We express our belief in the truth of two apparently contradictory statements: First, the State school system never had so many able, persistent, and sincere enemies as at the present time. Secondly, this system, as a whole, was never really more firmly intrenched in popular confidence and popular need than at the present time. We will explain.

1. Our school system grew out of a conviction of its necessity. The general intelligence which is the axiomatic basis of a popular government like ours, can only be secured by a system of thickly and broadly scattered free schools. Experience and reflection both proved that private enterprise was inadequate for the great and necessary work. The State only was equal to so prodigious a task, as the State only is equal to the necessities of war, of executive, and judicial administration, and of gigantic systems of public improvement.

The vast bulk of the people have, up to the present time, been satisfied with the public-school system, as a whole. It has reasonably met the need for which it was founded. But as the population and wealth of the country have increased with astonishing rapidity, as new industrial and social conditions have been rapidly evolved, the school system has not kept pace with them. The system that was reasonably adequate in the earlier years of its operation, is now seen to be defective in some important details. It does not satisfactorily meet the new, more numerous and more complex conditions that are crowding upon us.

Hence enemies, interested and disinterested, sincere and guileful, proclaim it a failure and, demand its overthrow. The New York Tribune has been publishing numerous letters from such, many of them exceedingly able, and nearly all of them containing in their charges more or less of unpleasant truth. There is dissatisfaction in New England. The Rev. Dr. Peabody, Prof. Everett, and
Mr. Frank W. Bird, of Massachusetts, are said to be among the opponentsof the present system.

Some of our readers will remember the bold and earnest letter of Gerritt Smith, advocating the entire overthrow of the public-school system, and the relegating to private enterprise of that with which the State has no right to meddle. Upon this letter the JOURNAL commented at some length two years ago. Not a few first-class men, in various parts of the country, are today advocating the same thing with like earnestness, ability and sincerity.

Then a respectable portion of our Catholic fellow citizens are with increasing vigor and effect assaulting the same system. Take an illustration from our own State. On the 18th of last month Rev. H. F. Fairbanks, of Whitewater, delivered, in St. John’s Cathedral, Milwaukee, in the presence of an unusually large and attentive audience, a very able and apparently very sincere arraignment of our public-school system as infidel and demoralizing in its influence, and not adapted to secure the ends sought either by good Christians or good statesmen. This address, or lecture, has just been published in full in the New York Freeman’s Journal and Catholic Register, a leading church paper, whose editor requests
for it “the careful perusal of every Catholic.”

These attacks cannot be ignored. They ought not to be. They should be known to every teacher, and to every friend of the public-school system in the State and country. Only through knowledge of them will come ability to repel them when undeserved, and to remedy the defects which deservedly invite the assaults.

2. The public-school system is so firmly grounded in the needs and convictions of the mass of the people of this country, that nothing will ever overthrow it but persistent refusal to recognize the defects that exist, and to apply the remedies which the changed conditions of the country demand.

These will be applied. Popular opinion will recognize their necessity. The public-school system will not fall, but will be made stronger and more symmetrical and enduring by the very blasts that beat against its now somewhat disproportioned limbs.

For ourselves, we freely acknowledge many of the defects pointed out by the enemies of the system, and instead of hurling bitter words against the latter, we cordially thank them for the aid they unconsciously give the true friends of public-school education in their efforts to improve the latter through an aroused and enlightened public sentiment.

We shall hereafter consider somewhat in detail the charges now being made against the public schools, shall strive to show how many are false and how many are true, and to indicate as well as we are able the reforms in the system that will prove far wiser and safer than its overthrow.

Conditions in the state’s school buildings were likewise dismal. An 1853 survey of the state’s 1,730 schoolhouses found that 600 had no blackboards. The vast majority of the school buildings were valued below $150, with many below $50 and one officially listed as worth three cents. The state superintendent filed a report that reflected the WTA’s concerns:

Nearly 99 out of every hundred of our school houses should be
torn down or greatly improved, and given a different location.
As they now are they are stinted in the ground they occupy, stinted in room, stinted in God’s free air and in short destitute of almost every thing that ought to be regarded prerequisite in a place of education.

In the association’s first 20 years, while building its membership and weathering the hardships of the Civil War, it formulated and advocated for such forward-thinking measures as the need for primary schools, free education, school libraries, compulsory school attendance, teachers’ colleges, teacher certification, and a state board of education.

In 1921, the association reorganized at the behest of the National Education Association, electing delegates and officers. The first Representative Assembly became legal in 1923, the same year the association hired its first executive secretary and full-time staff and established its first headquarters in Madison.

Another important precedent was set in 1921: the first successful teachers association suit against a school board. The Fort Atkinson Teachers Association sued the Fort Atkinson School Board for trying to change the grades of a prominent citizen’s child. The teachers won and the grades remained unchanged.

When the Great Depression hit, business owners who had always opposed public investments in education prevailed upon panicked lawmakers to enact a series of draconian anti-education and anti-teacher measures. Conservative organizations opposed to education seemed to appear overnight, and their lobbying led to drastic decreases in teacher salaries, school spending, course offerings, and teacher freedom, and drastic increases in class size and teacher workloads. Some towns threw out teacher contracts while others simply stopped paying teachers or paid them only in scrip.

Despite financial hardships of its own during this time, the WTA devoted $25,000 to a public relations campaign that emphasized the economic shortsightedness of divesting in education. The association’s message was one that reminded voters and lawmakers that it would make the economic downturn permanent if it failed to educate the next generation of workers, leaders and taxpayers.

By 1937, public outcry over the deterioration in education was sufficient to convince legislators to restore virtually everything that had been taken away at the onset of the crash, and to invest in gains for disabled students, higher education and school transportation.

These 19th and early 20th century debates would be staged again and again as the organization evolved into a union in the 1960s and continued to advocate for public education and public school employees in the 21st century.

The first WTA president, J.G. McMynn of Racine, gave an address at the association’s first annual meeting in August 1854, articulating his vision for the association’s mission and reason for existing. Putting aside changes in the conventions of speech and punctuation in the intervening years, President McMynn could have just as easily written his speech in August 2001:

The object of our organization is declared to be, our own improvement, and the advancement of public instruction throughout the State—an object that one would think must rouse like “a bugle blast,” the most indifferent, and urge forward to greater effort, the most zealous.

Much has been said and much remains to be said on the subject of education. Truths are evolved by discussion. Thoughts, that are now the richest heritage of mankind, “had never been born,” but by discussion. It is only in view of principles well settled, that the people can act efficiently. Especially is this true of educational truths. That there are a large number in our state that understand the relation of education to our general, as well as individual prosperity, none will deny; but, that the majority, even of those who mold public opinion, fully comprehend this subject in its details, none will affirm.

There are certain truths of vast importance, which the people
of this state have nobly, solemnly and fully recognized. Among these is the great truth, that education should be secured to all. Our constitution declares that the public schools of this state shall be free. Of course, dependent upon this, is the principle that “the property of the state should educate the children of the state. We have here the foundation laid broad and deep, and it is our duty to raise upon it a superstructure, that shall be worthy such a support.”

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