In 1642 the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed a law stating that all parents must teach their children how to read so that they could read the Bible. This was very much a religious push for the Puritans. In 1647, concerned that some parents wouldn't or couldn't comply they passed a law stating that every town over 50 families provide a staffed public school and those over 100 families must provide an education capable of sending children to Harvard. Quick citation. Of course, compulsory education didn't come until much later. You do have to have the capacity to educate in place before you make education mandatory.

The original push for education in the United States didn't come from socialism, which wasn't even a thing yet, but from concerns among protestants that the clergy wasn't being educated properly or that people were too illiterate to participate in bible study.

Which time period do you mean? The puritans had free public education but that was unheard of in the southern colonies. Do you mean ed reform of the 1840s in Massachusetts or do mean compulsory education laws in the early 20th century?

Comments I see here mostly deal with parochial schools. The idea of free public secular schools in the US comes circa 1840 from the efforts of Horace Mann. He made the argument that, in a democratic republic that chooses its own leaders, the citizens had to be educated, in order to make wise choices, and that education had to be secular, because parochial schools tended to divide people into groups, not unite them. This was a very powerful argument, at least in the north.

Maybe somebody else knows of actual organized opposition, but there was huge unorganized opposition from the huge number of farms and businesses that counted on cheap child labor, and it was a problem through the next century. The main job of a Truant Officer was to look for children who had been kept out of school to work. The standard school year, with its three months of summer vacation, could b seen as a compromise to farmers who desperately needed their children in the summer months.

good question, in England such provisions are surprisingly recent with the significant changes being made in 1880, 1918 and 1944, with The Elementary Education Act, The Fisher Education Act and Butler's Education Act. Each pushing back the age at which education must be attended until and placing increasing burden on the state, i imagine the standard voices complained it was unfair because poor people deserve to be poor, the state couldn't afford it and etc but i'd be interested to hear your question answered in regard to each of these three acts.

Of course those three dates are striking as all being war years, the Zulu, Boer and Afghan wars all around 1880 and of course ww1 and 2 culminating at the corresponding years - i'd be interested in hearing how this helped shape the national debate.