Part 3: Taking the Reins
A Mann with a Plan
Through the mid-19th 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 19th and early 20th 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.”
