Don’t suggest that public education is identical with, or even continuous with the bureaucratized systems we have today. By the end of the 19th century, the systems of locally supported and private schools was rapidly being replaced by system modeled after the Prussian state schools. Likewise, the German model was working its way into the colleges and universities, and the German idealism that had such an effect on Emerson and others, had become dominant. Dewey began as a Hegelian but gave up that form of idealism for something like the materialism of Marx . Dewey lead the way toward socializing the schools, driving private schools out of business as they gained an ever large share of tax revenue. The so-called Military-industrial complex has nothing on the public school monopoly that takes an ever greater share of the national wealth for ever diminishing results.