It’s true that federal laws about it didn’t come about until 1918, but parts of what is now the US has had universal compulsory education in some form since the 17th c at least, in the form of parochial schools attached to religious sects. Massachusetts systematized it a statewide basis in 1852, but most people had some kind of 3-r’s before that, even if it was taught at home. Rural one-room schools were around here in Michigan as soon as European-descent pioneers settled, and the first high school (still stands, no longer a school) in my hometown is from sometime in the 19th century. The brick multistorey high school (now gone) dated from the early 20th.
“It’s true that federal laws about it didn’t come about until 1918, but parts of what is now the US has had universal compulsory education in some form since the 17th c at least, in the form of parochial schools attached to religious sects. Massachusetts systematized it a statewide basis in 1852, but most people had some kind of 3-r’s before that, even if it was taught at home. Rural one-room schools were around here in Michigan as soon as European-descent pioneers settled, and the first high school (still stands, no longer a school) in my hometown is from sometime in the 19th century. The brick multistorey high school (now gone) dated from the early 20th.”
All true. But this is completely different than Universal Compulsory Education. America came to power without it. All you say above is that a lot of Americans learned how to read and write in the 19th century.
Then, the generation that created UCE also created the New Deal and the beginning of the decline of America. The next generation (WWII) fought WWII nobly but did not undo the damage by it’s predecessors. By the next generation (boomers), the left had sunk it’s teeth into the now compulsory system and the socialist indoctrination of American children began in earnest. Then the boomers got control of the education system and institutionalized the socialist indoctrination, pc, and multiculturalism as official education industry orthodoxy. Things have pretty much gone off the cliff since then. So UCE maybe educated a single generation decently and quickly degenerated into a system that, every generation, provides more ideology and less education.
So coming back to the original point of the thread, I don’t see how Universal Compulsory Education would have turned Rome into a power that still exists today. IMHO, it is a big source of the decline in America—it has provided the infrastructure for centralized control over education in the hands of a small elite band of radical ideologues who have used their power ruthlessly. Indeed, the Soviets (who got their indoctrination system in place more quickly than the US) fell only 60 years after their UCE system was implemented.
So I don’t see how a monopoly school system would have made anything different in Rome, except perhaps to hasten the fall of the empire.