Preparing New Ground: Education as Federal Policy in the Territories of the United States, 1867–1912

Preparing New Ground: Education as Federal Policy in the Territories of the United States, 1867-1912

             This paper analyzes education policies for US territories as exercises of federal power aimed at settling land claims, implementing labor policy, and arbitrating conflicts of power in colonial contexts.  Educational and comparative historians and political economists have long sought to explain the weak federal role in US education and its enduringly decentralized system.  Meanwhile, policy historians studying the state as "actor" argue that a decentralized state is not necessarily weak and have begun looking at education as a site of "strong" decentralized power.   These literatures pay little attention to territories, however, where federal authority in education was strongest.  Drawing on education provisions from all territorial and enabling acts, state constitutions, and revisions over 150 years, this paper traces shifts in such provisions for western territories organized during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

             In the US, federal authority in education derived from jurisdiction over territories, not states, and developed as a by-product of federal land policy.  In the 1780s the US dedicated land appropriated from Native Americans to support schools and encourage (white) settlement in new territories.  The first federal educational regulations established the terms upon which such lands would be sold and the proceeds distributed. 

         The first effort to shape substantive provisions of education occurred in the 1880s, when Congress came close to establishing a national system of education.  The nearly successful Blair Bill encompassed separate education provisions for territories and states, including distinctions of curriculum, purpose, control, and population.  Similar distinctions followed for the Territories of Alaska, Hawaii, Oklahoma, Arizona, New Mexico, and Puerto Rico.  Through such provisions, the federal government: justified and structured land appropriation and redistribution; distinguished colonized and colonizing populations; distinguished laborers from citizens; and designated qualified decision-makers.