This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, September 14th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown. American public schooling was established to

unify diverse people and prepare citizens for democracy.

How well of those schools performed, are those goals really possible?

Neil McCluskey is director of the Cato Institute Center for Educational Freedom

and is author of the new book, The

Fractured Schoolhouse, re-examining education for a free, equal, and harmonious society.

What was the to solve?

meant to solve or at least mitigate?

Well, I think the first thing we should say is that a fundamental problem with public schooling is the idea that there is one problem or one answer that's applicable to everyone.

And so you can go all the way back to start of public

schooling and run into disagreements about what public schooling was supposed to do and what education is supposed to do.

So fundamentally you can go back, first of all,

we should probably note, there was a whole lot of education going on before the

Republic schools. There is some mythology that, well before the public schools

people weren't learning or it was just sort of something that kind of happened

for rich people. There was education going on everywhere. For one thing, you

learned a trade usually, even if that was agriculture, which was serious learning, but also in the colonies very early on there was lots of education in literacy,

both the ability to read, the ability to write, and also to do some math. No, this wasn't everybody. the building right,

to write,

no this wasn't everybody, you know,

reading great novels and dissecting them for themes

...