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16 <br />"The first step toward developing an ideal public education system was the adoption of <br />our State's Constitution of 1776 which provided for the legislative establishment of schools and <br />for a university." And that was only the beginning. Like today, "there was much <br />misunderstanding" (in the development of a system of public education)... "Those who had <br />private schools felt that the State should help finance their schools. Some feared taxation. <br />Some felt that State money should finance 'free Schools "'. <br />As stakeholders, engaged in this current visioning effort, we spoke with other members <br />of the community about the role of public education in Orange County, and heard the echoes of <br />an appeal made in 1839, in the Raleigh Star which made a "strong appeal to the parents for <br />better education saying, 'They have here no matter what may be their poverty, a system which <br />offers to them, in addition to free education for their offspring, the highest gratification which a <br />patriotic feeling parent can desire, that of seeing their children endowed with sound learning, <br />established in sound morals and qualified for the responsible duties of popular <br />government... Support it, if you would strengthen the pillars of representative government; <br />Abandon it, if you would quench the Promethean fire which returned the light of freedom in <br />the Western World! "' <br />We recommend to our community this history for your reading and greater <br />understanding of the public values, visions, conflicts and choices that arose while our system of <br />public education took root here in Orange County, NC as well as across our state and nation. In <br />its reading, you will likely find, as we did that while the situations and choices may differ and <br />while we have certainly evolved and matured over time to be more representative and <br />inclusive, at our core we believed and continue to believe in the importance of providing a high <br />quality education to all for the benefit of the individual, our society and our democracy. <br />15 <br />