If we look back at the evolution of education in the United States, it may give us a sense of our direction going forward.

We thought of pursuing this perspective because of two stories in this week’s edition of The Enterprise.

One is about a ribbon-cutting ceremony in New Scotland, celebrating a new childcare center.

The other is on problems some parents and some workers have had with a preschool program run out of a Guilderland church.

“We all know about the struggles of finding childcare … we’ve lived it,” Jennifer Hogan told the crowd that gathered on Aug. 29 to watch her cut the ribbon on her new childcare center.

A speaker at the event noted that 60 percent of New York state is classified as a childcare desert.

“It is not babysitting,” Hogan said of her childcare center. “It is education. I stress to my staff when they’re hired and all the time that we’re educators, we follow a curriculum, we use a STEAM-based curriculum,” she said, using an acronym for science, technology, engineering, art, and math, “which I’m very proud of.”

Congressman Paul Tonko, who attended the event, called childcare “an essential service for working families.” He touted the now-abandoned child tax credit “that put money in the pockets of working families” and said he hoped it would be revived.

He also spoke in support of several bills he hopes will pass: the Stabilization Act that would provide $16 billion in grants nationwide; the Child Care for Working Families Act that would use a sliding scale of assistance for families; and the Child Care for Every Community Act that would offer affordable child care and early learning programs for children who are not yet required to attend school.

The other story, on our front page, written by Sean Mulkerrin, takes a deep dive into allegations about mismanagement at a pre-kindergarten program run out of Christ the King Church.

Several area churches run pre-kindergarten programs in partnership with local school districts, which receive state funds to educate 4-year-olds but don’t have space to house those classes in their own schools.

Separate from the specific issues Mulkerrin delves into, there are some overarching problems with the state’s push for educating 4-year-olds. One is that, although research shows pre-K is especially beneficial for children from poor families, the local lotteries for the limited state-paid places select children randomly.

Another is that, while the preschools work in partnership with the school districts, they are not under the purview of the districts.

This means the pre-K teachers aren’t paid the same as the public school teachers, aren’t required to have the same level of education, and the curricula they use don’t necessarily dovetail with the schools’.

So, with this in mind, let us look at the evolution of education.

A succinct timeline from the Noah Webster Educational Foundation starts in the 1600s with the founding of the nation’s first public school, the Boston Latin School, in 1635. Children were taught Puritan values and how to read the Bible.

However, public schools were not prevalent in that era. Mostly, only children of wealthy families were educated — at home by tutors.

After the Revolutionary War, Thomas Jefferson believed there should be an education system supported by taxpayer dollars but the United States did not enact a formal system of education for nearly a century after his proposal.

In the 18th century, Common Schools were instituted, each with one teacher who educated students of all ages in one room. Parents had to pay for their children to attend but sometimes bartered schooling for their kids by providing room and board for the teacher or materials for the school.

By the mid-19th century, academics became the focus of public schools. In 1837, Massachusetts, which under the guidance of Horace Mann had already set up free public schools for every grade, was the first state to create a board of education.

Mann believed education could bridge societal and economic gaps and thought free schools should be available for every citizen because education could provide wealth and opportunities.

After the Civil War, during the Reconstruction Era, public schooling became common in the South and in 1867, the federal Department of Education was founded, which helped establish a national standard for education.

By 1900, school attendance was mandatory for students aged 8 to 14 in 31 states. By 1918, all states required students to complete elementary school.

As the 20th Century unfolded, John Dewey’s ideas of progressive education, which encouraged children to advocate for and engage in a democratic society, grew prominent. Rather than authoritarian teaching and rote learning, under Dewey’s theory, children would be educated to reach their full potential by being invested in their learning.

In 1955, Milton Friedman wrote “The Role of Government in Education,” advocating for school choice, competition, and consumer freedom, ideas based on free-market principles, which led decades later to public charter schools.

In the 1960s and ’70s, legislators passed various acts to prohibit discrimination against gender, race, and disabilities in public schools and, in the 1980s, some states made legal provisions for homeschooling.

The 21st Century, which all of us are more familiar with, opened with the federal No Child Left Behind, bringing in standards-based testing reforms and penalties for schools that failed to meet adequate yearly progress goals.

This was followed in 2015 by the Every Student Succeeds Act, which provided many measures of assessments for student achievement. The current administration has proposed making pre-kindergarten available for 3-year-old children.

This evolution shows that education in the United States was once reserved for the wealthy but gradually became seen as essential for all children to reach their full potential.

Rather than being a means to perpetuate Puritan ethics or Bible reading, education became an essential vehicle for furthering democracy, funded by the government.

As we’re so well aware in our current times, schools have come to replace many of the services once provided by families, churches, or community groups.

At the same time, the length of time during which the government provided day-long services to the nation’s youth has been extended, first starting at age 8 but now starting with kindergarten, at age 5.

The current push in New York is to start schooling with pre-K at age 4 and the Biden administration has proposed preschool starting at age 3.

This recent shift in education has been brought about by a central shift in our society: More women are working outside the home.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the share of women in the labor force grew from 30 percent in 1950 to almost 47 percent in 2000, and the number of working women is projected to reach 92 million by 2050 — on the basis of an annual growth rate of 0.7 percent.

Childcare has become an economic necessity for many families. The several bills that Congressman Tonko touted at last week’s childcare center event points to the need — the unfulfilled need that families throughout New York state and across the nation face.

So the question we face, as a society, is: Should the government step in and provide that needed childcare in the form of public schooling?

Looking at a more detailed history provided by the National Institutes of Health on the evolution of nursery school, childcare, and kindergarten in our country, we think the answer may be: Yes.

Tellingly, the NIH timeline is titled “Preparation for the Care and Education Workforce in the United States.” The detailed history looks at childcare in the United States, starting in the 1800s with Settlement Houses, which provided social services to immigrant, poor, and working-class people. Services included childcare, youth activities, and family support.

“Day nurseries protected children from harm and helped assimilate immigrant children into American culture,” the history says. “Child ‘minders’ were from local communities and had not received formal education.”

Nursery schools, the timeline says, didn’t appear in the United States until the 1920s. The nursery school movement migrated here from England and by 1924 there were 28 nurseries in 11 states. The first American nursery school teachers traveled to England to study and work under Margaret McMillan.

By the 1930s, there were approximately 200 nursery schools in the United States, and more than half were affiliated with colleges and universities as the nursery-school movement was associated with the public’s scientific interest in child development and learning.

The U.S. Office of Education’s 1943 pamphlet titled “Nursery Schools Vital to the War Effort” indicated that skilled teachers with specialized training in nursery school education were essential to the war effort.

After the war, nursery-school teacher education included an emphasis on democratic principles and teaching techniques. Programs also encompassed a variety of fields concerned with human development and social progress, individualized instruction, child guidance, multiple theories of child development, expressive activities, and student teaching in community schools.

Eventually, states developed requirements for early childhood teacher preparation for children ages 3 to 5; these vary significantly from state to state. The Commission on Early Childhood Associate Degree Accreditation currently accredits more than 150 institutions in 31 states.

At the same time that childcare was being set up in Settlement Houses, German-trained kindergarten teacher educators migrated to the United States to provide 26-week formal training programs.

By the 1880s, two-year kindergarten training programs included courses in child study, psychology, child hygiene, sociology, children’s literature and storytelling, public speaking, philosophy of education, school management, and kindergarten principles and practices, among others.

Through the 1930s, admission to kindergarten teacher training required candidates to be of “good character,” good health, to be generally “refined,” and able to demonstrate musical ability. Native ability and a love of children were other essential criteria for admission.

By the 1960s, kindergarten training came under the umbrella of state certification. Criteria for kindergarten teacher candidates began to mirror that of the elementary grades.

Today, kindergarten teachers are required to hold a 4-year teaching degree in elementary education or early childhood education and state licenses are required by all teachers in public schools.

We can see the merits of pre-kindergarten schooling following the same path as kindergarten.

Just this past week, our nation’s top doctor, Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy, issued an advisory calling parental stress a significant public health issue.

The advisory cites a 2023 survey of adults from the American Psychological Association that found a third of parents reported high levels of stress in the past month and nearly half say that most days their stress is completely overwhelming.

The advisory calls for, among other things, childcare financial assistance and universal preschool.

“The work of parenting is essential not only for the health of children but also for the health of society,” Murthy writes in an introduction to the report. 

He’s right. So it makes sense that each of us, for the good of our society, should contribute to the health of children and the parents who are raising them.

In New York state, this would come in the form of school taxes that would allow our districts to expand their facilities and hire appropriately trained and paid professionals to school our youngest children.

As the director of New Scotland’s childcare center said, “It is not babysitting. It is education.”

As the surgeon general put it, “Raising children is sacred work. It should matter to all of us.”