Shanxi Omoniyi | July 27, 2024
(The Lion) — Advocates of current public schools often oppose Christian-based options, arguing religion has no place in government-funded education.
In doing so, they disregard years of historical precedent where the nation intentionally supported and financed Christian instruction in public-school classrooms.
The question has never been whether public education would be devoid of religious instruction, but to what extent the government should fund it.
As school choice pioneer Father Virgil Blum warned as early as 1960, every school has a “religious orientation,” whether acknowledged or implicit.
“A school cannot be neutral with regard to God,” he wrote. “If it excludes God as an important and integral part of things to be learned, its religious orientation is secularist.”
It’s time government-funded schools acknowledge their efforts to push a “secularist” religion at the expense of all other faiths – because as we all know by now, education can never be value-neutral.
Christianity’s history in US public schools
Many schoolchildren and educators today may be surprised to learn how colonists before 1776 funded religious schools by compulsion, not by choice.
“Before the American Revolution, most of the original colonies used tax dollars to support religious activity,” explains a 2009 fact sheet from the Pew Research Center. “Indeed, several colonies chose a single church as their officially established religion, and these churches enjoyed many privileges not extended to other religious groups. For instance, the Anglican Church enjoyed government support in some of the Southern colonies, while the Congregational Church held sway in New England.”
However, the success of the fledgling nation’s War for Independence launched several educational battles as well.
“Religious minorities, including Baptists and Methodists, argued that government support of religion infringed upon the liberty that the colonists fought to win from the British crown. In response, defenders of religious establishments countered that the government needed to fund religion because public virtue depended on vigorous religious institutions, which, they argued, could not survive with purely private support.”
As a result, Christian-based instruction – including classroom prayer and Bible reading – continued as an integral part of public education many years after the nation’s founding.
“In the 19th century, Protestants and Catholics frequently fought over Bible reading and prayer in public schools. The disputes then were over which Bible and which prayers were appropriate to use in the classroom.”
The rise of ‘compulsory’ education
Public education didn’t become compulsory or centralized until Horace Mann’s Common School Movement in the 1830s.
“Drawing inspiration from Prussia and France, Mann envisioned and campaigned for a more uniform, centralized, and government-controlled education system than had previously existed in America,” writes Daniel Lattier in an article for Intellectual Takeout.
This movement met vigorous opposition from Mann’s contemporaries. A Massachusetts legislative committee warned of “disastrous” consequences nationwide if the government began controlling its local educational system.
“Instead of consolidating the education interest of the Commonwealth in one grand central head, and that head the government, let us rather hold on to the good old principles of our ancestors, and diffuse and scatter this interest far and wide, divided and subdivided, not only into towns and districts but even into families and individuals,” the committee wrote in its report.
“The moment this interest is surrendered to the government, and all responsibility is thrown upon civil power, farewell to the usefulness of common schools, the just pride, honor, and ornament of New England; farewell to religious liberty, for there would be but one church [the government]; farewell to political freedom, for nothing but the name of a republic would survive such a catastrophe.” (emphasis added)
This committee predicted what is happening today – our nation’s First Amendment freedoms have been (and are being) violated by our current government-funded educational system.
Consider these recent examples:
- Discriminating against students’ rights to religious speech. A Mississippi 3rd-grader wore a mask saying “Jesus Loves Me” at her school and was told she couldn’t wear it. This occurred while other students freely displayed other slogans on their masks such as “Black Lives Matter.”
- Preferring one political viewpoint over another. An Indiana high school “derecognized” a pro-life student club after taking issue with its flyers, saying a sign referring to Planned Parenthood was “political.” However, other political groups such as the Gender and Sexuality Alliance, Young Democrats, and Young Republicans continued to be recognized at the school.
- Disregarding parental rights. Californian schools can force taxpayers to fund “gender inclusion” workshops at $1,500 each. Meanwhile, parents are legally prohibited from requiring those schools to keep them informed of their child’s gender identity.
Tyranny ‘for the good of its victims’
Proponents of today’s public schools often argue if taxpayers fund “religious schools,” this will threaten other people’s rights to different religions.
However, they fail to see how taxpayers are already forced to fund a type of religion right now – the “secularist” public school that excludes God, as Father Virgil Blum explained.
“When government demands the surrender of freedom of choice in education as a condition for sharing in state educational benefits, it enforces conformity to the philosophical and theological orientation of government schools,” he wrote in 1958.
“There can be no free exchange of ideas, there can be no full and free discussion, when participation in the government’s educational benefits is conditioned on the surrender of educational freedom – the freedom to exchange ideas and to pursue truth uninhibited by the strong arm of the state.”
Unfortunately, the current government educational system is guilty of what C.S. Lewis considers the most oppressive form of tyranny – “a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims.” It’s trying to replace traditionally Christian values in public schools with their own value system, arguing it’s for our benefit.
“This very kindness stings with intolerable insult,” Lewis wrote in his book, God in the Dock. “To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”
This nation can no longer pretend it has a public educational system devoid of religion. Whether it’s the historically Christian-based education in the 1800s or the secularist religion of today, every school has a religion – and we the taxpayers are funding it.
This article was made available to EdNews Virginia via The Lion, a publication of the Herzog Foundation.