History of American Education

 

We are bombarded with stories of government overreach into education. We hear about progressive propaganda disguised as curriculum, or parents in a California school district who are not allowed withdraw their children from the LGBT curriculum. You probably did not hear about the instance in Massachusetts where the state militia arrived at several homes of families who didn’t want their children to attend the local school. Under threat of force the militia escorted children from their homes and to the local school. The reason you probably never heard about it – it happened in 1852. Government overreach and mandatory education go together like Communism and gulags.

I won’t retread the vast array of problems in modern education. No one argues that the American education system is sound. But I will argue that the fruit of our current system is not the result of a good tree that’s diseased; it is the result of a poor seed planted in thorny ground and left untended.

The first instruction regarding education was given by the prophet Moses in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. These books represent the first recorded history and culture manual for a nation. He says that parents were to teach their children to love God at all times of the day. At a time when parents would spend all day with their children, this was easily done. Education for the ancients included knowledge, worship, skills, community-wide activities, and celebrations. Yet we know Israel was not faithful to that work. When they were captive in Babylon, the synagogues were created. These were places for worship and instruction in what it meant to be Jewish.

Skipping ahead a few civilizations, the people known as “the Greeks” were not one synonymous group, but several city-states who differed in what they valued and emphasized. The most notable difference was Sparta, who valued military service and Athens, who valued leisure and intellectual pursuits. Their most famous philosophers: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, were similar to Hebrew prophets, calling the people to live in a humane way and reject pragmatism (focus on what works, not what’s best) and decadence. They were, like the prophet John the Baptist, voices crying in the wilderness who were mostly rejected by their own people.

The Romans in their early Republic had a solid system of household law that emphasized education for children. They are most famous for their Stoic philosophers such as Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, and
Epictetus. Christianity, born in the Roman era among Jews, continued the Jewish tradition of emphasizing household education, with its customs, worship, and belief that Jesus Christ is the culmination of all philosophy and education. This did not mean they were fundamentalists who rejected all other knowledge outside of Christian doctrine, but that they believed all knowledge must be in conformity to the Word of God and natural revelation.

When the Roman Empire fell into decadence and disrepair, the monasteries of Europe arose. These were places where men and women gathered to live communal lives in dedication to God. It emphasized the same elements of education as the Torah: knowledge, worship, productive work, and service to others. By the year 1400, there were between 20,000-35,000 monasteries across Europe. Our closest equivalent to a monastery is the small college (less than 20). Each had a library, garden, farm, chapel, and almost all had a school. Education was not a factory where products were produced but a type of garden, where people flourished. This is from educating the whole person, not just spoon-feeding information or on the other extreme letting students choose whatever they want to do.

The Protestant Reformation brought a change in education. Many monasteries were stopped, but the schools continued. In fact, even more schools were started. Just as the Reformation brought a leveling influence to the church, reducing the division between holy orders (priests, monks, bishops, nuns) and common people (blacksmiths, shepherds, tanners, etc.), it reduced the gap in education. Martin Luther established schools for girls as boys already had many schools to attend. This was uncommon at the time.

Yet even in the most positive reforms there was a snake in the grass, as there has been since the Garden of Eden. The belief that children are basically good and need only to escape the corrupting influence of civilization, promoted by philosophers such as Jean Jacque Rousseau, gained influence in Europe in the 1700’s. The movement known as the Enlightenment, while good in many ways, de-emphasized the role of religion in education. This led to a shift in emphasis.

Up to this point education was to grow in the knowledge of God (or the gods, of you were a pagan) and the world He made. After the Enlightenment, the leading educators separated education from religion, seeing human knowledge as belonging to the school and religion belonging to the church. In that mindset the ideal education was achieved when you could teach as an agnostic – teaching facts while ignoring God’s direct work in human affairs. This perspective was sadly embraced even by some Christians.

Now we skip to America, where schools had maintained essentially the same philosophy as was given in the Torah – that education is for the whole person to become virtuous in whatever endeavor he/she pursues. All knowledge was under Christ; theology was queen of the sciences. Education was to produce a virtuous person, one free from the control of one’s passions and free to discover more of God, His world, and the story of His work. When the Puritans first landed in Massachusetts, their priorities were to build three places: a church, a school, and a brewery (kind of messes with our mental picture of the Puritans, doesn’t it?). They required what parents would teach children. But even this introduced poor practice – believing the society is responsible for education children rather than the family.

The southern colonies were better in this respect. Virginia, as was typical of southern colonies, did not require families to send their children to school; neither did they require particular precepts be taught. Education was expected but not determined by the state, town, or village. This division in philosophy between the northern and southern colonies will play out in many other ways as well.

Yet all was not well. By the 1800’s, the Enlightenment introduced its corruption in New England. The Puritans, once the strength of religious orthodoxy in the U.S., had largely gone Unitarian (belief that God is Father only, Jesus Christ is good man but not divine). Harvard, the first Christian college in the new world, chose a Unitarian President in 1805. In 1832, educator and Unitarian Horace Mann introduced the common school in Mass. It would be a school that would teach students morals but not religion. The idea was that a religiously neutral atmosphere would allow students to be taught a universal knowledge that could bypass Christianity altogether. This perspective was the toned-down version Rousseau wanted in France in the late 1700’s. Massachusetts introduced the country’s first mandatory school attendance law in 1852 and backed it by force.

 For Horace Mann, schools were the place where a new society was planted. They were instruments of social change. America being a democratic society, if we change the minds of the students, we change the society in a generation. Therefore whoever controls the schools will in time run the country. He saw schools as a place of freedom, but in this case the freedom came from renouncing the claims of tradition and historic orthodoxy and supporting the natural perfect ability of students through their studies.

This new perspective made tremendous inroads in the northern U.S. The Civil War led to further changes in education due to the Union defeat of the Confederacy. The South had been decentralized in education, but during Reconstruction (period just after the war when the South was turned into military regions), Northern teachers were asked to move South and brought the educational philosophy of Horace Mann to the schools. Local school boards had no more stomach for fighting and adopted the new perspectives. All public schools had to use textbooks from northern states that taught from the neutral, agnostic perspective. Though prayers were still offered, the prayers were generic (that is, Unitarian). The court decisions in the 1960’s to remove the prayers and the Ten Commandments, which came as a surprise to unsuspecting parents, were not surprising for those in the colleges of education. The prayers had been emptied of theological content decades before.

 The last significant change I’ll mention is adopting the factory model over the traditional, non-age segregated classrooms. We appreciate Henry Ford’s assembly line as a method for producing cars, but when it was applied to students, it doesn’t look so pretty. When the U.S. moved to larger schools, age-segregated classrooms, and the bell schedule, they were purposely adopting from the industrial mindset of one Frederick Winslow Taylor, who studied factories to determine how they could produce things more efficiently. When we applied this to students, the results should not be surprising. Our best students know facts but fall in the realm of virtue. To quote from the British writer C.S. Lewis, “By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.” And finally, “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”

When approaching the question of, “What is to be done?” I don’t want to give you false hope. The system of public education, while many of its teachers and leaders are good people, is agnostic at its core. A teacher who professes Christianity is legally liable in court for manipulating students. Though many break the law, the legal precedent for prosecution is already in place. The system as it stands cannot continue. Federal mandates are on the way that actively oppose what many of us appreciate about our history and culture. It is us to people like you to stand up to resist federal bribery, offering money in exchange for greater secular influence over our children. Currently several states are debating legislation that would restrict schools from implementing further progressive curricula in the schools. But even more, we must actively build alternatives where students can receive an education in the best sense: where they can learn about God, His wisdom, and how He has blessed us with a culture and history that shows His faithfulness.