Board of education

A board of education, school committee or school board is the board of directors or board of trustees of a school, local school district or higher administrative level.

The elected council helps determine educational policy in a small regional area, such as a city, county, state or province. It usually shares power with a larger institution, such as the government's department of education. The name of the board is also often used to refer to the school system under the board's control.

The government department that administered education in the United Kingdom before the foundation of the Ministry of Education was also called the Board of Education.

History

The American board of education traces its origins back to 1647 with the formation of the American public school system, the Massachusetts Bay Colony mandated that every town within its jurisdiction establish a public school. Committees sprang up to run the institutions, and in the 1820s the state of Massachusetts made the committees independent of local governments, establishing the model for the autonomous school districts that exist throughout the country today. The U.S. Constitution left authority over education in the hands of the states under the Tenth Amendment, which reserved to them all powers not explicitly given to the federal government, and the states passed that authority on to local school boards. For more than a century, local boards were solely responsible for public educations funding, standards, instruction, and results. At their height in the 1930s there were as many as 127,500 boards. Some sparsely populated states had more school board members than teachers. For much of their history, the boards presided over school systems serving agrarian and industrial economies.

Of Education

The tractate Of Education was published in 1644, first appearing anonymously as a single eight-page quarto sheet (Ainsworth 6). Presented as a letter written in response to a request from the Puritan educational reformer Samuel Hartlib, it represents John Milton's most comprehensive statement on educational reform (Viswanathan 352), and gives voice to his views "concerning the best and noblest way of education" (Milton 63). As outlined in the tractate, education carried for Milton a dual objective: one public, to “fit a man to perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war” (55); and the other private, to “repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love Him, to be like Him, as we may the nearest by possessing our soul of true virtue” (52).

Influences

The influences at work in the tractate are an interesting blend of Renaissance humanism with its emphasis on the via activa, tempered by the more contemplative medieval concern with personal redemption. It is clear, however, that the overwhelming thrust of Milton's educational programme as outlined in the tractate is centred in the public objective. This is likely a reaction to the scholasticism that dominated the medieval university from the twelfth century, which still held sway in Milton's time (Ainsworth 25).