"Their Priorities Were Social and Political in Nature"

"Jobs certainly matter, and the future labor productivity of today's students will impact the entire economy. Yet even if schools could be reoriented to focus effectively on job training, the result would hardly be an unqualified good. Any shift in the present orientation of schools will come at the expense of school activities organized around the preservation of rights and liberties, as well as the inherent value of education. By and large, Americans of the past were unwilling to make that trade-off."

Jack Schneider at The New Republic reminds readers that "[e]arly advocates of public education were generally unconcerned with what we would think of as workplace training."