Robert Dale Owen was the eldest son of Robert Owen, the famous English manufacturer-philanthropist, who originated the system of socialism known as “Owenism.”  Born in Scotland, he was educated at Hofwyl, Switzerland, in a school conducted by Emmanuel von Fellenberg, the associate of the famous Pestalozzi, as a self-governing children’s republic on the manner of the present “Julior Republics.”  Owen himself said that he owed his abiding faith in human virtue and social progress to his years at Hofwyl.  In 1825 Robert Dale left England to join his father in a communistic experiment at New Harmony, Indiana, and together they lived through the vicissitudes which attended that experiment.  There he met Frances Wright, America’s first suffragist, with whom he formed an intimate friendship lasting through many years.  The failure at New Harmony convinced him that his father had overlooked the importance of the anti-social habits which the members had formed before they joined; and he concluded that those could be prevented only by applying a rational system of education to the young.  These conclusions, together with the recollections of his experience at Hofwyl, led him to advocate a new system of education, which came to be called “state guardianship.”

State guardianship was a demand for the establishment by the state of boarding schools where children should receive, not only equal instruction, general as well as industrial, but equal food and equal clothing at the public expense.  Under this system, it was asserted, public schools would become “not schools of charity, but schools of the nation, to the support of which all would contribute; and instead of being almost a disgrace, it would become an honor to have been educated there.”  It was urged as an especial advantage that, as children would be clothed and cared for at all times, the fact that poor parents could not afford to dress their children “as decently as their neighbors” would not prevent their attendance.

State guardianship became the battle cry of an important faction in the Workingmen’s party in New York.  Elsewhere a less radical program was advocated.  In Philadelphia the workingmen demanded only that high schools be on the Hofwyl model, whereas in the smaller cities and towns in both Pennsylvania and New York the demand was for “literary” day schools.  Yet the underlying principle was the same everywhere.  A labor candidate for Congress in the First Congressional District of Philadelphia in 1830 expressed it succinctly during his campaign.  He made his plea on the ground that “he is the friend and indefatigable defender of a system of general education, which will place the citizens of this extensive Republic on an equality; a system that will fit the children of the poor, as well as the rich, to become our future legislators; a system that will bring the children of the poor and the rich to mix together as a band of Republican brethren.”