Until 1840 public education in the US was mostly the responsibility of churches. Thomas Jefferson gave his fortune to trying to establish government supported public education. He held this was the only way to assure a strong Republic. However, this
federally regulated education did not become a reality, until 1840. This was done in response to the flood of immigrants and the rising crime rate. The primary goal of public education was to Americanize the immigrants with a set of American values, and produce a highly moral society, protecting our liberty.
In comes Horace Mann and the high breed education that was a blend of Greek based rational and religion. This was secular controlled education, rather than religious controlled education. John Dewey takes this even further and advocated we take greater steps to use education for increasing the strength of democracy. Our industry imitate England's autocracy, so we have rather weak education for democracy. Here is a link:
http://www.frinstitute.org/allschools1.html
The point is, this education is extremely important to reducing crime while maintaining the greatest liberty. In 1958 we replaced our liberal education with education for technology for military and industrial purpose, and we returned to leaving moral training to the church. This of course would result in rising crime requiring more institutionalization of criminals. Worse, is the cooperate corruption. I thought the terrible damage done by Enron was bad enough, but we continued to ignore the growing corruption problem, until it is so bad it results in an economic collapse effecting world economies. Only highly moral people can have liberty, and the only way to assure a highly moral population is education that serves that purpose.
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