Voices of Revolution, Chapter 1

"The importance the Working Man's Advocate placed on universal education was clear from the motto it carried each week at the top of page one: 'All children are entitled to equal education, ' and from the item it positioned as number one on its list of measures that working men sought: 'Equal Universal Education.' " (Page 12)

     George H Evans, the publisher and editor of Working Man's Advocate, was passionate in reforming the education system for children, among other things. While he was a radical reformer, he and William Heighton, who was quoted in his Mechanic's Free Press saying that something he was primarily focused on was "securing education for every working-class child," (Page 12), Evans could not accept a system that directed benefitted one class - the bourgeois, which was in the minority in terms of their size. With that in mind, in one of my art history classes I was learning about how after the fall of the Roman Empire, it brought rise to the dreadful system known as feudalism. Cities in Italy including Siena, Lucca, San Gimignano had citizens, who grew tired of having the feudal lords ruling their towns and mistreating the lower classes. Additionally, the feudal system gave birth to a new class, known as the merchant middle class, which was full of many people with enough capitol and wits to eliminate the feudal system. And instead of that system, they created a self-governing system, where members of the middle class and some lower class individuals would live autonomously without having feudal lords interfering and making ridiculous laws that only benefit themselves and the rest of the bourgeois. Although this system would have a lot of trouble thriving in 19th century America, I found it interesting that if you go back six or seven centuries systems of government were in the case of San Gimignano and the other Italian cities, much more reasonable to those inhabiting them. The concept of equal education for the child working class would likely be more of a non-issue because the merchants, who were part of the governing board, would not have as much reluctancy or see it as problematic to permit working class children to education. If only things could have been that easy for the American working-class children in the 19th century.