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The Making of Our Wisconsin Schools
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School Patterns
The making of our Wisconsin schools does not fall into a simple pattern easy to formulate in words. It may be viewed as a crazy quilt or an intricately woven Persian rug but the truth lies between these two extremes. Among the influences that combined to make Wisconsin schools were the Prussian idea of a highly centralized and tightly organized system working from the top down, localism as expressed in the district system stemming from New England, and the intermediate county organization deriving from the southwest settlements. Although they differed in organization, they agreed in accepting Governor DeWitt Clinton’s statement made in 1826 - “The first duty of the government and the surest evidence of good government is the encouragement of education.”
The Ordinance of 1787 and the constitution are the legal bases of our schools; the land grants gave them a financial start; and the district system without state control was gradually modified with the acceptance of the necessity for state support and state direction. The University at the top, the elementary school at the bottom with the high school between; teachers’ colleges, county normal schools, Stout Institute, and private colleges; vocational schools and various types of adult education; nursery schools and kindergartens, trade schools, and county schools of agriculture, and the Wisconsin Institute of Technology were evolved in answer to the real changing needs of the state. Of course, there was no plan laid down from the beginning, no chart or blueprint for a century of development. Probably no one would be more amazed at what he found than would Michael Frank if he were to return to view the modern scene. At times local interests seem paramount and at others the need of central direction is in the foreground. Yet it is all a single enterprise with no part expendable. Attempts to deal with education as if it were like other forms of government are likely to ignore its historical development.
Wisconsin, from a statistical analysis of objective data made by Hughes and Lancelot in 1946, ranks twenty-first among the states in ability to support public schools, and seventeenth in efficiency. The apparent rank as to general educational performance is seventeen. “By a combination of effort and efficiency, both somewhat above the average, it has attained a rank somewhat above the average.” The challenge of 1948 is to make better schools for a better state, nation and world.
This then is a short summary of the development of education in Wisconsin. It is far from complete, but it may serve as a stimulus to further study.
Posted March 6, 1998
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