When viewing the landscape of learning and literacy, politics and policy often intersect. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, literacy is one skill that progressives sought to expand and others historically used to restrict access to immigration, jobs, and civic participation. During the closing decades of the nineteenth century, just as the recognizably modern American school system emerged, learning and literacy also emerged as contentious political issues. Policy debates around the civil meaning of language and literacy, and the rights conferred or denied by virtue of fluency and literacy, has a long and contentious history. While many argue that the ability to speak the language of one's choice, the right to an education, and the right to civic participation are inalienable human rights, history suggests otherwise. Historically, civil policy and community norms, often legally sanctioned, have governed each of these rights, thus effectively rendering them civil rights. Public schools are one place where each of these policies and practices intersect and as might be expected, debate has ebbed and flowed over the course of the last century. This article seeks to examine the historical conflicts as the issues debated then reemerge periodically in much the same form.