you know the feeling that lots of us get around mid-august that little pit in your stomach even if your hair is my color we get afflicted with that end of summer leftover anxiety when it's about to become back to school season of course it's likely that learning in some fashion has been around since cave walls doubled as blackboards but real organized learning came long after the dinosaurs froze over being too cool for school started when our ancestors got a fixation for public education although home schooling is preferred by some families the majority of k-12 kids attend schools outside the home to receive their education the first kind of public schools were in 1600s in massachusetts they voted to publicly fund schools for a few weeks a year it wouldn't be until the 1870s that schooling became widespread this one-room schoolhouse built in 1861 is called the scotch settlement school and it originally stood in dearborn township in michigan it was here in the 1870s that a young henry ford attended school in 1923 he would acquire the building moving it to greenfield village where i met curator of domestic life jeannie miller to learn more about the origin of public education in america when you hear public school you don't really think about innovation at least i don't yeah where am i wrong it was absolutely an innovation until really the early 1800s people felt that education was a family responsibility and the idea of publicly funded schools had not caught on yet who really helps push public schools to fruition the man named horace mann he was the secretary of the board of education of massachusetts and he firmly believed that there should be free universal schooling for every child one room school houses like this would hold children of all ages at once and until they were textbooks lessons were often oral how were texts and materials chosen generally the states established what the curriculum was but the choice of the textbooks was often left up to the local school boards and in that way states and school boards were able to write history according to their own world view and so in addition to the three r's teaching today's children critical thinking and compassion may one day result in their rewriting history books