AILSA CHANG, HOST:
School and the federal government's role in it has been a topic of debate in this country since the very first Department of Education was created. Rund Abdelfatah and Ramtin Arablouei, the hosts of NPR's Throughline podcast, bring us the story of the department's birth in the wake of the Civil War. And a note - this story includes archival text read by voice actors.
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RAMTIN ARABLOUEI: On June 8, 1866, James Garfield, a representative from Ohio, takes the floor to make the case for something that the nation had never seen before - a national Department of Education.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As James Garfield) Schoolhouses are less expensive than rebellions. A tenth of our national debt expended in public education 50 years ago would have saved us the blood and treasure of the late war. A far less sum may save our children from still greater calamity.
ARABLOUEI: Garfield was speaking to a Congress that looked very different than it had just a few years prior. The Civil War had just ended. Reconstruction had begun. Even the building was undergoing a renovation. At this point, many Southern lawmakers had left or had been expelled by Congress during the Civil War and were not even in the room when Garfield spoke. The hard work of rebuilding the country was beginning. Garfield and others argued that teachers should lead the way.
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MICHAEL STEUDEMAN: Schoolteachers are going to be the ones that are able to rebuild Southern culture and rebuild our society in a way that is more cohesive.
ARABLOUEI: This is Michael Steudeman. He's an assistant professor of rhetoric at Penn State University who studies the history of education policy in the U.S.
STEUDEMAN: Basically, where soldiers set down their arms, schoolteachers need to pick up their books.
ARABLOUEI: And the need was urgent. The 13th Amendment abolishing slavery had just been ratified in 1865, and the 14th Amendment granting equal protection was on its way.
CHRISTOPHER SPAN: And the greatest clamor coming from 4 million people who were enslaved in the South is this demand that they be properly educated to become citizens of this country.
ARABLOUEI: This is Christopher Span. He's a historian of American education.
SPAN: And it's amazing 'cause it's not just the 4 million newly freed people that they're working with.
ARABLOUEI: Many white people in the South also had no schooling.
STEUDEMAN: Particularly poor Southern whites, so people that did not have plantations, did not have slaves, did not have access to the money and wealth.
ARABLOUEI: At this point, the South had virtually no schools compared to the North, and James Garfield saw this as an opportunity.
STEUDEMAN: Congress reconvened after the Civil War, and there was a sort of flurry of proposals that - it was like everybody was ready with all these plans for, like, how are we going to do reconstruction? Let's go.
ARABLOUEI: Education was important for cultural reasons and also for very practical ones.
STEUDEMAN: Any hope they had of a meaningful political coalition in the South depended on Black people having the right to vote and the right to participate in politics.
RUND ABDELFATAH: And the radical Republicans, a faction of the Republican Party committed to fighting for equal treatment of the formerly enslaved, had every intention of enfranchising Southern Black people. So things that we might consider very basic education today - knowing how to count, being able to read and write - were essential.
STEUDEMAN: That you can read the ballot and be able to vote for the candidate that you want to because you have enough literacy to be able to select that correctly.
ABDELFATAH: Which brings us back to that June day in 1866. Garfield opens up the debate in the House by describing his vision for a federal Department of Education.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As James Garfield) That there shall be established at the city of Washington a Department of Education for the purpose of collecting such statistics and facts as shall show the condition and progress of education in the several states and territories.
ABDELFATAH: Going into the debate, Garfield knows that he has to tread carefully because up until this point, local communities handled their own education systems.
STEUDEMAN: So his position was, if we come out with a Bureau of Education that tries to impose upon the country its will, that tries to say to states, here's how you're going to educate, people will reject that. That was his opinion.
ABDELFATAH: But he had a plan for that. The department would gather statistics. At this time, statistics was an emerging science that Garfield fully embraced.
STEUDEMAN: In his view, statistics were basically like interpreting God's word, in a sense. It was, this is revealing the shape of the social world to us so that we can make very wise political decisions. So he had a ton of faith in what could happen if schools were approached in a way that emphasized statistics.
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As James Garfield) According to the census of 1860, there were 1,200,000 inhabitants in the United States over 21 years of age who could not read nor write, and 800,000 of those were American-born citizens.
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ABDELFATAH: One by one, the Republicans step onto the floor to make their case for the Department of Education.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As Ignatius Donnelly) Civilization is nothing more than education.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As Samuel Moulton) The very object of establishing a Bureau of Education is that these different systems may be brought together.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As Ignatius Donnelly) We thus strike out at one blow a large proportion of the ignorance of the South. We shame the whites into an effort to educate themselves, and we prepare, thus, both classes for the proper exercise of the rights of suffrage.
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As Samuel Moulton) We want all these school systems all over the land brought under one head so that they may be nationalized, vitalized and made uniform and harmonious as far as possible.
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ABDELFATAH: But not everyone was on board with these ideas.
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UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As Andrew Rogers) I am content, sir, to leave this matter of education where our fathers left it, where the history of this country has left it - to the school systems of the different towns, cities and states. Let them carry out and regulate the system of education without interference.
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ABDELFATAH: Southern Democrats weren't present, so it was Northern Democrats who were making these comments.
SPAN: And many of them come from school communities where local control is the ultimate form of control.
ABDELFATAH: The Democrats that were left in the room pointed out that a federal education department was never written into the Constitution. And after hearing all the radical Republicans talk about just how much this new department would do to change the country, well, they didn't like the idea of handing the federal government so much power. And so they feared what the radical Republicans would end up doing if the Department of Education was established.
STEUDEMAN: That this was going to empower the federal government to have an undue influence on what children learned in the classroom.
ABDELFATAH: In the end, the radical Republicans prevail. The following year, President Andrew Johnson signs the bill. The first Department of Education comes into existence on March 2, 1867. It would be made up of one commissioner, three clerks and a small budget of $15,000 - roughly $300,000 today. And it would only last about a year.
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CHANG: That was NPR's Throughline team. You can listen to their full episode wherever you get your podcasts.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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