The Northwest Ordinance divided every town into thirty-six lots and reserved a center lot for public schools, requiring outer lots to generate resources for those schools. In total, the Northwest Ordinance helped shape thirty-one states.Įducation was embedded into the structure of these future states. Those same rules later governed land west of the Mississippi too. In 1785, the Northwest Ordinance divided new lands into territories and towns that would ultimately become the states of Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. The solution came in the form of the Northwest Ordinances, which still today are reprinted at the front of every copy of the United States Code alongside the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Two years before the Constitutional Convention met, the Continental Congress needed to resolve the colonies’ competing land claims in the western territories and establish the rules for creating new states, not just extensions of existing ones. Recognizing the challenge, the nation’s commitment to public education actually predates the Constitution itself. As Benjamin Franklin bluntly acknowledged at the close of our Constitutional Convention, the founders had established “a republic, if you can keep it.” Our democratic experiment might very well just fail. Without education, the founders feared democracy would devolve into mob rule and open doors to unscrupulous politicians and hucksters. This new experiment in self-government depended on educated citizens. In a world ruled by kings and queens, our founders sought to turn political power over to average people. The original theory of America was quite radical.
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