> At 01:50 PM 11/20/2009, Alan Rudy wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 1:38 PM, c b <cb31450 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > The first public education in the US was for the ex-slaves in the late
>> > 1800's. When public education was won for them it was extended and won
>> > for the whole working class...
>> >
>>
>> Um, CB, you live in MI, the home of one of the two foundational land grant
>> universities - chartered as such in the 1860s... and very definitely not
>> for
>> ex-slaves.
>>
>> Do I take it that you are talking about public primary and secondary
>> education? If so, I have vague recollections of early public ed at that
>> level in New England before the late 19th C (but I could surely be wrong).
>>
>
>
> heh. I think this is where someone might include these responses in a list
> of examples of white privilege. :)
>
> he knows when public education was extended to people who weren't slaves
> prior to the late 1800s. he's saying that it wasn't truly public education
> until black people attended school. just like it wasn't much of a
> representative democracy in this country until until well after the end of
> Jim Crow -- and some people would argue it ain't much of a representative
> democracy now because the way we, in the u.s. do things, we manage to keep
> a lot of folks out of the polls via informal mechanisms.
I think I'll wait for CB's response to be convinced of this. In any event, I think this is a problematic argument. Where do we draw the line for "truly" in this instance?... as you point out about representative democracy? Did the "truly" public education of whites and blacks educate girls and young women the same as it did boys and young men? If not, by your standard educating ex-slaves isn't yet "truly" public. And, of course, what about Native Americans? What about "illegals"?
It seems to me that what we need in this instance is either more detail from CB and/or a way of defining "public" in non-anachronistic terms since the "public" of the 1820s and 30s was defined as not including slaves, though it may have included ex-slaves (however small their numbers and racist their treatment at the time.) Who's gonna argue that public ed hasn't privileged already privileged whites since, of course, many of the now-white weren't yet white at the time and poor whites have never been fully "white" anyway... since "whiteness" is, by default, assumed to be "middle class" (whatever the hell that means).
Too much shorthand and too many incomplete stances taken here, mea culpa.