Hello and welcome to this day, a history show from Radiotopia. My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, June 26, 1868, the federal government kills off the Department of Education. That's right,

folks, over 150 years ago, a big fight over the

federal government overseeing schooling in this country. Now, of course, I'm going to just

introduce the current context and resonance here right off the bat, which is that the Donald

Trump administration has talked a lot about wanting to fully eliminate the Department of Education.

And in their argument, you sometimes hear proponents say something like, you know,

the DOE has only existed since the 1970s.

But that is not technically true, as we are going to discuss.

For a little over a year after the Civil War, there was indeed a federal Department of Education,

and the fight over it looked an awful lot like the fight over it taking

place today. So let's go to 1867, 1868, look at why the DOE was founded and just as quickly

why opponents started to say, no thank you. Get out of our schools. Here, as always, Nicole

Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wowsley.

Hello there.

Hello, Jody.

Hey there.

Really, really fascinating story, really interesting moment and just full of all these kind of same as it ever was arguments.

But to bring us up to, you know, this moment, obviously the wake of the Civil War,

let's do a, and I'm saddling you with this, Nikki, a capsule history of kind of the approach to education in this country up until this moment.

A hundred years of education in the United States.

All right.

...