People have long been speculating on what relationship
school might have to crime. A fairly typical example of
the mainstream American view is found in the January 10,
1931 Literary Digest, in a brief article entitled "What
We Shall Be Like in 1950" (pp. 43-44). The predictions
in that article are described as "definite prophecies
made the National Education Association" and adapted
from a publication called Tomorrow's Business (New York)
published by the Shaw-Walker company. The NEA prediction
of most interest here, not attributed to any particular
individual, is "Crime will be virtually abolished by
transferring to the preventive processes of the school
and education the problems of conduct which police,
courts, and prisons now remedy when it is too late."
Sound like the 1950 you remember?

One of the most astounding things I learned as a
third-year law student from a professor who researches
criminal law and juvenile justice is that there are many
experts exploring a connection between school attendance
and crime. This is NOT a new idea, as you can see from
this quotation from more than 200 years ago: "Public
schools are the nurseries of all vice and immorality."
Henry Fielding (1707-1754), Joseph Andrews, book III,
chapter 5. It bears pointing out that at that time,
"public" school meant education in classrooms outside
the home, whether or not they were operated "privately"
as we use the term today. Poet William Cowper
(1731-1800), who attended much more school than most of
his contemporaries, because his mother died when he was
six years old, was also convinced that schools led to
wrongdoing. He wrote an epic poem, "Tirocinium: Or, a
Review of Schools" in which many rhyming couplets
expressed his view that school children urge one another
on to bad behavior, and the best form of education was
the kind he had so little of, what we would call home
schooling today.

By 1835, this argument against schools had attracted
enough attention to demand refutation. I have borrowed
from the University of Minnesota Education Library a
book published in Philadelphia that year entitled
Remarks on the Relation Between Education and Crime. The
author thought schools were good on the whole, and
attempted to explain away crime and its increase by
pointing to other causes. I'm not wholly convinced by
what he said to demonstrate other causes, but all
authors at that time labored with a dearth of
statistical information on this point.

Horace Mann, pioneer of introducing Prussian ideas of
schooling to the United States, had none of the doubts
about schools expressed by Cowper. As a Unitarian Whig
lawyer-politician, Mann helped establish the
Massachusetts Board of Education. Although he had not
been a schoolteacher beforehand, Mann became the board's
secretary, and published the enormously influential
Common School Journal, to communicate with "friends of
education," as he termed them. In January 1841, Mann
wrote, "THE COMMON SCHOOL IS THE GREATEST DISCOVERY EVER
MADE BY MAN. . . . Other social organizations are
curative and remedial; this is a preventive and an
antidote; they come to heal diseases and wounds; this to
make the physical and moral frame invulnerable to them.
Let the Common School be expanded to its capabilities,
let it be worked with the efficiency of which it is
susceptible, and nine tenths of the crimes in the penal
code would become obsolete; the long catalog of human
ills would be abridged." Mann's reforms added a new
crime to the penal code, however, when in 1852
Massachusetts became the first state to follow the
Prussian model of making school attendance compulsory.

Horace Mann died in 1859. It remained for a later
generation of Americans to examine the reality
of his promises for the common school. Zach[ariah]
Montgomery, Poison Drops in the Federal Senate: The
School Question from a Parental and Non-Sectarian
Standpoint (Washington, DC: Gibson Bros., 1st ed. 1886)
(photographic reprint with cover title 200 Year Study:
Public Education vs. Home Education available from Noah
Webster Research Library, Warner Road, Route 3--Box 85,
Staples, MN  56479) is one of the first books on this
subject to draw on the vast statistical resources of the
United States federal government, at the time when there
was a suitable "control group": states that DID NOT
compel school attendance as contrasted with those that
did. Montgomery reaches the conclusion that any time a
state adopted compulsory school attendance laws in the
19th Century, its crime rate and youth suicide rate
increased. United States census figures are cited
throughout the book, some more convincingly than others.

Modern authors continue to produce aphorisms casting
doubt on the "socialization" produced by schools. Edward
Grieg is quoted in a biography by Henry T. Fink, Grieg
and His Music (1929), at page 8, saying, "I have not the
least doubt that school developed in me nothing but what
was evil and left the good untouched." A comment that
perhaps comes from a humorist's point of view is "You
can't expect a boy to be vicious until he's been to a
good school," by H.H. Munro (Saki) (1870-1916), the
short story writer. In a similar vein is Robert Morley's
"Show me the man who has enjoyed his schooldays and I
will show you a bully and a bore," from his book Robert
Morley: Responsible Gentleman (1966). There are, of
course, modern authors who are entirely convinced of the
power of compulsory schooling to produce desirable
characteristics in children--but one must note what
characteristics they desire: "By educating the young
generation along the right lines, the People's State
will have to see to it that a generation of mankind is
formed which will be adequate to this supreme combat
that will decide the destinies of the world."--Adolf
Hitler, in Mein Kampf.

In any event, the social effects of school deserve
further open-minded research. "As the labor of children
has become unnecessary to society, school has been
extended for them. With every decade, the length of
schooling has increased, until a thoughtful person must
ask whether society can conceive of no other way for
youth to come into adulthood." This is the striking
cover quotation from Youth: Transition to Adulthood:
Report of the Panel on Youth of the President's Science
Advisory Committee (Chicago, U of Chicago Press, 1974).
It's fascinating to think how different things might be.
Joseph Kett, one the contributors to Youth: Transition
to Adulthood, and now one of E.D. Hirsch's collaborators
in the Core Knowledge Series, also wrote a full-length
historical exploration of the process of children
growing up, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America
1790 to the Present (1977). He demonstrates, among other
things, that the "peer group" of most children used to
range in age from four to twenty-two--until
age-segregated public schools became commonplace after
the Civil War. It would be a good idea to reexplore how
children can best grow into adults, in view of the
likely changes in schooling resulting from changes in
our economy.

The last time I brought up these issues on the USENET,
someone commented that crime, violence, and youth gangs
have existed for thousands of years, since before
compulsory school attendance statutes. This is surely
true, because crime, violence, and youth gangs are all
recorded in the Bible. Nevertheless, I replied, learning
and achievement have also existed for thousands of years
before the existence of compulsory schooling. The
question for the policy maker must be whether, on
balance, schools produce so great an increment of
learning or achievement that would not occur without
them that they make up for the increment of crime that
would not occur without them.

Karl from MN,
Internet:    bunda002@gold.tc.umn.edu
             cfmc77a@prodigy.com
             74222.1721@compuserve.com
             k.bunday@genie.com

P.S. One final thought: every person convicted today of
a felony in the United States has attended more school
than the four United States presidents whose images are
carved on Mt. Rushmore--combined.