely limited access to quality education for African Americans, leading to decades of educational disparity.

Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, reflects on the long-term impact:

"The civil War, it is the engine of the creation of the state school system 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." [47:53]

The episode draws parallels between the historical debates over federal education control and contemporary discussions, highlighting persistent tensions in the American education system.

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Conclusion: The Enduring Battle Over Federal Education

Throughline concludes by emphasizing that the debates surrounding the first Department of Education are echoed in today's discussions about the federal government's role in education. From concerns over local vs. federal control to the impact of educational policies on societal cohesion, the episode underscores the enduring complexity of shaping a nation's educational framework.

M.K. Lovell encapsulates the ongoing relevance:

"A lot of this anxiety over the role of the federal government in education is there, regardless of what the agency is doing... it is such a lightning rod." [49:05]

The episode serves as a reminder that the quest to balance federal oversight with local autonomy in education has deep historical roots, shaping the contemporary landscape of American schooling.

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*This episode was produced by Rund Abdelfattah, Ramtin Arablouei, and M.K. Lovell, with contributions from historians and educational experts. For more insights into the history of American education and its national implications, tune into Throughline.

Transcript

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[M.K. Lovell]

For he.

[Unknown Speaker]

Who knoweth his Master's will and doeth it not shall be beaten with many. Strip.

[Nat Turner]

You've asked me to give a history of the motives which induced me to undertake the late insurrection. In my childhood, a circumstance occurred which made an indelible impression on my mind.

[Unknown Speaker]

Behold me as I stand in the heavens.

[Nat Turner]

I surely would be a prophet, as the Lord has shown me things that had happened before my birth. We determined to enter the house secretly. Hart got a ladder and set it against the chimney on which I ascended and hoisting a window, entered and came downstairs, unbarred the door and removed the guns from their places. It was then observed that I must spill the first blood.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

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. 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. 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.

[Christopher Spanner]

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

[Nat Turner]

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.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Nat Turner lived in Virginia at a time when it was illegal to teach enslaved people to read. But he managed to learn anyway. He read the Bible and he believed he was a prophet who would free his people.

[Nat Turner]

I surely would be a prophet.

[Christopher Spanner]

The south as a region saw education as a dangerous thing. The black population was the majority population in a handful of states. Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina, Alabama was nearly 50%. Florida was nearly 50%. The ultimate means of social control is to make sure they don't have a lot of knowledge.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

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

[Christopher Spanner]

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. 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? Because there are people across this country saying otherwise.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

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.

[Jonathan Zimmerman]

The word education doesn't appear in the United States Constitution. 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, including its civic function, especially its civic function. But they didn't imagine education organized at the federal level.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

But the Civil War changed all that. Suddenly, the question of education became existential for the United States and for the formerly Confederate South. As black people were emancipated and reconstruction began, Congress created the first Department of Education. A year later, it was basically shut down. 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.

[James Garfield]

President Carter fulfilled one of his 1976 campaign pledges. Today he signed legislation establishing a separate Department of Education.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Mr. Reagan wants to reduce drastically. President George Bush has dominated the national debate over how schools.

[Nat Turner]

President Clinton signs a bill that sets national.

[James Garfield]

President Bush has signed into law one of the most far reaching education the Obama administration had.

[M.K. Lovell]

States compete for the money.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

The Trump administration is withdrawing Obama era guidelines that increase. President Biden has outlined another round of federal student loan cancellations. President Trump wasted no time today announcing next steps in his bid to dismantle the US Department of Education. The Department of Education that we know has only existed for about 50 years. 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. It's much bigger than the first Department of Education ever was. 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.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

I'm Ramtin arablouei.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

And I'm Rund Abdelfattah.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

On this episode of Throughline from NPR, the birth, death and legacy of the first Department of Education.

[M.K. Lovell]

Hi, this is M.K. lovell from St. George, Utah. And you're listening to Throughline from NPR. Thanks for making me a better American.

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[M.K. Lovell]

Part 1 A stick in the Dirt.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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

[M.K. Lovell]

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

[Ramtin Arablouei]

This is Michael Studeman.

[M.K. Lovell]

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.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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

[M.K. Lovell]

A lot of it wouldn't be too unfamiliar. Usually students sat in rows. A lot of the assignments they did would be very much examination and recitation driven. This was a time where pedagogy relied very heavily on shame, and so public exhibitions were a big way that evaluations happened.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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

[M.K. Lovell]

It collected up lots of anecdotes.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

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

[M.K. Lovell]

Very folklore driven curriculum.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

It is mine, said John, for I was the first to see it. No, it is mine, said James, for I was the first to pick it up.

[M.K. Lovell]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah]

They called an older boy and asked him.

[M.K. Lovell]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah]

He took the nut and broke the shell. This half of the shell said he belongs to the boy who first saw the nut and this half belongs to the boy who picked it up.

[M.K. Lovell]

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

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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.

[M.K. Lovell]

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

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Before he was a reformer, Henry Barnard was a kid who hated the little red schoolhouse he attended in Hartford, Connecticut. He said he was a victim of.

[James Garfield]

A miserable district school.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Henry's father once brought him back an orange after being away at sea. An orange from a strange distant land. That brought him wonder out. There was a whole world to be discovered if he wasn't in school. When Henry was 12 in the 1820s, he hated school so much that he decided to run away with a friend. They planned to leave the following night, go to a seaport and find work as sailors. Henry's father, having overheard their plan through an open window, told Henry the next day that he could transfer out of his school. And he did. 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.

[James Garfield]

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.

[Jonathan Zimmerman]

What happened in the antebellum era, starting in the 1830s, is figures like Horace Mann and Henry Barnard started to advocate for something called a common school system.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

This became known as the common school movement. Basically free public schools in every state.

[Jonathan Zimmerman]

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

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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

[Jonathan Zimmerman]

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.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Of school year, shared requirements for teachers.

[Jonathan Zimmerman]

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

[James Garfield]

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

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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.

[James Garfield]

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

[Jonathan Zimmerman]

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

[Ramtin Arablouei]

But the common school movement had momentum and the bill passed and he eventually.

[Jonathan Zimmerman]

Became the secretary of their new state board of education, which of course he had advocated for.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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

[Jonathan Zimmerman]

The underlying motivation was civic. 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.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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

[M.K. Lovell]

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.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

American society in the 1830s. There was growing industrialization, a growing divide between rich and poor, and more and more immigration.

[M.K. Lovell]

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. A degree of nativism informed this movement. They were worried about people coming to the United States that did not share the same political views, did not share, share the same religious beliefs because so many people coming to the country were Catholic. 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.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Since Nat Turner's Rebellion in 1831, the country had been splitting further apart. In the north, calls for abolition were growing louder. 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.

[Christopher Spanner]

Many people would sneak out at night. They would learn from this kind of self taught teacher, someone who was already literate in the slave community. And then they would go ahead and resume their activities in the daylight hours as if nothing would have happened. Frederick Douglass, he learned from the mistress of his slaveholder.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

This is Christopher Spanner.

[Christopher Spanner]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah]

He's currently the dean of the graduate school of Education at Rutgers University.

[Christopher Spanner]

So as he shares in his autobiography There was a woman by the name of Mrs. Auld, a white face beaming.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

With the most kindly emotions.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

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

[Christopher Spanner]

And she, deeply religious, commenced to teach.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Me the ABC she assisted me in learning to spell words of three or four letters.

[Christopher Spanner]

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

[M.K. Lovell]

It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable and of no value to his master as to himself. It could do him no good but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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

[Christopher Spanner]

Douglass took this as a sign that he was doing something very good, good for himself.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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

[Christopher Spanner]

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

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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

[Christopher Spanner]

So Douglas was determined to learn to read regardless, knowing that he couldn't go to Mrs. Auld 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. 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 can spell this word better than you. And so the side of a barn became the chalkboard, A stick in the dirt became a pencil. And rote memorization and competition test allowed him to gain the acquisitions of reading and writing in ways that others simply would not. Douglass became so literate that he literally wrote his own path to freedom that when he stepped on the train to escape from slavery, he wrote himself a pass that allowed him to escape. And that's how he made his way out of Maryland and into the Northeast and eventually landing in a place like Massachusetts.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

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

[Christopher Spanner]

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. 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. And so they only had to look around them to see that a literate person could read contracts. A literate person could ensure that they would not only do, but they would be able to do the other kinds of labor that required a little bit more to mind than the hands.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Reading was a gateway to freedom, education, a way to enlighten and influence and when Northern troops began arriving in Alexandria, Virginia in 1861, the black community began opening up schools there.

[Christopher Spanner]

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.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

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

[M.K. Lovell]

You're listening to Throughline. My name is Deborah. I'm calling from Honolulu, Hawaii and I am totally delighted by your coverage of the Constitutional amendment. I'm a political scientist and you are doing a terrific job. Thank you.

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[M.K. Lovell]

Part two Shame, Shame, Shame.

[Unknown Speaker]

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.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

On June 8, 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.

[Unknown Speaker]

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

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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

[M.K. Lovell]

Schoolteachers are going to be the ones that are able to rebuild southern culture and rebuild our society in a way that is more cohesive. Basically, where soldiers set down their arms, Schoolteachers need to pick up their books.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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.

[Christopher Spanner]

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

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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. The bureau supported newly freed african americans as well as southern white refugees who were formerly in the confederacy, Particularly poor southern whites.

[M.K. Lovell]

So people that did not have plantations, did not have slaves, did not have access to the money and wealth the.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Bureau provided food, shelter, clothing, medical aid, and schooling. As part of that effort, the bureau also offered military protection against people who opposed. Opposed black education.

[M.K. Lovell]

It was always this very fine line that congress had to walk. 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? Oh, are the federal schools going to be used to train this political force in the south?

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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. 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.

[M.K. Lovell]

Congress reconvened after the civil War and 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.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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

[M.K. Lovell]

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.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And the radical Republicans had every intention of enfranchising southern black people. So things that we might consider very basic education today, knowing how to count, being able to read and write, were.

[M.K. Lovell]

Essential 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.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

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.

[Unknown Speaker]

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.

[Jonathan Zimmerman]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Garfield is basically saying that the department would keep track of how schools were being managed and what teaching methods they were using. 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 because remember, up until this point point, local communities handled their own education systems.

[M.K. Lovell]

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. That was his opinion, but he had.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

A plan for that. The department would gather statistics. At this time, statistics was an emerging science that Garfield fully embraced.

[M.K. Lovell]

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

[Unknown Speaker]

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

[M.K. Lovell]

So his opinion was that this bureau would have the ability to create a fairly uniform national system and thus 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.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

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

[Unknown Speaker]

We must pour upon them all the light of our public schools. We must make them intelligent, industrious, patriotic citizens, or they will drag us and our children down to their level.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

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

[M.K. Lovell]

The south 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. And so they followed the plantation leaders into the war because they were susceptible to demagoguery.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

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

[Nat Turner]

Civilization is nothing more than education.

[M.K. Lovell]

So one figure that is an interesting part of this debate is Minnesota representative named Ignatius Donnelly. We excel the past because we have select a wider field of observation.

[Nat Turner]

We possess the accumulations of a greater.

[M.K. Lovell]

Number of generations of workers.

[Nat Turner]

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

[M.K. Lovell]

At this point, he is just a zealous advocate for schools. We thus strike out at one blow a large proportion of the ignorance of the South. We shame the whites into an effort to educate themselves.

[Nat Turner]

And we prepare thus both classes for.

[M.K. Lovell]

The proper exercise of the rights of suffrage in order to make education universal. What do we want? What is the crying necessity of this nation today? Another figure in the house was a man named Samuel Moulton from Illinois. Why, sir, we want a head. We want a pure fountain from which a pure stream can be poured upon all the states. 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. The very object of establishing a Bureau of Education is that these different systems may be brought together. 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. 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.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

But not everyone was on board with these ideas.

[M.K. Lovell]

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.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

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.

[M.K. Lovell]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Remember, southern Democrats weren't present. So it was northerners like Rogers who were making these comments.

[Christopher Spanner]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah]

The Democrats that were left in the room pointed out that a federal education department was never written into the Constitution. 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. And so they feared what the Radical Republicans would end up doing if the Department of Education was established.

[M.K. Lovell]

That this was going to empower the federal government to have an undue influence on what children learned in the classroom. 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. 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. 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.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

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

[M.K. Lovell]

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.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

But Garfield doesn't back down.

[Unknown Speaker]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah]

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

[M.K. Lovell]

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.

[Unknown Speaker]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah]

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?

[M.K. Lovell]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah]

The following year, Johnson signs the bill. The first Department of Education comes into existence on March 2, 1867. It would be made up of one commissioner, three clerks and a small budget of $15,000, roughly $300,000 today. Now all that was left to do was to find the department a leader.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

I watched the progress of the bill through the House and Senate with the deepest interest, all the more from a presentiment that if it became a law that you would be placed at the.

[Unknown Speaker]

Head of the department.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah]

That's coming up.

[M.K. Lovell]

Hi, I'm angel from Aonia, Colorado and I listen to through line from NPR when I'm painting houses and it makes it feel like I'm not even working at all.

[Unknown Speaker]

This message comes from Strawberry Me. You've worked hard to get where you are, but what's next? Strawberry Me Career coaching helps professionals like you take the next big step with confidence by matching you with a certified career coach who understands your goals and challenges. This isn't just advice, it's a personalized, results driven approach to uncover hidden strengths, overcome obstacles and accelerate your career growth. Visit Strawberry Me NPR to claim your.

[Capital One]

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[M.K. Lovell]

Part 3 A collection of Floating Matters.

[James Garfield]

I have no prejudices of my own to impose on the country. It's been my aim to bring to bear the light of past and present experience. 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.

[Jonathan Zimmerman]

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

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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.

[Jonathan Zimmerman]

Made sense by this time he was the most prominent school leader or in the United States.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Barnard's dream of uniting the country through education was coming true. And he wrote to James, may you.

[James Garfield]

Live a thousand years and your shadow and that of your wife never be less. But I don't believe you will ever do a work more beneficial and fruitful.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And it wasn't just Barnard. His friends and colleagues were wrote him, full of optimism. A new educational era has opened upon us.

[M.K. Lovell]

Pride in your promotion and confidence in your success.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

It is an appointment eminently fit to be made.

[M.K. Lovell]

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

[Ramtin Arablouei]

They'd promised a lot. 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. 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.

[M.K. Lovell]

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

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And so Barnard continues putting out his journal. In it was everything from notes about school architecture and teacher training programs to information about schools in Europe and women's education. It was his entire vision for education in America. A vision that some lawmakers didn't ask for.

[M.K. Lovell]

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. That's a peculiar choice.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

And that wasn't the only issue.

[Jonathan Zimmerman]

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

[Ramtin Arablouei]

He didn't have a lot of help.

[M.K. Lovell]

This was not like a lucrative role by any stretch.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

He asked for more money.

[M.K. Lovell]

He was still paying a lot of money out of pocket, but Congress wouldn't.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Give it to him and he was complaining about it.

[Jonathan Zimmerman]

One of the controversies was Barnard asked for another clerk.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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

[M.K. Lovell]

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

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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

[M.K. Lovell]

He did receive office space, but he was shuffled around D.C. from office to office to where you would have people making jokes about it. He said he occupied an office over a restaurant. Well, is that anything against him? It is very convenient. And so there was this sense of like, what is Barnard doing? He's out of town a lot. 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.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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

[Unknown Speaker]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah]

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 gotta help me out here.

[Unknown Speaker]

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

[M.K. Lovell]

He starts preparing his report. 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.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

It was a lot and it was kind of random.

[M.K. Lovell]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah]

More than 800 pages.

[M.K. Lovell]

I have it pulled up here. I can read like some of the topics. European observations on American schools and education, Art education in the District of Columbia. It's just not focused. 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. It is a compilation and collection together of scraps. I will not say say scraps. I take that back because there is a speech in there from a member of Congress. And of course that is not scraps, but it is a collection together of floating matter.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Wow.

[M.K. Lovell]

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. And so people are looking at this and they're just like, what is it supposed to do exactly that will help some kids in a school somewhere.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Garfield was disappointed.

[M.K. Lovell]

It was not what he had envisioned.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

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

[M.K. Lovell]

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

[Jonathan Zimmerman]

What was happening was that in many ways they created this office as window dressing because they couldn't really do much without employees. And it was shortly after that that the whole thing comes unglued.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

This is but a glass eye.

[M.K. Lovell]

It has no sight in it.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

It has no power.

[M.K. Lovell]

It cannot inspect the system of education.

[Unknown Speaker]

Anywhere in the United States.

[James Garfield]

What is the Bureau of Education?

[Ramtin Arablouei]

It is the gathering up of these.

[M.K. Lovell]

Facts by a worn out man who.

[Christopher Spanner]

Embodies Them in his report.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

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.

[M.K. Lovell]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah]

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

[James Garfield]

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.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

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

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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

[Jonathan Zimmerman]

Here's another sad irony. I mean, the civil War, it is the engine of the creation of the state school system 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.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Wow. So it's like the introduction of the free public school system, but then the slow separation of the quality of that education.

[Jonathan Zimmerman]

Precisely. Which, let's remember, last for a century.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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. For example, before the Civil War, about 1 in 10 enslaved people were literate.

[Christopher Spanner]

If you get to 1900, roughly 40 years later, we're talking about 7 in 10 formerly enslaved people are now literate. That is massive. 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.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

As the federal government's role in education grew in the 20th and 21st 1st centuries, so have the arguments over the role it plays in schools.

[M.K. Lovell]

A lot of this anxiety over the role of the federal government in education is there, regardless of what the agency is doing. 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 in ways that it has not been in other countries. 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. 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. All of these anxieties, anxieties about coming into the local classroom and usurping the parents role, you know, all of that was there from the beginning and now we're having the exact same debates. I think that like early version of the Bureau that we saw in the 1800s is foreshadowing everything that we saw that came after.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

That's it for this week's show. I'm Rundab Dil Fatah.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

I'm Ramtin Arablouei and you've been listening to Throughline from npr.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

This episode was produced by me and.

[M.K. Lovell]

Me and Lawrence Wu, Julie Kane, Anya.

[Capital One]

Steinberg, Casey Minor, Christina Kim, Devon Kadayama, Irene Noguchi.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin vogel.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Thanks to D.L. blair, Luther Pearson, Justin Hicks, Cody Klasna, Ryan Muzzi, Paul Lancour, Amber Tse, Eli Blonde, Jonathan Bastian, Allison Grant, Bowie Alexander, Jason Davina, Gracia, Blaise Adler, Ivanbrook, and Shonari J. Edwards for their voiceover work. Thanks also to the New York University Archives.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

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

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which.

[M.K. Lovell]

Includes Anya Mizani, Naveed, Marvi, Sho Fujiwara.

[Ramtin Arablouei]

If you get a chance, check out Michael Studeman's book that's coming out soon called Absence of National Education Debates in the Reconstruction Congress. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write [e-mail] and make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify or the NPR app. That way you'll never miss an episode.

[Rund Abdelfattah]

Thanks for listening.

[Capital One]

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[Unknown Speaker]

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