The Educational Function of the National Government

Extract

Education is admittedly a comprehensive and vague term. It may be used to imply all the training which life affords to any individual member of human society. In a narrower and customary sense it has reference to requirements more or less technical which a community makes of its younger members. Whether viewed in its larger or in its narrower meaning it amounts to a process through which the individual progresses toward a more or less useful place in society.

In the phrase “educational function” is included a large group of federal activities which tend directly or indirectly to influence popular intelligence and accordingly help in the establishment of public policy and law. Such activities frequently underlie legal development in one or another direction. They account occasionally for the creation of new laws.

Well educated as were most of the framers of the Constitution, it is a notable fact that in the long course of their debates in the Convention of 1787 they gave slight attention to the subject of education. In a few minds of that epoch there was a dim ideal of the probable future necessity of instructing the democracy. But public schools at the time were unsystematized and undeveloped.