Which statement about education in the late nineteenth century is FALSE? It was a period of rapid expansion for public schools. Educational opportunities extended to Indian tribes as well. Southern blacks had far less access to education than southern whites. Funding for public education was highest in rural areas. By 1900, most states required compulsory school attendance.

The correct answer is Funding for public education was highest in rural areas.

From the middle of the 19th century, therefore, the hierarchical and authoritarian model of education that characterized school institutions until then came to be questioned by educators such as Maria Montessori, in Europe, and John Dewey, in the United States. Driven by the development of psychology studies on learning and human development, and with criticism of traditional pedagogy and the way curriculum content was imposed on students, these and other educators started to demand the active participation of students in the learning process. In this way and as mentioned earlier, these proposals rescued Athenian principles of education by valuing the student's previous experience and knowledge prior to school learning.

Due to this historical trajectory, it should be noted that Education has not always met the same types of objectives and all of its analysis requires, above all, an intense effort of reflection and contextualization. Through this path, it is possible to better understand educational methods and theories, as we observe traits present in current educational practices that refer to the legacy left by the educational models analyzed so far. If, on the one hand, there is the value of discipline and knowledge to be transmitted by the school; and, on the other hand, the idea that knowledge is built and, consequently, no one teaches anything to anyone definitively; it is important to note that these currents of thought are not mutually exclusive, since nowadays it is necessary to reconcile the value of knowledge to the value of student engagement as a strategy to address the demands of a world in continuous development and marked by a constant flow information available to a wide range of people located in different regions of the world.