Schooling in the United States has never been a public good, nor has “the public good” been its primary goal. Since its origins in the early nineteenth century, schooling has been a white good, designed to promote white advantage. Three mechanisms, among many, have been key to this process: the relationship of schooling to place, the knowledge that schools impart, and the hobbling of brown and Black children. Insofar as schooling has approached being a public good, that tendency has emerged as the result of counter-majoritarian, explicitly racial activism led by non-white people. The struggle for racial justice has been the struggle of moving schooling from a white good to a public good.

Between the founding of Jamestown in 1606 and the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, images of Indigenous men and women rose and fell on the great seals of the British Atlantic colonies. At the peak of this process, “the Indian” was the most persistent seal icon save for that of the arms and image of the monarch himself. This essay traces the sigillary Indian's illustrious career, as evolving imperial structures and legal debates about the nature of empire positioned and repositioned him (and her) in relation to just claims of authority. Early depictions reflected the settler colony concerns of private charter companies, justifying claims to land, not the rule over people. Royal colonies, by contrast, imagined Indians as a form of vassal, essential aids in the procurement of raw materials from the land. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, the image of the Indian had yielded to classical motifs and representations of the land through maps, mirroring the increasing centrality of territoriality to British imperial thought. Taken together, seal images of Indians in the British Atlantic present the rise and fall of a visual paradox: depicting Indigenous people as symbols of authority over white settler colonies.

They sat in the Cubberley Education Lecture Hall to hear visiting experts. More often they could be found meeting in reduced-size classes, or working on small-group activities. They usually took notes; sometimes they took field trips. They memorized lists and sat for exams, but they also watched films and acted out scenarios. Rather than take regular courses in the disciplines, they studied an integrated curriculum referred to as “Area Relationships.” Some faculty collaborated, team taught, and drew on students' prior knowledge. Even some administrators joined in the role-playing for the big culminating activity. The head of the program explained the reason for such a break from the traditional Stanford experience: “Special effort must be made to supply the student with points of view and methods of procedure which will enable him most quickly and most surely to survey a situation, analyze a problem, and formulate a solution.”

In the decade and a half after the Civil War, the American public school rose and fell as a central issue in national and state politics. After a relative calm on matters of education during and immediately after the War, the Republican Party and Catholic Church leaders in the late 1860s and early 1870s joined a bitter battle of words over the future of public education—who should control it, how should it be financed, and what should it teach about religion. These battles often reflected very different world views. Leading Protestant ministers and Republican politicians waved the threat of a rising antidemocratic “Catholic menace” as the new bloody shirt and championed their own educational ideal as a remedy—religiously neutral, ethnically and racially inclusive common schools. While Democrats tended to downplay school issues, Catholic Church leaders countered with their own screed: common schools were hardly common, embodying either inherently Protestant notions of religion or the atheism of no true religious creed at all. New York City became the epicenter of these cataclysmic debates, and the brilliant cartoonist Thomas Nast immortalized the Radical Republican side of the issue in the pages of Harper's Weekly.

Since the early nineteenth century, the idea of American prisons, like the idea of common schools, has reflected a faith in public institutions for effecting social reform through individual transformation. With this goal in mind, penal theory has been a type of educational theory, making a systematic, sustained effort to “correct” the behavior and ideas of inmates. What has set penal theory apart from educational theory—and prisons apart from schools—are other social functions of imprisonment: retribution for crimes committed, custodial control that separates the inmate from society, and deterrence. The goal of punishment has dominated the evolution of American prisons; nevertheless, as “total” institutions prisons have had their own paeadia and this paeadia—along with its relationship to punishment—has changed significantly over time.