Cooling on Schooling

It’s telling that schooled once meant becoming educated, today it’s slang for getting humiliated.

Two hundred and nine years ago, in an infant republic, a great American president observed: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

One hundred and sixty-three years ago, another great American president signed the Morrill Act establishing land grant colleges. This was done the year after the Civil War commenced, a matter of months before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. He signed the legislation over the objections of senators like Minnesota’s little-remembered Henry Mower Rice, who squealed “we want no fancy farmers, we want no fancy mechanics.” That great American president knew what needed to accompany the end of slavery. Speaking in Milwaukee, he declared: “Free Labor insists on universal education.”

Eighty-seven years ago, with the Great Depression wreaking havoc and world war looming on the horizo…