There was once a New England politician with an idea. Social and economic changes had made education more important than ever, but access was stubbornly limited to the children of the rich. The answer, this politician thought, was simple: more years of public education, universal, free for all, and provided by the government.
Of course, this idea didn’t go over well. “How are you going to pay for it?” snarled its opponents. “Isn’t the idea that ordinary people needed extra years of schooling elitist?” they said. And, of course, the perennial complaint: “Why should I pay for someone else’s child?”
Sound familiar? It should. Behind Medicare for All, free college was the brightest dividing line of the 2020 Democratic primary. It proved so popular that Joe Biden—not originally a supporter—adopted a watered down version of the plan for his general election platform. But this story isn’t about the 21st century; it’s about the 19th. The New England politician isn’t Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren; it’s Horace Mann. And the idea isn’t free college; it’s free elementary school.
We’ve been at this for a long time….
Public education has always been controversial. Free elementary school may seem perfectly natural to us today, but it was once the subject of vicious and intractable political debates, as was the establishment of free, universal high school.
In the face of this resistance, however, activists and reformers persevered and won. Thanks to their efforts, the story of public education in America, until recently, has been one of continuous expansion. In the late 18th century, when the United States was first created, there was almost no public education at all. By the mid 19th century, just a few generations later, free elementary school was nearly universal. Just a few generations after that came free high school.
By the mid 20th century, free college looked like the next logical step. Scholars confidently predicted that college and university would soon become as common and freely provided as elementary and high school.
But it didn’t happen. The one-two punch of stagflation and the Reagan Revolution buried hopes for free college so deep that for a long time we forgot all about it. Now that the free college movement has been revived and picked up by politicians like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren it is treated like a strange new idea. But really, free college is just the next step in our long American tradition of expanding public education.