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The Foundation of Universal Education

In the 20th century, the United States opened wide the schoolhouse doors to the vast majority of its young people. But those advances built on a solid foundation that had been established long before, when the nation embraced the principle of free, universal public education.

"It goes back to the New England tradition of literacy," says the historian Daniel J. Boorstin, "and the belief that all young people should be inducted into the ideas that govern the nation and the community."

In Colonial times, many towns had schools, but attendance was strictly voluntary, and parents usually paid a fee, notes Carl F. Kaestle, a professor and historian at Brown University. School subjects generally were confined to reading, writing, and arithmetic. And students in rural areas might attend for only a...