Powerful Words

I recently read parts of How Lincoln Learned to Read by Daniel Wolff. Here's a quote that caught my attention:

The argument that got the [common school funding] movement going again wasn't so much the nation's need for literacy or a unifying patriotism, but for obedience. What made a republic successful, Noah Webster wrote, was "a singular machinery...which takes the child as soon as he can speak, checks his natural independence and passions, makes him subordinate to superior age, to the laws of the state, to town and parochial institutions." It was like religion: a child had to be taught to answer to higher authority.