by Moe Zilla

Created on: July 11, 2010

Homeschooled children can learn a lot by studying the history of American education. They'll identify more with historical stories if they're about the children who lived in those periods. There's some natural reading material which can bring to life both the people and the worlds they lived in. And it can also be a handy way to start other lessons about the government and political science.

For example, there was a time where many children simply weren't educated at all. The advent of child labor laws changed the shape of American education, and were instituted only after crusading reformers urged that it was a way to improve American society. In 1836 Massachusetts passed a law requiring that child laborers attend at least three months of schooling each year.  But child labor continued throughout the 19th-century, and child laborers were actually present throughout most of the industrial revolution period of American history.

And there's some fascinating historical stories about the way children were educated in The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Written when he was 65, the first part of the book remembers Franklin's adolescence in pre-revolutionary American, in colonial Massachusetts back in the 1710s. There were no public libraries - since this was an idea Franklin himself would propose later in life - so he remembers a childhood of borrowing books from friends. Reading was a luxury which Franklin enjoyed, but it wasn't even part of a formal education plan!

Reading the autobiography teaches valuable history lessons while making one of America's founding father's come to life.  Franklin was one of 17 children, and his father desperately tried to fit him into various professions. At the age of 12, he was required to sign papers of indentured servitude through the age of 21 to obtain an apprenticeship at  print shop that was run by his older brother. But Franklin reports that his brother "had often beaten me" - and then describes the day he finally ran away to start his own print shop in Philadelphia. Yet this story about life in the early 1700s sets up a later lesson about the American revolution, since Franklin says his childhood experience may have taught him an "aversion to arbitrary power that has stuck to me through my whole life."

There are some fascinating children's picture books which touch on the topic of education. More Than Anything Else describes young Booker T. Washington, covertly learning how to read at a time when this was forbidden by law.  And Coolies describes a family of young immigrant Chinese brothers, who instead of being educated spend their childhood laboring to build America's first transcontinental railroad.  But one of the best history books might be A Short History of the United States. Author Edward Channing had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1926 for his "History of the United States," but this shorter work was geared for younger students, and became a well-respected textbook in the early 20th century. It's still a very readable (free) American history text, and homeschoolers might enjoy the extra novelty of knowing that their history textbook is, itself, more than 100 years old!

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