Click here for Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3
Part 4: It’s Broke, so let’s Fix It
Secularization of Public Schools
While the Progressive Protestants did get the generic Protestant education implemented in the public schools, it was clear that this arrangement could only be temporary. There was no way that the increasingly heterogeneous United States founded on the Enlightenment Era principle of separating Church and State would allow the State sanctioned public schools to be de facto cathedral schools of the Protestant denominations.
By the 1940s, the writing was on the wall. The increasing secularization of the school materials had reached a pinnacle. The Supreme Court was about to step in and begin cleaning house of this “non-sectarian” Protestant bias that inherent in the public schools of the 19th century. The case was Everson v. Board of Education, and the issue was public funding of transportation to religious schools. While the case came out in favor of these reimbursements, the precedential concept of a “wall of separation between church and state” was set, and would never be undone. A waterfall of cases followed, including Zellers v. Huff in 1948 (religious teachings banned in public schools, including religious garb and other religious assistance), Engel v. Vitale in 1962 (prayer in public school banned), and Abington v. Schempp in 1963 (Bible readings banned in public school). By the 1970s, the public school system in the United States was unrecognizably secular, a complete turn from the results of the Bible Wars in the 19th century.
The Modern Landscape
The Progressive Protestants rigged the system to beat back the temporary immigration of Irish, Italian, and German Catholics, only to have it predictably backfire. To this day the conflict still rages, the ideological progeny of the 19th century Progressive Protestants, the Social Conservatives, still fight tooth and nail for those last few scraps of religiosity in the public schools. Whether it’s prayer at the flagpole, a banner with a Bible verse, or a prayer before a football game, these Social Conservatives are motivated to fight the same losing fight, trying to keep the Church in power over the schools despite the State’s administrative authority.
The other, more secular, and eponymous descendants of the 19th century Progressives are the ones who wield the power of the State over the School these days. With this control, they are attempting to revive some of the methods of the past. Public schools were and are seen as a place to mold the children of America, pulling them away from the habits and beliefs of their parents, and integrating the children into American society. However, with the growth of charter schools, private schools, online schools, and homeschooling, it is not as simple to impose a worldview as it was to Protestantize the immigrant Catholics of 125 years ago.
To this end, however, there are public policy murmurs of again requiring public school education. Articles have floated the same ideas of the past such as “If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You are a Bad Person: A Manifesto” and “Banning Homeschooling does not Violate Rights: U.S. Attorney General’s Office”, both published in 2013, along with an article from the Washington Post that focused on Warren Buffett’s idea to solve problems in urban education: “Make private schools illegal and assign every child to a public school by random lottery.” Even President Obama recently weighed in with a mild rebuke of private schooling, saying “Those who are doing better and better, more skilled, more educated, – luckier – having greater advantages are withdrawing from the commons. Kids start going to private schools, kids start working out at private clubs instead of the public parks, an anti-government ideology then disinvests from those common goods and those things that draw us together.”
Perhaps today’s Progressives have taken a page from Martin Luther’s playbook. Perhaps they are attempting to use today’s public schools to establish their worldview as the dominant one in modern American society, much like Luther used the German schools to solidify Protestantism as the dominant religion of Germany. Does this imposition of worldview fit in a modern post-Enlightenment nation as well as it fit in 16th century Europe? Do laws such as the bill proposed in Michigan that requires social worker (or other authority figure) supervision of homeschooled children go too far, especially in light of alleged abuses of similar supervision in New Jersey?
Where to go From Here
It strikes me, almost two years after most of these words were written, how predictable the response from the Left is to any critique of their little pet. Also predictable are the results of the ever-growing public education system. The ire of the do-gooders may have shifted from poor Irish and Italian Catholics to poor Blacks, but the same impulse is there. They must grab the children and indoctrinate them for their own good. To allow the children to escape from the grasp of the Leviathan is unacceptable, and every dirty trick in the playbook is fair game. To let a child learn in a private, charter, or homeschool setting is akin to letting a slave escape the plantation.
This is the quintessential libertarian issue for the next 50 years. If we were to focus all of our efforts on freeing children from the yoke of public education, it wouldn’t be enough. You cannot have a free society, a liberty-loving nation, when generation after generation is inculcated from age 5 (or before) in the ideology of the State. Liberty has no hope in a country where the Republicans are beholden to the religious faction of the Progressive Party and the Democrats are beholden to the secular faction of the Progressive Party.
I also must mention the perversion of the relationship between the State and the Family. It is not an unforeseen consequence that the family has collapsed over the past 50-70 years. This was an express goal of the Progressives who designed the modern public school system. See, when the school has complete control over a child’s every move, their family can’t impart icky views on them.
Libertarians should prioritize this issue for the sake of future liberty. Only unyielding activism in this area will give children the hope of escaping the yoke of the State. To reiterate something I wrote in a comment a while back, this issue really gets me going because I can’t stand child abusers!
very good stuff.
a minor note of criticism (i can’t help it): maybe you should draw a line at the end of the formal-essay you wrote, and the more recent comments that you appended at the end; there’s a noticeable change of tone and it goes from reading like a professionally written/proofed piece to more of a blog-commentary. maybe just change the last section heading to “postscript” or something, to indicate that the last bits were your more-personal thoughts and not really part of the OG piece.
Everyone with a pompadour is an editor. 😉
Says the guy who sent his daughters to a $40K per year private school.
That comment really underscores what a horrible human being Obama is.
Note how the assumption is that if one is not participating in the state’s institutions, one is withdrawing from civil society.
You can’t expect Obama to be consistent and send his children to DC public schools. Have you seen The Wire? They’ll be eaten alive!
…Oh.
I think the way to break the spine of government schooling is not necessarily through a frontal assault on it but by undermining it so that the vast majority of people see it as a waste of time, money and their children’s educational opportunities.
One critical step is to engineer a way round the federal government’s stricture against allowing prospective employers giving aptitude tests to prospective employees..
That would create an massive market opportunity for a heterogeneous aptitude testing industry that would, in turn, give rise to more things like Coursera and Khan academy to give skills to people trying to make the grade on the aptitude tests.
Then, just as schools are already starting to outsource education to Khan academy, you’d see increasing reliance on these alternate forms of education.
Eventually, parents will get fed up sending their kids to a poorly performing indoctrination center to get the same training that they can get online in fewer hours at a private school/daycare.
I think there’s a lot to be said for this approach, but it’s still pretty hard to cripple the school juggernaut. Many parents these days are well aware of what a waste of time school is but still use the “free” government day care while supplementing their kids’ education at home. Even more parents just don’t care at all and still use the “free” daycare. I’m not sure the system will ever wither on its own
I think you’re right that it won’t wither on it’s own because of the free daycare aspect.
But… the federal government is going to hit a wall with the deficits it’s running where it can no longer borrow the money needed to give as block grants to states. The states won’t be able to afford the massive public school apparatus they currently do.
And as the funding dries up, the quality of the day care will decrease, and the same phenomenon that happens in backward places like some of the poorer sections of India – where public schools are worthless with teachers routinely failing to show up for work and students just not coming to classes at all – will happen in the under-served areas of the U.S. And there will be a massive market opportunity for inexpensive private education to fill the gap.
This is true. I must admit that this is why we don’t homeschool – it’s not financially advantageous to us. We’d lose a fair bit of income.
That’s a good idea. What would that take? My understanding is that the aptitude test prohibition came from a SCOTUS decision. Was it on the CRA? What law would have to be repealed?
Also I wonder why the military gets away with an aptitude test.
Needs more Jew-bashing. We are the ones behind the secularization to prevent the holy name of Jehovah from passing through dirty, dirty goyish mouths.
IDK about dirty goyish mouths, but I certainly knew some dirty JAP mouths growing up. And lemme tell you…pretty much anything could pass through them.
Hubba hubba!
Though there’s a reason I only married shiksas.
As a serious note, the public schools of yore actually did an effective job of Americanizing my family. No concessions to things like ethnic sensitivity or multilingualism- English immersion and you’re learning about George Washington, not Hayim Yankelovich or whatever. And within a generation we were more American than Americans. Whether or not one believes it’s a proper government function, it’s a powerful force that’s been pretty much castrated of its assimilation value.
My family was the converse – my mother always loved America as a concept, and its culture as well. She absolutely insisted on Americanizing her children and her habits, and refused to identify as anything but an American, which is actually rare for Armenian immigrants (retention of old-world culture and practices is the norm for the first few generations, at least). Her English was shitty until the day she died, and she spoke Russian to us at home, but she was a patriot, and a staunch libertarian in almost every aspect, with the exception of a peculiar approval of drug prohibition.
My grandfather was the son of immigrants and his stories of when he was young are much the same. His parents never spoke particularly fluent English, but they more or less forbade their children from speaking Italian and only spoke Italian to each other. They wanted their kids to be American children, not Italian children – that’s why they left Italy in the first place. They weren’t ashamed of their background – they never changed the family name or anything – but they never identified themselves as Italians after leaving the old country. Actually, grandpa DID legally change his first name as a young man from Alfredo to Alfred to be more “American”, but not his last name. I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all in a country founded on ideals rather than blood and soil.
It isn’t. I posit it’s a conscious attempt to detach from a past life in a worse world, and to truly begin afresh. My name’s Anthony, and my brother’s is Andrew, in those forms from birth – that is, they’re not Anglicized from a previously given ethnic name.
English was always indisputably the first language, and my mother’s methods in ensuring as much obviously succeeded. I think in both English and Russian, but English invariably predominates.
I suspect a great many native-born Americans would be surprised to learn just how allegiant to the United States and its foundational precepts some of the Soviet immigrants to this country, like my mother and her family, were and are, and that they’re often the most steadfast of patriots.
When you’ve lived the Satanic tragedy of communism, you’re sometimes much likelier to cherish the blessings of liberty than some clueless, complacent native who’s known contentment and convenience from birth.
One of my German ancestors changed their last name, the story goes that it was over a gamboling game gone bad but that just might be a gloss over to explain assimilation. Funny thing is, it involved a stabbing and my Irish side has a similar stabbing story. I sense a pattern…might even explain my knife addiction. *flicks blade out on my stabber*
Nights at the Bacon-Magic household.
I’m using that one, sir. Thanks!
Footage has emerged of Bacon-Magic fighting a bystander after a Picard-versus-Kirk debate turned sour:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlIepkY6jlY
Kirk would whoop his ass.
Dude brought a belt to a knife fight. Fail. If he wasn’t the aggressor he could’ve used the belt to wrap up the knife.
I once watched a scrawny guy punch a knife out of a bigger guy’s hand and knock him out with the following hit. It was impressive.
Do you fight with the cutthroat britva and the nozh and the oozy to chain the glazzies out?
In seriousness, I recall my grandfather telling us about Imperial loyalists in the family who fled the Empire prior to its final disintegration, which is how the core of the clan avoided persecution later — the Reds presumably remained unaware of their relatives’ counter-revolutionary activities.
“A gamboling game gone bad”
That’s the best John-o since this site opened
I like john-o’s. Gambling. Thanks. *heads to Tree of Woe™*
That’s basically what happened to me, although it was the contrast between freedom in New Hampshire and the fascism in Turkey.
These backgrounds help us to understand the singular perils of statism. I wonder whether Americans who agitate for progressive politics would continue to do so if they saw the practical outcome of their ideology.
They wouldn’t care, they think bad things would happen to their enemies, not them. They want to hold the clipboards when the trains are being loaded.
Among the people I knew in high school (which was a private school with mostly wealthy kids) who show up on my Derpbook, the only one who isn’t a prog is a Vietnamese guy who escaped Vietnam as a young kid with his father in the late ’70s.
You haven’t seen a real turd in educational terms until you’ve experienced the splendors of public schooling in Britain, or dealt with agents of government tasked with enforcing standards for carricula and homeschooling there. Me and my fiancee are friends with a family of relatively observant, pious Christians who chose to educate their kids at home, and they’ve suffered nearly a dozen belligerent visits from social workers threatening to abduct their children for their espousal of heterodox views.
That’s awful.
We’ve decided to abstain from having children until we finally move back to the United States. I won’t be coerced into subjecting my own kids to this insanity.
I’m all for school choice after growing up in the South and going to public school outside of Atlanta. Kids who wanted to escape awful schools had to be all but smuggled into the schools.
Very good read, well worth reading. I didn’t know my family was a bunch of Presbyterian shitlords.
Interesting, and very similar to what happened to Canadian schools. With one exception. Since the country had both Protestant and Catholic public school systems (some provinces got rid of their Catholic schools once their populations were low enough that they couldn’t complain and change the result) the Protestant schools were secularized into the modern system, while the Catholic schools still get to be Catholic. This has continued in Ontario, and now there’s a big argument once and awhile as to why the province is funding religious public schools.
How did that work out?
Religion [per Wikipedia]
33.5% Not religious
29.5% Roman Catholicism
27.9% Evangelical Church
Ouch.
‘Northern Germany’ and ‘the various Princes and Electors of the Holy Roman Empire’ is probably a more accurate description than ‘Germany’. It’s not like they got a whole lot of traction in Bavaria.
Yeah, and even today’s Bavaria bears little resemblance to the Bavaria of olde.
The whole prayer in public school thing reminds me of when I was a kid. I suppose now we’d call it “fake news”, but part of my Bible study classes (Southern Baptist, though my dad’s side of the family has been Church of Christ since Church of Christ first became a thing) was assigned reading, which included books about how the elimination of prayer in public schools was a Satanic plot to undermine Christianity in America. Not because they opposed mixing religion and state – that was just the front, the excuse given to get idiot liberals to support them. No, the reality was that they knew the unalterable truth of Christianity, and were engaged in a nefarious (and ultimately successful) plot to keep children from being informed by the state that Jesus Christ is their Lord and Savior. More souls lost to the Dark Lord!
I remember another one of the assigned readings was about all the Satanists in day care centers & youth groups & organizations. They even accused the Boy Scouts of being infiltrated by Satanists. There were Satanists everywhere in the early 90s, apparently, hiding under the bed, in your closet, masquerading as teachers, youth group leaders…community organizers.
I wish I remembered the names of these books, though they were mostly published by small church publishing houses, and so I doubt were very widespread.
Ah, yes Satanic panics. That brings back memories. Heavy Metal and Dungeons & Dragons were pathways to the dark side. Of course who could forget that cinematic Tour de Force that was Monsters and Mazes with a young Tom Hanks in the lead showing us the dangers of role playing games.
+1 Tom Hanks fighting monsters in Manhattan subway
It was another example of “the book was better.”
It has been quite a while since I read Mazes and Monsters, though. Yeah, a it was a product of a dumb moral panic, but acceptable literary fare nonetheless.
I’m always saddened that the imaginary Satanists are way more metal than the real life goth-reject Satanists.
Do I have the video for you!
https://youtu.be/cudicmiCQpM
We used to watch His two videos at least once a year at my (Baptist, private) high school.
And when you say “Satanist”, you mean “homosexual”, right?
Sounds like those Jack Chick pamphlets.
A church in Memphis, TN that ran a day care was raided in the 1980’s, and the day care workers accused of abusing children.
I remember a lady in our church saying that she knew those people, and that, in her opinion, they could not possibly have abused children.
Here is the story.
Here’s how the story ends: “In May 1993, the Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the decision to set aside the conviction. The Supreme Court noted that investigators had destroyed tape-recorded interviews with children at the center. One investigator testified that in initial interviews, some of the children said nothing had happened to them, but later changed their statements. The investigator said that she and other investigators were instructed by a prosecutor to write reports from the tapes and then erase the tapes so the defense would not have access to the taped interviews that contained denials of sexual molestation.”
I think it speaks to the lurid nature of most people’s imaginations that they decry sex in popular culture, but obsessively follow and puff up stories like this. They almost want it to be true, to confirm their opinion that sexuality is so awful that it is all-corrupting.
It’s always seemed to me like a way to indulge sexual fantasies while still holding them in the mental realm of “all-corrupting.”
My wife’s grandmother was an extremely sexually repressed Midwesterner who watched nothing but really seedy police procedurals. A line I remember overhearing that stuck with me because it seemed so representative of the genre was “the important question is whether or not there was semen in the body!”
It struck that me these shows almost obsessively delve into really deviant sexuality (of a variety that probably doesn’t even actually exist) but with a tone of unambiguous condemnation. There’s a real fascination-revulsion thing going on that says a lot about the mental lives of the shows’ viewers.
The teachers unions don’t care about indoctrination as much as they care about enriching themselves and making more teachers. Until we solve that issue, nothing will change.
^ This.
I’d bet hard cash that the teachers’ unions would be all for school choice if it involved an accreditation system that required unionization of the teachers and staff.
“Do laws such as the bill proposed in Michigan that requires social worker (or other authority figure) supervision of homeschooled children go too far, especially in light of alleged abuses of similar supervision in New Jersey?”
So don’t leave me in suspense, what happened in New Jersey?
Shoot, sorry I’m late in replying to this. This was an editing mistake on my part. I cut out some the details without cutting out the reference.
Here’s the link
“Liberty has no hope in a country where the Republicans are beholden to the religious faction of the Progressive Party and the Democrats are beholden to the secular faction of the Progressive Party.”
It occurs to me that at least in the political arena, it’s Republicans who have been pushing vouchers, tax credits, and homeschoolers’ rights.
Republicans and non-insane Dems are, in the political arena, the ones behind charter schools – Republicans being more likely to vote against caps on the total number of charter schools and other restrictions.
Finally got a chance to RTFA. Good one, trshmnster.
Yet, interestingly, the political aspects of the narrative remained as fossils. I don’t know what’s happened since, since things have been in rapid flux, but when I was in public high school studying World/American History ’round about 1986, the story of Protestantism was the story of America.
Catholicism was presented as the force working against science, progress and Democracy – a relic of the Dark Ages. Protestantism was the primary source of the Enlightenment, staunchly resisted by Catholics, and the yearning to freely practice a religion unpolluted by Catholic clap-trap was the whole impetus for the Mayflower’s journey.
We were presented such myths as “Columbus proved the world round over the protests of unenlightened Catholics” and “Galileo had a clear understanding of science and was punished for it by an institution benighted by ignorance and superstition.”
Monotheism was presented as the most evolved and enlightened of religious views, while the Catholic attachment to the Trinity showed their inability to reason beyond Paganism.
So there may have been some superficial concessions to separation of Church and State, but the “anti-Catholic narrative” was very much still alive and well when I was in school.
Wow, I don’t remember any of that and I’m from the same era (class of 88…). Maybe a regional thing? I’m from upstate NY – a heavily Catholic region I might add.
This was Orange County CA, which was an iron bastion of radical Protestantism at the time. Significant viewership base for the 700 Club. The only Catholics were the Mexican immigrants.
Nice series, read it all in one go.
I’d be interested to see how history textbooks portray current and recent events 20 years from now. When I was in school I rarely questioned what I was taught or the motives of teachers. Granted, nor did I care about any of that given how I always thought it was a waste of time.