Author: trshmnstr the terrible

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 19^th 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 19^th 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 19^th 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 19^th 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!

For Part 1 and Part 2

Part 3: Taking the Reins

A Mann with a Plan

Through the mid-19^th century, a group of educational reformers led by Horace Mann became interested in the Prussian model of education. The Prussians had slowly evolved away from the religious teaching proposed by Luther in the 16th century and had embraced a system tailored to individual students. The contemporary Prussian system was largely secular, and de-emphasized religious learning in favor of secular skills such as mathematics and drafting.

Horace Mann, the father of the public school, worked to secularize the public schools established in Massachusetts. He preferred that children be taught in a soft manner by female teachers, and without corporal punishment. Replacing catechisms with books of nature, geography, and government, Mann wanted children to be exposed to an education that was like “the warming sun and the refreshing rain.” In his eyes, the schools were to “purify the [teaching] environment” and “purge it from alienating influences.” This softer, more generic system in the mold of the Prussian system aimed to expose children to the love of learning rather than the rote memorization and recitation characteristic of the religious schools of the time. Mann believed that learning and literacy should engage the imagination, and allow for open minds, but the existing structures of learning were not amenable to either.

Bible Wars and Misdemeanors

With Mann’s growing public school system and a competing Catholic parochial system, a tension was created between the nativist Protestant elites, who were supporting these growing public schools across the nation, and the immigrant Catholic peasants, who were being supported by the Catholic Church’s parochial schools. The 1869 Cincinnati Bible Wars were endemic of the tension between the entrenched Protestant majority and the growing Catholic presence in urban areas. The Cincinnati Bible Wars started as a proposal from F. W. Rauch, a Catholic member of the Cincinnati School Board, to combine the public schools with the Catholic parochial schools in Cincinnati. An alternative proposal prohibited the reading of religious books, including the Bible in Cincinnati public schools. This proposal passed the School Board on a divided vote, and ignited a three-year court battle between the Catholics and the Protestants as to whether the King James Bible was sectarian or not. As the court battle was concluding in 1870 (in favor of the Bible being taught in school), the New York Times and Harper’s Weekly expressed the Protestant populist opinion that the Catholics were holding religious study ransom in order to dip their hands into the “public education” coffers.

In 1875, the tension boiled over when Congressman James G. Blaine proposed what would be known as the Blaine Amendment. This Constitutional amendment would have halted any public funding, lands, or other assistance from going to Catholic parochial schools, and would force the Bible to be taught in the Protestant public schools. There had been quite the buildup to this proposal, including President Grant speaking about the need for education in a representative form of government so that the tyrant of “priestcraft” could not control them. Blaine feared that the growing parochial schools would lead to the abolishment of the “non-sectarian public school,” which would breed ignorance. This seems odd when viewed from the secularized modern day, but at the time, Catholic schools were seen to be an encroaching sectarian force, breeding intolerance and bigotry. Generic Protestantism was seen as nonsectarian. Senator Morill wrote that schools were “all but universal now, and tending to become more and more so, are likely to leaven the whole lump and [make] national unity not only possible, but probable . . . Religion will tend to mold together the great majority of our people, as it is distinctively Protestant.” No statement better summed up the view of the Protestant elites than that.

When the Blaine Amendment failed to pass the Senate, these crusaders couldn’t just quit, they had to continue! Catholics and Protestants were continuously clashing about schooling, to the point of Teddy Roosevelt’s proclamation in 1893 that “[w]e have the right to demand that every man, native born or foreign born, shall in American public life act merely as an American” (a clear shot across the Catholic immigrants’ bow), and Woodrow Wilson saying “our problem is not merely to help the students to adjust themselves to world life . . . [but] to make them as unlike their fathers as we can.”

There was a full blown populist push from the nativist Protestants, especially the Social Darwinist Progressives, to Americanize and Protestantize the Catholic peasants, and the best way to do it was a one-two punch of compelling attendance at public school and providing a Protestant education at those public schools. One of the best examples of the compulsory education laws passed during this era was passed in Oregon in 1922. This law would be challenged in 1925 in Pierce v. Society of Sisters. The Act “requires every parent, guardian, or other person having control or charge or custody of a child between 8 and 16 years to send him ‘to a public school for the period of time a public school shall be held during the current year’ in the district where the child resides; and failure so to do is declared a misdemeanor.”

While this specific law may have been struck down, more generic compulsory education laws thrived through the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The State had taken control of education, and children would be getting a generic Protestant education steeped in American Protestant morals and ethics. Those who had the power to effectively object, like Alfred Roncovieri, were simply swept out of the way in the push to Americanize and Protestantize the immigrant Catholics. While a disdain for Catholics was not the only motivation behind compulsory education, it was certainly a driving force for much of the upheaval around education at the turn of the 20th century. In the words of Richard Niece, “The original purposes for compulsory education were three-fold: (1) to teach the skills essential to exist within and contribute to an industrialized nation . . . (2) to instill the youth with social skills and moral values; and (3) to Americanize the children of immigrants who had settled in this country. This third purpose seems, in retrospect, to have been the most sacred to the early proponents of compulsory education.”

For Part 1, go here .

Part 2: Eugenics and Anti-Catholic Sentiment

The other side of the Progressive movement was a secular philosophy anchored in the theories of Darwin and in an increased role of government. Social Darwinism had become a popular philosophy which eventually evolved into the eugenics movement. The premise of Social Darwinism was that the races developed and evolved apart from one another, and the relative civilization of each race determined how advanced they were. Therefore, certain races were more or less worthy of power. This, combined with a populist push to eradicate social ills (aided by the Social Gospel movement), led to a massive change in the role of government from dispassionate referee to guarantor of social justice. Many of the social programs instituted in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries had aspects of Social Darwinism as the foundation.

Scientifically Inferior

Through the 1850s there was a mass migration of Germans, Irish, and other Europeans, specifically Catholic Europeans to the United States. Some of this was due to famine, but much was due to governmental upheaval. In the 1850s there was a number of outbreaks of violence against immigrant Catholics, specifically the Irish Catholics. The nativist tendency of the natural-born Americans was showing itself through resistance to the more assertive Catholic Church. As the Irish Catholics were forced to retreat into their own communities, they created systems of schools. These schools, which became parochial Catholic schools, raised even more suspicions from the native-born Americans regarding the infiltration of Catholicism into American society.

Many Americans, especially the Social Darwinists, despised the low-class Irish Catholics that immigrated to the United States during the Potato Famine and thereafter. Anti-immigrant sentiment was not new in the Progressive Era, but for the first time there was a science that supported the bias. Even more, there was something to be done about it. The Progressive movement had finally consolidated enough power in the national government that the Social Darwinists could implement policy, highlighted by the election of Teddy Roosevelt.

The Protestants were somewhat split on the science of eugenics versus the spirituality of the Social Gospel. On the one hand, racism against Catholics was stoked by the Social Darwinists. On the other hand, the Social Gospel preached a different message regarding the poor and the destitute in an attempt to purify and perfect America. As is the case in modern politics, the message became muddled and descended to the lowest common denominator: the dislike of immigrant Catholics. Economist Francis Walker bluntly summed up the moral and scientific fusion of the eugenics camp, “We must strain out of the blood of the race more of the taint inherited from a bad and vicious past before we can eliminate poverty, much more pauperism, from our social life. The scientific treatment which is applied to physical diseases must be extended to mental and moral disease, and a wholesome surgery and cautery must be enforced by the whole power of the state for the good of all.”

Dying Influence

Protestants were confronted with an emotionally charged problem. Everything had been fine up until the increased Catholic immigration of the 1850s, but there were fears of influence from Rome, and a general scientific consensus that the Irish and Italian Catholic immigrants were lesser races and were uncivilized. Stoking the flames of Catholic hatred was the First Vatican Council in 1869. The most well-known decision to come from Vatican I was the doctrine of papal infallibility. The Roman Catholic Church established that when the Pope was speaking ex cathedra, he was speaking in an inerrant manner. To a skeptical and hostile Protestant America, this looked exactly like what they feared. The Catholics were attempting to run the world from Rome.

To have a major player such as the Pope be declared infallible, especially in political and social pronouncements, makes clear why Protestants were uncomfortable with Catholics, especially since Protestants were losing their grip on the society. They were panicked by the thought of the Catholics having a growing political and social coalition that would ruin the previous homogeneity of thought and culture in the United States. In order to protect against this encroaching foreign power, Progressive Era Protestants focused their attention on the most malleable of the Catholics, their children.