. . . The inquiry to which these remarks have conducted us is this: what is offered by the plan of female education here proposed, which may teach or preserve among females of wealthy families that purity of manners which is allowed to be so essential to national prosperity, and so necessary to the existence of a republican government?

(1) Females, by having their understandings cultivated, their reasoning powers developed and strengthened, may be expected to act more from the dictates of reason and less from those of fashion and caprice [unpredictability].

(2) With minds thus strengthened they would be taught systems of morality, enforced by the sanctions of religion; and they might be expected to acquire juster and more enlarged views of their duty, and stronger and higher motives to its performance.

(3) This plan of education offers all that can be done to preserve female youth from a contempt of useful labor. The pupils would become accustomed to it in conjunction with the high objects of
literature and the elegant pursuits of the fine arts; and it is to be hoped that, both from habit and association, they might in future life regard it as respectable. . . .

Source: Emma Willard, “An Address to the Public, Particularly the Members of the Legislature of New York, Proposing a Plan for Improving Female Education,” 1819

. . . Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men—the balance-wheel of the social machinery. I do not here mean that it so elevates the moral nature as to make men disdain and abhor the oppression of their fellowmen.

This idea pertains to another of its attributes. But I mean that it gives each man the independence and the means, by which he can resist the selfishness of other men. It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility towards the rich; it prevents being poor. Agrarianism
[movement to improve the economic status of farmers] is the
revenge of poverty against wealth.

The wanton destruction of the property of others, — the burning of hay-ricks and corn-ricks, the demolition of machinery, because it supersedes hand-labor, the sprinkling of vitriol [caustic substances] on rich dresses, — is only agrarianism run mad. Education prevents both the revenge and the madness. On the other hand, a fellow-feeling for one’s class or caste is the common instinct of hearts not wholly sunk in selfish regards for person, or for family. The spread
of education, by enlarging the cultivated class or caste, will open a wider area over which the social feelings will expand; and, if this education should be universal and complete, it would do more than all things else to obliterate factitious distinctions in society. . . .

— Horace Mann, 12th Annual Report of the Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, 1848 Source: Lawrence Cremin, ed., The Republic and the School: Horace Mann on the Education of Free Men, Columbia University

Our school begun—in spite of threatenings from the whites and the consequent fear of the blacks—with twenty-seven pupils, four only of whom could read, even the simplest words. At the end of six weeks, we have enrolled eighty-five names, with but fifteen unable to read. In seven years teaching at the North, I have not seen a parallel to their appetite for learning, and their active progress. Whether this zeal will abate with time, is yet a question. I have little fear that it may.
Meanwhile it is well to “work while the day lasts.” Their spirit now may be estimated somewhat, when I tell you that three walk a distance of four miles, each morning, to return after the five-hours session. Several come three miles, and quite a number from two and two-and-a-half miles. . . .

— Mary S. Battey, schoolteacher, Andersonville, Georgia, 1866

Source: Gerda Lerner, The Female Experience: An American Documentary, Bobbs-Merrill Company

. . . The nondescript supply of books which each pupil had brought from whatever state was ‘back home’ to him was placed on the bench by his side. Slates, which had to take the place of both blackboard and tablets, were of all sizes and descriptions, from Jimmy’s tiny one with the red felt covered frame and pencil tied to it with a string, to Mary’s big double one with the wide home-made frames fastened together with strong hinges and cut deep with initials and hearts.

She had found it packed away among grandfather’s books which he had used away back in Ohio. There were histories from Illinois, spellers and writing books from Iowa, readers from St. Louis city schools, and even some old blue-backed spellers, with their five-syllabled puzzlers. From this motley array the teacher made the assignments and arranged the classifications, depending entirely upon her own judgment.

The pupils had been without school privileges long enough to be glad to have an opportunity to study, and their rapid progress showed they came, for the most part, from intelligent families. True, there was not a suspension globe for explaining mathematical geography, but an apple and a ball did very well. There was no case of the latest wall maps on rollers, but the large ones in the books answered the purpose when care was taken to hold them correctly. . . .

— India Harris Simmons (1888) Source: Joanna Stratton, Pioneer Women: Voices from the Kansas Frontier, Simon and Schuster

STATE OF EDUCATION BLACK AND WHITE

. . . On average, Southern states spent half as much educating a black child as they spent educating a white. Investment in white school plants [buildings] was four times higher, white teachers’ salaries 30 percent higher. Seventeen segregating states spent $42 million busing white children — less than $1 million on blacks.  Median years of schooling in segregating states and Washington, D.C.: whites — 8.4; blacks — 5.1. The percent of whites finishing school was four times that of blacks. Segregating states spent $86 million on white colleges, $5 million on black ones. There was 1 accredited medical school for blacks, 29 for whites; 1 accredited black school for pharmacology, 40 for whites; 1 law school for blacks, 40 for whites. There was no engineering school for blacks, 36 for whites. In 1946, an estimated one quarter of the entire black population was functionally illiterate. . . .

Source: Harold Evans et al., The American Century, Alfred A. Knopf (adapted)

. . . Segregation of white and colored children in public schools has a detrimental effect upon the colored children. The impact is greater when it has the sanction of the law, for the policy of separating the races is usually interpreted as denoting the inferiority of the negro group. A sense of inferiority affects the motivation of a child to learn. Segregation with the sanction of law, therefore, has a tendency to [retard] the educational and mental development of negro children and to deprive them of some of the benefits they would receive in a racial[ly] integrated school system.

Whatever may have been the extent of psychological knowledge at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson, this finding is amply supported by modern authority. Any language in Plessy v. Ferguson contrary to this finding is rejected.

We conclude that, in the field of public education, the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. Therefore, we hold that the plaintiffs and others similarly situated for whom the actions have been brought are, by reason of the segregation complained of, deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. This disposition makes unnecessary any discussion whether such segregation also violates the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment . . . .

— Chief Justice Earl Warren, Opinion of the Court, Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954)