The First Department of Education

Throughline

NPR

Society & Culture, History, Documentary

4.7 • 15K Ratings

🗓️ 12 June 2025

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Whose job is it to educate Americans? Congress created the first Department of Education just after the Civil War as a way to help reunify a broken country. A year later, it was basically shut down. But the story of that first department's birth – and death – set the stage for everything that's come since.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	For he who knoweth his master's will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes. You've asked me to give a history of the motives which induced me to undertake the late insurrection.
0:45.3	In my childhood, a circumstance occurred which made an indelible impression on my mind. Hold me as I stand in the heavens.
0:48.3	I surely would be a prophet as the Lord has shown me things that had happened before my burden.
1:01.0	We determined to enter the house secretly.
1:10.0	Heart got a ladder and set it against the chimney on which I ascended and hoisting a window
1:18.3	entered and came downstairs.
1:24.4	Unbarred the door and removed the guns from their places.
1:28.8	It was then observed that I must spill the first blood.
1:36.7	What you just heard was written in a pamphlet called The Confessions of Nat Turner.
1:42.3	It was written by a white lawyer days before Turner's execution for the crime of
1:46.9	insurrection.
1:48.5	While scholars have debated its accuracy, what is known for sure is that over the course
1:53.9	of an August night in 1831, Nat Turner led a revolt of enslaved black people that ended in the killing of at least 55 white men, women, and children.
2:05.7	It was something that white slave owners had always feared.
2:09.6	And in its wake, slaveholding states zeroed in on one major culprit.
2:15.3	Literacy.
2:16.8	Nat Turner knew how to read.
2:19.7	He was deemed to be a literate slave, and he used his literacy to lead an assault
2:24.9	against whites in Virginia.
2:27.6	The manner in which I learned to read and write not only had great influence on my own
2:33.6	mind, as I acquired it with the most perfect ease.
2:38.5	Nat Turner lived in Virginia at a time when it was illegal to teach enslaved people to read,
	...

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