Peter N. Herndon
The new state constitution of the state of Massachusetts, ratified before the passage of the First Amendment, included a requirement for cities and towns to provide for “the public worship of God and the support and maintenance of public Protestant teachers of piety, religion, and morality” in the schools. Led by future President John Adams, Massachusetts kept its status as a Christian commonwealth. In 1787, the Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance that contained these words “religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” (quoted in Fraser, page 23) At the dawn of the nineteenth century, schools, religion and government seemed to be fused together into a tight bond despite the adoption of the First Amendment. But a hot debate was simmering on the nation’s horizon.
It wasn’t until 1818 that the Congregational Church in Connecticut finally was voted out as the official church, and placed it as an equal with other denominations. In 1833, the last two battles for disestablishment were won; the Congregational Churches in Massachusetts and New Hampshire lost their tax subsidies and were relegated to unprotected status. How would the new secular states treat religion in their schools?
Enter Horace Mann, secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education from 1836 to 1848. As secretary, Mann worked tirelessly to promote his views of what he called the “Common School Movement.” Mann sought the best of both the secular and the religious worlds. In his view the public school was a place where the child would be free to choose his own religious views; he would, through reason and conscience learn to determine his own religious values. This was a truly democratic approach, he believed; one that would satisfy both Christians and minority faiths. The schools would observe daily Bible readings, but without any comment or sermonizing. Leave the interpretation of the scriptures to the parents and religious leaders. The public schools would not promote a particular religion but did not exclude religion either. His reasoning was this: A nation or state without an established church, as in the past, needed an institution to pass along traditions and shape the culture and standards of morality. Schools traditionally had been an extension of the established church. Why not create “common schools” that would equip the children with the elements of a “common faith?”
But, of course, there were objections to his policies that are still heard today. One objection was the issue of democratic choice: Was it the proper role of a central Board of Education to set curriculum for the local schools throughout the commonwealth? What about bureaucratic costs? Was it proper to expose the children to religion in schools in order to foster common moral values? Whose job should it be to decide what these common moral values should be? Should the state or the parents have the final say in molding the minds and shaping the religious values of the children of Massachusetts? Where does the power for public education finally lie? Don’t some decisions have to be made by central committees? Which ones? Can schools work if individual parents have the authority to select the course of study for each child? How can a public school system function without some agreed upon standards and fundamental goals? These were the challenges facing Massachusetts in the 1830’s and still challenging public school systems today.
The common school movement was very successful in the Midwest, from the 1830’s to the late 1800’s. Along with the attempt to educate was the cause of evangelical Protestants to use the common schools to further the kingdom of God and to assimilate immigrants into a common “Protestant” culture. According to historians Timothy Smith and David Tyack, evangelicals such as Connecticut’s Lyman Beecher and Calvin Stowe helped to direct and create a school system along the western frontier, in Ohio and beyond, directed by evangelical missionaries. The acceptable textbook for religious instruction in these common schools? Calvin Stowe’s answer was “The Bible, the whole Bible and nothing but the Bible, without note or comment, must be taken as the text-book of religious instruction. Instruction in those points which divide the sects from each other must be confined to the family and the Sunday school.” (quoted in Fraser, page 36)
On the female side, another effective leader in the common school movement was Lyman Beecher’s daughter, Catharine Beecher, the sister-in-law of Calvin Stowe. Catherine’s contribution to the common school movement was her ability, over time, to persuade women that elementary school teaching was an acceptable profession for women. From 1835 to 1845, Catharine worked tirelessly to promote women as the more logical caregivers and instructors for young children in schools. Through the National Board of Popular Education that she founded in 1843, Catharine recruited hundreds of women to become trained in the East and sent out to missionary-teaching positions in the western frontier. In many communities on the frontier, the first professional was the teacher sent out by the National Board or a similar missionary society.
The issue for the religious denominations was this: it was important to establish and spread Christian values in the absence of an established church. How best to do this?
Whatever theological differences Congregationalists, Baptists, Episcopalians, Methodists, --liberals and conservatives--might have over church issues, they tended to unify around support for religious emphasis in the public schools. They believed it would be the public schools that would prove the effective builder of a morally strong America. Even non-evangelicals like Horace Mann worked hard to establish secular public schools that would help newcomers to America become assimilated into the mainstream and become part of the American Protestant culture. .
Many schools adopted the
McGuffey’s Readers
series, which sold an estimated 122 million copies between 1836 and 1920. It was the ideal textbook for the common schools, as it reflected white middle-class Protestant values as they existed in the early to mid-nineteenth century. The moral message of the Readers was clear, as in the story of the “Good Natured Boy” who “took care of his faithful dog as long as he lived, and never forgot that we must do good to others if we wish them to do the same to us.”
(McGuffey’s
Fourth Reader
, pages 39-43) McGuffey saw his textbook’s purpose as more than just inculcating individual morality. The greater design was this belief that the nation’s moral and religious values had been built around a common morality and faith and history and the
McGuffey’s
series were there to promote these important ideas to the children of the nation. In short, all could learn their place and “take care of the faithful dog.”
As the nineteenth century unfolded, it became clear that America was changing. As various Protestant denominations faced issues such as slavery and the new waves of immigration, the dominant Protestant values of the common schools began to lose their influence. Parochial schools began to appear, particularly among the Lutherans and Presbyterians. Later, Roman Catholic schools were formed as a result of the common schools refusal to include their concerns. Native Americans were seen as foreigners and outside the concern of the common schools. African Americans, many of whom were slaves, were generally excluded, and demands to establish racially integrated schools in the north were ignored by common school leaders. One condition the Protestant evangelicals did not really plan for was the mix of a national morality that was becoming highly secularized in the schools. It was one thing to rejoice in the general acceptance of a free universal education in the nation; it was another to refuse to focus on a changing America with its uncertainties and fears. From the mid nineteenth century onward, there were large cracks that began to appear in the Protestant ideal of America and the proper place of religion in a growing secular and diverse society. In a nation of growing cultural and racial diversity, do the religious values of the past expand and become inclusive, or refuse to do so and act out of fear and uncertainty? These issues are still with us.
