Education in Cities

Education consumes a great portion of the waking hours of much of the world's urban population. Schools and universities shape the geography, economies, and social lives of cities, suburbs, and rural communities as much as any other institution. In 2001, public elementary and secondary school construction expenditures in the United States topped $44 billion, compared to a total budget of about $33 billion for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The majority of Americans' property taxes and much of their state and local wage taxes go to funding education, making it the foremost public service. Private and religious institutions make further investments in schooling and spur debates about the role of the state in civil society. Education is a hotly contested arena of urban life, as schools embody and refract Americans' deepest social, economic, and political concerns.

Historians argue that education is far more than just schooling. Learning takes place in many settings, from households and workplaces to formal institutions such as libraries, museums, child-care centers, and summer camps. However, most histories of education focus on schools, since they constitute the most deliberate, comprehensive attempts to address educational needs. Schools themselves take diverse forms. Public, private, and religious institutions of elementary, secondary, and higher education offer day, night, and weekend classes for commuter and boarding students. Many schools cater to specific populations and types of education, from students with learning disabilities to nonnative speakers of English, from high school vocational programs to professional training in university graduate schools.

Schools' roles in urban society have varied among different communities in cities and suburbs, as well as across different eras of American history. In the colonial era, churches ran most schools, and the earliest colleges trained clergymen. The mercantile elite of Boston, New York, and other large centers founded academies and colleges in the 18th century to train their growing professional classes. Some also established charity schools to serve the poor. These schools formed part of larger complexes of educational institutions. In mid-18th-century Philadelphia, for example, Benjamin Franklin and his colleagues founded the Library Company; the American Philosophical Society, the foremost center of Enlightenment science in the Americas; the Academy, College, and Charitable Schools of Philadelphia (later University of Pennsylvania); and Pennsylvania Hospital, the first teaching hospital on the continent. These institutions played a major part in making Philadelphia the political, economic, and cultural capital of the Revolutionary era.

Although schooling would be largely the purview of individual states, education became a national priority in the formative years of the United States. In the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the Continental Congress mandated schooling as a means of socializing a national polity, even as settlers moved into the “wilderness” of the West. In cities of the Early Republic, the decline of apprenticeship left an educational vacuum for the working classes. From Buffalo to Baltimore, local philanthropic societies organized the first large-scale schools open to the public at the dawn of the 19th century. Most of these schools employed the “monitorial” (or Lancasterian) system of British Quaker Joseph Lancaster, wherein a master teacher trained older pupils, the monitors, who in turn taught the other students.

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