Sleeping Peacefully?

Overview & Synopsis

American public school education was founded, in large measure, on the ideals of Horace Mann's leadership of Massachusetts schools in the 1800s. Later in that same century, private schools began to emerge and serve those disaffected with Mann's "common schools," and tension between publicly funded and privately paid education arose. This perhaps inevitable friction continued throughout the 1900s and remains pronounced today. The author of this essay is director (superintendent) of an American/International school in Holland; he revisited this public versus private education debate as part of a Klingenstein Fellowship at Teachers College, Columbia University, January-February 2009. Through on-site visits to alternatives to traditional public schools--including charter schools, parochial schools, and schools-within-schools--the author considers whether these alternatives are threats to Mann's ideal and concludes with an examination of whether American/International schools such as his own support or undermine the goals of universal public education in a democratic society.