Governments engage in social engineering when they create policies and programs to influence (i.e., govern) their citizens’ behavior. All governing, including public education, is an act of social engineering. How social engineering is implemented in U.S. public education has evolved over the years and will continue to do so as the expansion of ESAs (education savings accounts) transforms the public education market.
The U.S. Postal Service, which the Second Continental Congress created in 1775, functioned as the nation’s first public education system. Its social engineering task was to expand basic literacy and help unify a diverse and isolated rural population.
Public education’s next social engineering effort was in response to the large numbers of Catholics immigrating to the U.S. in the mid-1800s. State governments began passing mandatory school attendance laws and using public schools to teach Catholic children how to be good Protestants and thereby good Americans.
As industrialization and urbanization expanded in the later 1800s, the government started managing public schools as if they were industrial factories to teach children how to be good industrial workers.
Well into the 1900s, government used public schools to perpetuate traditional gender roles by forcing female teachers to resign when they got married and later in the mid-1900s forcing married women to resign when they got pregnant. The junior high school I attended in the late 1960s required all male students to learn how to use woodworking tools and all female students how to plan meals, cook, and sew.
For much of our country’s history, the government used public schools to implement and help perpetuate Jim Crow laws. Black students were prohibited from attending my all-white high school until my junior year (1971-72).
The government’s social engineering via public education in the 1700s and early 1800s was not controversial, but beginning in the mid-1800s public education’s social engineering became contentious and remains so today.
Improvements in how some states are implementing public education may allow us to begin de-escalating the controversies surrounding how government uses public education to further its social engineering goals.
Thanks to the education choice movement, public education is becoming more diverse and decentralized. Today nearly half of Florida’s K-12 students do not attend their assigned public schools. Our Florida nonprofit, Step Up For Students, will fund about 450,000 full-time flexible spending accounts (i.e., ESAs) this school year and another 30,000 part-time ESAs. Other states are also funding increasing numbers of ESAs.
ESAs enable families to spend their children’s public education dollars on a wide variety of educational products and services in addition to public and private schools. This family-controlled spending is attracting diverse and innovative providers into the public education market and creating a feedback loop in which more demand is attracting more supply, which in turn is attracting more demand, which is then attracting more supply.
Families accessing this expanding variety of educational options are decentralizing public education as fewer students attend government schools, thus limiting how comprehensive government’s social engineering efforts can be. The days of government using public education to teach children how to think about issues such as religion, race, or gender roles are probably ending as families reassert control over how and when their children learn about non-academic topics.
As government’s ability to influence how children think about cultural issues through public education diminishes, its emphasis will shift to ensuring children master the literacy skills necessary to be successful adults and giving families the support they need to guide their children’s personal and social development.
There is a back-to-the-future feel to these changes. Families were responsible for all aspects of their children’s education until government took away much of this responsibility in the mid-to-late 1800s and kept it for the next 150 years. The modern education choice movement is helping families regain this control.
Government social engineering will always be part of the public education market. But going forward, this social engineering will be tempered by greater parental control over their children’s education. Finding the proper synergy between parental empowerment and government social engineering will be an important, ongoing process as public education continues to diversify and decentralize.
