Education is one of the few common experiences that truly binds Americans together. Virtually everyone today has spent at least some time in an institution of education, and many of us for a long part of our lives: almost 90 percent of young people who attend high school now graduate, and about half of Americans aged twenty-five to twenty-nine have at least an associate degree. Most of us spend a lot of time in the education system, and by choice or by necessity, we see the value of it.

But why do we value education and what do we hope to get out of it? Because our institutions change so slowly — one’s experience in, say, elementary school, is not that different than that of one’s children’s — public education can seem to have a timeless quality, as if we have always valued it for the same reasons. But the reasons American politicians, policymakers, intellectuals, and working people have advocated for more investment in public education has changed dramatically over time.

In the nation’s first century, republican-minded leaders like Thomas Jefferson sought public education to help develop political independence. Though their vision was far from universal, they nonetheless expanded the circle of democracy, and they viewed education as providing the training to help do that. Social reformers like Horace Mann sought investment in education to cultivate dispositions to help working people navigate the rising inequality brought on by market capitalism, but public education as job training was mostly an afterthought. Republicans like Abraham Lincoln supported investment in colleges and universities to provide both “liberal and practical” education, and union activists such as Margaret Haley in the Progressive Era saw public education as teaching students to build industrial democracy.