The Declaration did not need government schooling
It is a common refrain among government schooling advocates that public education—almost always meaning public schooling—is the “cornerstone of our democracy.” Public schools are what ensure that we have an enlightened citizenry capable of self-government. But there’s a problem: The key building blocks of American “democracy”—states with republican forms of government, the Constitution establishing a federal republic, and the Declaration of Independence that annunciates that government’s purpose is to protect “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—were all in place well before the common schooling movement began in the late 1830s.
How was a democratic revolution, predicated on abstract ideas such as liberty and constitutional bulwarks to uphold it, able to occur without free, universal government schooling? Many factors were at work, but two major ones were that Americans tended to value education, and they were politically and civically minded.
The Declaration of Independence was a product of the Enlightenment, a period of freer thought and action, with roots in the spread of knowledge and ideas made possible by invention of the printing press in the 1440s. The nation’s Founders were Enlightenment people, consuming everything from books on the republics of antiquity, to treatises by Thomas Hobbes and Montesquieu, to Cato’s Letters by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon.
But it was not just elites being exposed to all sorts of ideas. So, too, were everyday Americans.
When the first successful English colonies were planted in the early 17th century, the land was basically a wilderness and the small numbers of colonists were pioneers. In this state, there was little time or reason to engage in deep reading or political discussion. The demands of daily life were too basic and pressing—food, shelter, fuel for the winter, defense—and the population too small to support publishing.
But that did not last.
The first printing press arrived in Massachusetts in 1638. The first successful newspaper—the Boston News-Letter—launched in 1704. By 1740 there were 16 newspapers in the British colonies, and by 1775 there were approximately 37. Benjamin Franklin made a handsome return selling a publication for the masses: Poor Richard’s Almanack. Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense, which sold about 500,000 copies in a country with a population of only about 2.5 million, spurred on the Revolution. Historian Bernard Bailyn has documented that pamphlets of all types were ubiquitous around the time of the Revolution. And the Declaration of Independence itself was eventually published in 29 newspapers, bringing word of independence across the expanse of colonies in revolt against the Crown’s authority.
All of this happened without widespread common schooling. It happened because the people cared about knowledge and they cared about political ideas.
We should not put too fine a point on this. Colonial America was not a land of universal enlightenment or literacy. The United States still is not—about 4 percent of American adults are functionally illiterate and another 13 percent have low literacy—even with more than a century of free, compulsory, public schooling. Also, government sometimes compelled and funded education. There were laws that called on parents to provide education to their children, while government assistance could and did go to everything from town schools—which were required in Massachusetts and Connecticut—to schools of various religious denominations, to “dame schools” run by older women, and even schools placed on fields with soil exhausted from cultivation.
Of course, literacy was not nearly as integral to life in the colonial period as today—most people were farmers, and pioneers do not tend to encounter a lot of bookstores. There was likely neither strong impetus, nor opportunity, for many Americans to read. Nonetheless, it has been estimated that by 1755 about two-thirds of Virginians and Pennsylvanians were literate, as were around 85 percent of New Englanders.
Why relatively high literacy given its limited utility?
First, culture. The colonies in New England started with a strong baseline of literacy because Puritans thought it was crucial to understand the word of God. And when population densities became great enough that running schools was practical, New Englanders and others did so. Large populations are also needed for publishing to be profitable, and until there is something to read there is limited incentive to become literate.
By the time of the Revolution, Americans had the necessary combination of culture and population concentration for publishing to take off. Americans had also become different people than the English: more rough and self-reliant. Much of the pamphleteering so popular at the time reflected that, as well as a growing fear that the constitution of liberty colonists had enjoyed as Englishmen was crumbling as the British elite became less virtuous and more self-serving. And even illiterates were often politically engaged, gathering to hear news read aloud in taverns and coffeehouses.
Combine these things, and it should be no surprise that even the Founders who eventually advocated for greater public provision of education, such as John Adams and Noah Webster, paid homage to the enlightenment of Revolutionary-era Americans.
In answer to a question whether the “common people in America” were in danger of falling prey to “skilful politicians,” Adams responded in 1780 that one major protection against that happening is that “there is no country where the common people, I mean the tradesmen, the husbandmen, and the laboring people, have such advantages of education as in [the United States].”
In 1787, in a pamphlet supporting the proposed Constitution, Webster—author of the famous “blue-backed speller” that by the end of the 19th century had sold approximately 100 million copies and followed Americans to the frontier—wrote, “In no country, is education so general—in no country, have the body of the people such a knowledge of the rights of men and the principles of government. This knowledge, joined with a keen sense of liberty and a watchful jealousy, will guard our constitutions, and awaken the people to an instantaneous resistance of encroachments.”
The Declaration of Independence was not drafted by elites for only elite consumption. It was a statement for all Americans, and the public was prepared to receive it. Not because government had educated and conditioned them to, but largely because the people sought to empower themselves.
Neal McCluskey directs the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom and is co-editor of the new book Fighting for the Freedom to Learn: Examining the Nation’s Centuries-Old School Choice Movement.
