A Conversation on "Sectarian" Education
Subject: "Nonsectarian" but still very religious
From: kevin4vft@aol.com (KEVIN4VFT)
Date: 04 Jan 1998 03:24:02 EST
In article <19971231235201.SAA04312@ladder01.news.aol.com>, edarr1776@aol.com (EDarr1776) writes:
>Kevin said: >>Horace Mann's schools were explicitly religious. But they were
>non-sectarian. Christian but non-sectarian. You can't understand the First
>Amendment if you can't make that distinction.<<<
>And you don't understand
>either Horace Mann or the First Amendment if you think that the Constitution
>endorses Christianity, in schools or in any other form. That's just not
>so.
Well don't cite an authority or anything like that. The presence of evidence and stuff like that might distract readers from the argument you're making.
What I know about Horace Mann I learned from a past president of the Columbia Teacher's College, a widely recognized authority on the history of education in America, Lawrence Cremin.
The dominance of the New England Primer in the 1700's and the McGuffey Readers in the 1800's, shows that Education was Christian and Biblical throughout this period. The Constitution and the First Amendment were never understood to prohibit state and local governments from encouraging the teaching of religion in all schools.
Even Horace Mann, severely criticized by many Christians, did not attempt to remove religion from the schools. It was not until the 20th century that religion was stripped from schools, and this was a sociological phenomenon, not a legally-mandated one. The legal "mandate" was not invented until the early 1960's.
In article <19971229081200.DAA11964@ladder01.news.aol.com>, edarr1776@aol.com (EDarr1776) writes:
>I'm saying that your statement that all the states taught religion is
>absolutely untrue. Politely I've given a few examples and asked you to
>document your assertion. That is in lieu of accusing you of a Ninth
>Commandment violation. But then, since you don't hold to organized religion,
>should we expect you to try to hold to the commandments?
>If you do hold to
>the commandments, at least tell us what source has led you astray on the
>teaching of religion in the public schools. It is not done, it has never
>been done on any substantial scale. If you have evidence otherwise, now is
>the time to present it.
Here we go:
-------------------------------------
Butts & Cremin, A History of Education in American Culture, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1953, pp. 272ff.:
"The attempt to build a nonsectarian common school curriculum.
In order for the ideal of a universally available, publicly supported, and publicly controlled common school to be at all workable, the teaching of sectarian religion had to be excluded from the classroom. [KC Note: this does not mean excluding all Christianity, just the denominational distinctives:] In their attempts to accomplish this by teaching the common elements of Christianity and the Bible without comment, however, the reformers encountered violent opposition from conservative religious interests and the forces allied with them. The idea that morality and character -- for many the central purposes of education -- could be included in the curriculum apart from the dogma of a sectarian faith was a difficult one for people who had recently lived under religious
establishments to accept. Yet the reformers were able, in the space of a half century, to convince a majority of Americans that the plan was practical.
"The development of the nonsectarian curriculum in Massachusetts well represents the movement throughout the Union. Interestingly enough, while the general law of 1789 had enjoined teacher to exert their best endeavors to communicate piety, justice, and other virtues to children, it nowhere mentioned the teaching of religion. Although the popularity of the New England Primer had begun to wane in favor of newer material, the Bible and the Psalter were in wide use, and the law of 1789 probably represented a more general trend replacing earlier Calvinist teachings with a milder conception of Judeo-Christian ethics and morality. Far from excluding religion, the law merely required the teaching of Christian principles to a Christian community.
"When the law of 1827 greatly strengthened the town school committees, the question of sectarian feeling in the selection of school books received important attention. In order to prevent undue sectarian interest in this matter, the following clause was inserted in the law: "That said committee shall never direct any school books to be purchased or used, in any of the schools under their superintendence, which are calculated to favor any particular sect or tenet." Once again, rather than excluding Christian morality from the schools, this provision obviously hoped to bar only sectarian doctrines and tenets.
"No particular attention was paid to this provision until the establishment of the Board of Education in 1837 and the appointment of Horace Mann, a Unitarian, as its secretary. When Mann and the board vigorously supported the common elements of Christianity conception, the more conservative religious groups in the state accused him of trying to introduce Unitarianism into the schools. [note: in the early 1800's, Unitarianism looked more like contemporary evangelicalism, but was clearly a departure from Puritan Calvinism.] In 1838, in a controversy over school libraries with Frederick A. Packard of the American Sunday School Union [which published public school textbooks, not just "sunday school" texts --kc], and again in 1844 and 1846, in controversies with Reverends Edward A. Newton and Matthew Hale Smith, respectively, Mann and the board
were accused of conducting "godless," immoral
schools which bred delinquency and vice. Throughout these continuing struggles, Mann held steadfastly to his position that the common schools were neither irreligious nor nonreligious; they were nonsectarian. If one examines the curriculum of these years, Mann's arguments were entirely borne out in practice, at least to the extent that moral instruction was non-sectarian Protestant in orientation. Very obviously, what his attackers were urging was not that religion, ethics, and morals be taught in the schools, but that their particular sectarian doctrines be taught.
"By the time of the Civil War, Mann's position enjoyed wide acceptance in most places, and universal acceptance in others. A questionnaire sent to twelve leading citizens of Massachusetts in 1851 revealed general concurrence in the conclusion that the New England system of education, while nonsectarian, was far from irreligious. Had America been entirely Protestant, there seems little doubt that well nigh universal acceptance of this policy might have been achieved by 1865. But this was not the case, and after 1840, their ranks strengthened by the mass immigrations of the 1840's and 1850's, the Roman Catholics raised growing objections. Pointing to the fact that the Protestant version of the Bible was read in schools and that this Bible, contrary to Catholic doctrine, was read without comment or interpretation, this group continued to view the public
schools as sectarian. In some places temporary compromises were achieved; in others Protestants refused to heed these complaints; and in still others separate Catholic schools systems were established. Suffice it to say that before 1865 the Protestants had no adequate solution to the problem."
If I am able, I will quote Princeton Calvinist A.A. Hodge who railed against the Catholics for fighting Protestants over the King James Bible when they should have joined the Protestants in fighting against the secularists. Again, I blame ecclesiastical denominations for most of today's problems.
But the point is inescapable. The Bible was taught in public schools long after the Constitution was ratified. Even while Horace Mann was active, the New England Primer was still being used:
That Cotton Mather's injunctions were not simply the ravings of a [fanatic] minister is attested by the whole content and spirit of the New England Primer which was the most widely read school book in America for 100 years. The best estimate is made that some 3,000,000 copies were sold from 1700 to 1850.
Butts & Cremin, p.69
No one believed this to be unconstitutional (except a few wiggy and blasphemous prototypes of the ACLU, who were always ruled against in court).
Subject: "Sectarianism"
From: kevin4vft@aol.com (KEVIN4VFT)
Date: 18 Dec 1998 12:41:00 EST
In article <19981217145321.07300.00000641@ng-cf1.aol.com>, edarr1776@aol.com (EDarr1776) writes:
>Kevin has posted nothing that suggests that the "theistic spirit" of the
>Declaration is opposed to religious freedom,
No, the theistic spirit was NOT opposed to freedom for Christians of every sect. I've never said it was.
>nor that it was designed to
>exclude any believer of any faith, nor any disbeliever of any faith.
Name one person (besides Franklin or Jefferson [maybe]) who signed the Declaration who believed that atheists should be allowed to hold office or testify in court -- and quote him to that effect. I will promptly cite the rest of the signers, and will quote the constitutions they drafted which excluded atheists.
>The
>"theistic spirit" was clearly a civil spirit, not a sectarian religious one.
I am against sectarianism, i.e., the preference by law of one Christian sect over another.
Gov Samuel Johnston affirmed this during No.Carolina's ratifying convention:
I know of but two or three states where there is the least chance of establishing any particular religion. The people of Massachusetts and Connecticut are mostly Presbyterians. In every other state, the people are divided into a great number of sects. In Rhode island, the tenets of the Baptists, I believe, prevail. In New York, they are divided very much: the most numerous are the Episcopalians and the Baptists. In New Jersey, they are as much divided as we are. In Pennsylvania, if any sect prevails more than others, it is that of the Quakers. In Maryland, the Episcopalians are most numerous, though there are other sects. In Virginia, there are many sects; you all know what their religious sentiments are. So in all the Southern States they differ; as also in New Hampshire.
I hope, therefore, that gentlemen will see there is no cause of fear that any one religion shall be exclusively established.[20]
Notice how the word "religion" is used. It is a mistake to impose our ignorance on the Founders. They used words with a specific meaning, which we may not understand 200 years later. Also speaking to the First Amendment in the same convention, Mr. Iredell:
[Congress] certainly [has] no authority to interfere in the establishment of any religion whatsoever; and I am astonished that any gentleman should conceive they have. . . . Happily no sect here is superior to another. . . .
This article is calculated to secure universal religious liberty, by putting all sects on a level.[21]
As Story wrote specifically regarding the purposes of Article VI:
It is easy to foresee, that without some prohibition of religious tests, a successful sect, in our country, might, by once possessing power, pass test-laws, which would secure to themselves a monopoly of all the offices of trust and profit, under the national government.[22]
(20) Jonathan Elliot, ed., The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, Washington: Printed for the Editor, 1836, vol. IV, p. 199. Emphasis added.
(21) Ibid., p. 194. Emphasis added.
(22) Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, Abridged Boston: Hilliar, Gray & Co., 1833, p. 690.
I join the Founding Fathers in defending a non-sectarian Christocracy.
I have been alternately called an aristocrat and a democrat. I am now neither. I am a Christocrat. I believe all power. . . will always fail of producing order and happiness in the hands of man. He alone Who created and redeemed man is qualified to govern him.
-- Benjamin Rush