education (n.)
All education is despotism. [William Godwin, “Enquirer,” 1797]
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despotism – dĕs′pə-tĭz″əm – noun
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Education – Etymology – LiquiSearch
Etymologically, the word “education” is derived from the Latin ēducātiō (“A breeding, a bringing up, a rearing“) from ēdūcō (“I educate, I train”) which is related to the homonym ēdūcō (“I lead forth, I take out; I raise up, I erect“) from ē- (“from, out of”) and dūcō (“I lead, I conduct”). Read more about this topic: Education
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What is the etymological meaning of education? – Quora
The word ‘education’ has been derived from Latin words-‘Educare’, ‘Educare’ and ‘Educatum’, ‘e’+ ‘duco’. ‘Educare’- The term ‘educare’ means to bring up, to rise, and to nourish, to train or mould. The child has to be brought up like a plant in the garden by the teacher. His potentialities should be developed with proper care and nourishment.
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Education Definition & Meaning – Merriam-Webster
education: [noun] the knowledge and development resulting from an educational process.
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education | Definition, Development, History, Types, & Facts
Education can be thought of as the transmission of the values and accumulated knowledge of a society. In this sense, it is equivalent to what social scientists term socialization or enculturation. Children—whether conceived among New Guinea tribespeople, the Renaissance Florentines, or the middle classes of Manhattan—are born without culture.
So, we have seen that education is child rearing. Raising up children by instilling values and transferring skills for living in the world.Those are tasks that fall on the PARENTS, not the schools or the government or the society. PARENTS have the RIGHT to raise their children according to their own values, philosophies and religious beliefs.If you are a believer in the Creator and His WORD, you know that children do not belong to their Parents, they belong to GOD. God blesses us with children and entrusts them to us to raise. We will be held accountable for what we do or do not do for our children. We are to raise them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Proverbs 22:6spacer
The Greatest Commandment:
1Now these are the commandments, the statutes, and the judgments, which the LORD your God commanded to teach you, that ye might do them in the land whither ye go to possess it: 2That thou mightest fear the LORD thy God, to keep all his statutes and his commandments, which I command thee, thou, and thy son, and thy son’s son, all the days of thy life; and that thy days may be prolonged. 3Hear therefore, O Israel, and observe to do it; that it may be well with thee, and that ye may increase mightily, as the LORD God of thy fathers hath promised thee, in the land that floweth with milk and honey.
4Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD: 5And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. 6And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: 7And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. 8And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. 9And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates. (Matthew 22:34-40; Mark 12:28-34)
Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Ephesians 6:4
Tell your sons about it, And let your sons tell their sons,
And their sons the next generation. Joel 1:3Source: https://bible.knowing-jesus.com/topics/Parents-Duty-To-Children
One of the main objections people have to getting government out of the education business and turning it over to the free market is that “it simply would not get the job done.” This type of thinking is due, in large measure, to what one historian called “a parochialism in time,”[1] i.e., a limited view of an issue for lack of historical perspective. Having served the twelve-year sentence in government-controlled schools, most Americans view our present public school system as the measure of all things in education. Yet for two hundred years in American history, from the mid-1600s to the mid-1800s, public schools as we know them to day were virtually non-existent, and the educational needs of America were met by the free market. In these two centuries, America produced several generations of highly skilled and literate men and women who laid the foundation for a nation dedicated to the principles of freedom and self-government.
The private system of education in which our forefathers were educated included home, school, church, voluntary associations such as library companies and philosophical societies, circulating libraries, apprenticeships, and private study. It was a system supported primarily by those who bought the services of education, and by private benefactors. All was done without compulsion. Although there was a veneer of government involvement in some colonies, such as in Puritan Massachusetts, early American education was essentially based on the principle of voluntarism.[2]
Dr. Lawrence A. Cremin, distinguished scholar in the field of education, has said that during the colonial period the Bible was “the single most important cultural influence in the lives of Anglo-Americans.”[3]
Thus, the cornerstone of early American education was the belief that “children are an heritage from the Lord.”[4] Parents believed that it was their responsibility to not only teach them how to make a living, but also how to live. As our forefathers searched their Bibles, they found that the function of government was to protect life and property.[5] Education was not a responsibility of the civil government.
Education Began in the Home and the Fields
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The Hand That Rocks the Cradle Rules the World
by William Ross Wallace (1819-1881)
| Blessings on the hand of women! Angels guard its strength and grace. In the palace, cottage, hovel, Oh, no matter where the place; Would that never storms assailed it, Rainbows ever gently curled, For the hand that rocks the cradle Is the hand that rules the world.Infancy’s the tender fountain, Power may with beauty flow, Mothers first to guide the streamlets, From them souls unresting grow — Grow on for the good or evil, Sunshine streamed or evil hurled, For the hand that rocks the cradle Is the hand that rules the world. |
Woman, how divine your mission, Here upon our natal sod; Keep – oh, keep the young heart open Always to the breath of God! All true trophies of the ages Are from mother-love impearled, For the hand that rocks the cradle Is the hand that rules the world.Blessings on the hand of women! Fathers, sons, and daughters cry, And the sacred song is mingled With the worship in the sky — Mingles where no tempest darkens, Rainbows evermore are hurled; For the hand that rocks the cradle Is the hand that rules the world. |
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Education in early America began in the home at the mother’s knee, and often ended in the cornfield or barn by the father’s side. The task of teaching reading usually fell to the mother, and since paper was in short supply, she would trace the letters of the alphabet in the ashes and dust by the fireplace.[6] The child learned the alphabet and then how to sound out words. Then a book was placed in the child’s hands, usually the Bible. As many passages were familiar to him, having heard them at church or at family devotions, he would soon master the skill of reading. The Bible was supplemented by other good books such as Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, The New England Primer, and Isaac Watt’s Divine Songs. From volumes like these, our founding fathers and their generation learned the values that laid the foundation for free enterprise. In “Against Idleness and Mischief,” for example, they learned individual responsibility before God in the realm of work and learning.[7]
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Armed with love, common sense, and a nearby woodshed, colonial mothers often achieved more than our modern-day elementary schools with their federally-funded programs and education specialists. These colonial mothers used simple, time-tested methods of instruction mixed with plain, old-fashioned hard work. Children were not ruined by educational experiments developed in the ivory towers of academe. The introduction to a reading primer from the early 19th century testifies to the importance of home instruction.[8] It says: “The author cannot but hope that this book will enable many a mother or aunt, or elder brother or sister, or perhaps a beloved grandmother, by the family fireside, to go through in a pleasant and sure way with the art of preparing the child for his first school days.”
Home education was so common in America that most children knew how to read before they entered school. As Ralph Walker has pointed out, “Children were often taught to read at home before they were subjected to the rigours of school. In middle-class families, where the mother would be expected to be literate, this was considered part of her duties.[9]
Without ever spending a dime of tax money, or without ever consulting a host of bureaucrats, psychologists, and specialists, children in early America learned the basic academic skills of reading, writing, and ciphering necessary for getting along in society. Even in Boston, the capital city of the colony in which the government had the greatest hand, children were taught to read at home. Samuel Eliot Morison, in his excellent study on education in colonial New England, says:[10]
Boston offers a curious problem. The grammar (Boston Latin) school was the only public school down to 1684, when a writing school was established; and it is probable that only children who already read were admitted to that . . . . they must have learned to read somehow, since there is no evidence of unusual illiteracy in the town. And a Boston bookseller’s stock in 1700 includes no less than eleven dozen spellers and sixty-one dozen primers.
The answer to this supposed problem is simple. The books were bought by parents, and illiteracy was absent because parents taught their children how to read outside of a formal school setting. Coupled with the vocational skills children learned from their parents, home education met the demands of the free market. For many, formal schooling was simply unnecessary. The fine education they received at home and on the farm held them in good stead for the rest of their lives, and was supplemented with Bible reading and almanacs like Franklin’s Poor Richard’s.
Some of our forefathers desired more education than they could receive at home. Thus, grammar and secondary schools grew up all along the Atlantic seaboard, particularly near the centers of population, such as Boston and Philadelphia. In New England, many of these schools were started by colonial governments, but were supported and controlled by the local townspeople.
In the Middle Colonies there was even less government intervention. In Pennsylvania, a compulsory education law was passed in 1683, but it was never strictly enforced.[11] Nevertheless, many schools were set up simply as a response to consumer demand. Philadelphia, which by 1776 had become second only to London as the chief city in the British Empire, had a school for every need and interest. Quakers, Philadelphia’s first inhabitants, laid the foundation for an educational system that still thrives in America. Because of their emphasis on learning, an illiterate Quaker child was a contradiction in terms. Other religious groups set up schools in the Middle Colonies. The Scottish Presbyterians, the Moravians, the Lutherans, and Anglicans all had their own schools. In addition to these church-related schools, private schoolmasters, entrepreneurs in their own right, established hundreds of schools.
Historical records, which are by no means complete, reveal that over one hundred and twenty-five private schoolmasters advertised their services in Philadelphia newspapers between 1740 and 1776. Instruction was offered in Latin, Greek, mathematics, surveying, navigation, accounting, bookkeeping, science, English, and contemporary foreign languages.[12] Incompetent and inefficient teachers were soon eliminated, since they were not subsidized by the State or protected by a guild or union. Teachers who satisfied their customers by providing good services prospered. One schoolmaster, Andrew Porter, a mathematics teacher, had over one hundred students enrolled in 1776. The fees the students paid enabled him to provide for a family of seven.[13]
In the Philadelphia Area
Philadelphia also had many fine evening schools. In 1767, there were at least sixteen evening schools, catering mostly to the needs of Philadelphia’s hard-working German population. For the most part, the curriculum of these schools was confined to the teaching of English and vocations.[14] There were also schools for women, blacks, and the poor. Anthony Benezet, a leader in colonial educational thought, pioneered in the education for women and Negroes. The provision of education for the poor was a favorite Quaker philanthropy. As one historian has pointed out, “the poor, both Quaker and non-Quaker, were allowed to attend without paying fees.”[15]
In the countryside around Philadelphia, German immigrants maintained many of their own schools. By 1776, at least sixteen schools were being conducted by the Mennonites in Eastern Pennsylvania. Christopher Dock, who made several notable contributions to the science of pedagogy, taught in one of these schools for many years. Eastern Pennsylvanians, as well as New Jerseyans and Marylanders, sometimes sent their children to Philadelphia to further their education, where there were several boarding schools, both for girls and boys.
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In the Southern colonies, government had, for all practical purposes, no hand at all in education. In Virginia, education was considered to be no business of the State. The educational needs of the young in the South were taken care of in “old-field” schools. “Old-field” schools were buildings erected in abandoned fields that were too full of rocks or too overcultivated for farm use. It was in such a school that George Washington received his early education. The Southern Colonies’ educational needs were also taken care of by using private tutors, or by sending their sons north or across the Atlantic to the mother country.
Colonial Colleges
A college education is something that very few of our forefathers wanted or needed. As a matter of fact, most of them were unimpressed by degrees or a university accent. They judged men by their character and by their experience. Moreover, many of our founding ‘fathers, such as George Washington, Patrick Henry, and Ben Franklin, did quite well without a college education. Yet for those who so desired it, usually young men aspiring to enter the ministry, university training was available. Unlike England, where the government had given Cambridge and Oxford a monopoly on the granting of degrees,[16] there were nine colleges from which to choose.
Although some of the colonial colleges were started by colonial governments, it would be misleading to think of them as statist institutions in the modern sense.[17] Once chartered, the colleges were neither funded nor supported by the State. Harvard was established with a grant from the Massachusetts General Court, yet voluntary contributions took over to keep the institution alive. John Harvard left the college a legacy of 800 pounds and his library of 400 books. “College corn,” donated by the people of the Bay Colony, maintained the young scholars for many years.[18] Provision was also made for poor students, as Harvard developed one of the first work-study programs.[19] And when Harvard sought to build a new building in 1674, donations were solicited from the people of Massachusetts. Despite the delays caused by King Philip’s War, the hall was completed in 1677 at almost no cost to the taxpayer.[20]
New Jersey was the only colony that had two colleges, the College of New Jersey (Princeton) and Queens (Rutgers). The Log College, the predecessor of Princeton, was founded when Nathaniel Irwin left one thousand dollars to William Tennant to found a seminary.[21] Queens grew out of a small class held by the Dutch revivalist, John Frelinghuyson.[22] Despite occasional hard times, neither college bowed to civil government for financial assistance. As Frederick Rudolph has observed, “neither the college at Princeton nor its later rival at New Brunswick ever received any financial support from the state.”[23] Indeed, John Witherspoon, Princeton’s sixth president, was apparently proud of the fact that his institution was independent of government control. In an advertisement addressed to the British settlers in the West Indies, Witherspoon wrote:[24] “The College of New Jersey is altogether independent. It hath received no favor from Government but the charter, by the particular friendship of a person now deceased.”
Based on the principle of freedom, Princeton under Witherspoon produced some of America’s most “animated Sons of Liberty.” Many of Princeton’s graduates, standing firmly in the Whig tradition of limited government, helped lay the legal and constitutional foundations for our Republic. James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, was a Princeton graduate.
Libraries
In addition to formal schooling in elementary and secondary schools, colleges, and universities, early America had many other institutions that made it possible for people to either get an education or supplement their previous training. Conceivably, an individual who never attended school could receive an excellent education by using libraries, building and consulting his own library, and by joining a society for mutual improvement. In colonial America, all of these were possible.
Consumer demand brought into existence a large number of libraries. Unlike anything in the Old Country, where libraries were open only to scholars, churchmen, or government officials, these libraries were rarely supported by government funds. In Europe, church libraries were supported by tax money as well, for they were a part of an established church. In America, church libraries, like the churches themselves, were supported primarily by voluntarism.
The first non-private, non-church libraries in America were maintained by membership fees, called subscriptions or shares, and by gifts of books and money from private benefactors interested in education. The most famous of these libraries was Franklin and Logan’s Library Company in Philadelphia, which set the pattern and provided much of the inspiration for libraries throughout the colonies.[25] The membership fee for these subscription libraries varied from twenty or thirty pounds to as little as fifteen shillings a year. The Association Library, a library formed by a group of Quaker artisans, cost twenty shillings to join.[26]
Soon libraries became the objects of private philanthropy, and it became possible for even the poorest citizens to borrow books. Sometimes the membership fee was completely waived for an individual if he showed intellectual promise and character.[27]
Entrepreneurs, seeing an opportunity to make a profit from colonial Americans’ desire for self-improvement, provided new services and innovative ways to sell or rent printed matter. One new business that developed was that of the circulating library. In 1767, Lewis Nicola established one of the first such businesses in the City of Brotherly Love. The library was open daily, and customers, by depositing five pounds and paying three dollars a year, could withdraw one book at a time. Nicola apparently prospered, for two years later he moved his business to Society Hill, enlarged his library, and reduced his prices to compete with other circulating libraries.[28] Judging from the titles in these libraries,[29] colonial Americans could receive an excellent education completely outside of the schoolroom. For colonial Americans who believed in individual responsibility, self-government, and self-improvement, this was not an uncommon course of study. Most lawyers, for example, were self-educated.
Sermons as Educational Tools
The sermon was also an excellent educational experience for our colonial forefathers. Sunday morning was a time to hear the latest news and see old friends and neighbors. But it was also an opportunity for many to sit under a man of God who had spent many hours preparing for a two, three, or even four hour sermon. Many a colonial pastor, such as Jonathan Edwards, spent eight to twelve hours daily studying, praying over, and researching his sermon. Unlike sermons on the frontier in the mid-19th century, colonial sermons were filled with the fruits of years of study. They were geared not only to the emotions and will, but also to the intellect.
As Daniel Boorstin has pointed out, the sermon was one of the chief literary forms in colonial America.[30] Realizing this, listeners followed sermons closely, took mental notes, and usually discussed the sermon with the family on Sunday afternoon. Anne Hutchinson’s discussions, which later resulted in the Antinomian Controversy, were merely typical of thousands of discussions which took place in the homes of colonial America. Most discussions, however, were not as controversial as those which took place in the Hutchinson home.
Thus, without ever attending a college or seminary, a church-goer in colonial America could gain an intimate knowledge of Bible doctrine, church history, and classical literature. Questions raised by the sermon could be answered by the pastor or by the books in the church libraries that were springing up all over America. Often a sermon was later published and listeners could review what they had heard on Sunday morning.
The first Sunday Schools also developed in this period. Unlike their modern-day counterparts, colonial Sunday Schools not only taught Bible but also the rudiments of reading and writing. These Sunday Schools often catered to the poorest members of society.
Modern historians have discounted the importance of the colonial church as an educational institution, citing the low percentage of colonial Americans on surviving church membership rolls. What these historians fail to realize, however, is that unlike most churches today, colonial churches took membership seriously. Requirements for becoming a church member were much higher in those days, and many people attended church without officially joining. Other sources indicate that church attendance was high in the colonial period. Thus, many of our forefathers partook not only of the spiritual blessing of their local churches, but the educational blessings as well.
Philosophical Societies
Another educational institution that developed in colonial America was the philosophical society. One of the most famous of these was Franklin’s Junto, where men would gather to read and discuss papers they had written on all sorts of topics and issues.[31] Another society was called The Literary Republic. This society opened in the bookbindery of George Rineholt in 1764 in Philadelphia. Here, artisans, tradesmen, and common laborers met to discuss logic, jurisprudence, religion, science, and moral philosophy (economics).[32]
Itinerant lecturers, not unlike the Greek philosophers of the Hellenistic period, rented halls and advertised their lectures in local papers. One such lecturer, Joseph Cunningham, offered a series of lectures on the “History and Laws of England” for a little over a pound.[33]
By 1776, when America finally declared its independence, a tradition had been established and voluntarism in education was the rule. Our founding fathers, who had been educated in this tradition, did not think in terms of government-controlled education. Accordingly, when the delegates gathered in Philadelphia to write a Constitution for the new nation, education was considered to be outside the jurisdiction of the civil government, particularly the national government. Madison, in his notes on the Convention, recorded that there was some talk of giving the Federal legislature the power to establish a national university at the future capital. But the proposal was easily defeated, for as Boorstin has pointed out, “the Founding Fathers supported the local institutions which had sprung up all over the country.”[34] A principle had been established in America that was not to be deviated from until the mid-nineteenth century. Even as late as 1860, there were only 300 public schools, as compared to 6,000 private academies.[35]
A Highly Literate Populace
The results of colonial America’s free market system of education were impressive indeed. Almost no tax money was spent on education, yet education was available to almost anyone who wanted it, including the poor. No government subsidies were given, and inefficient institutions either improved or went out of business. Competition guaranteed that scarce educational resources would be allocated properly. The educational institutions that prospered produced a generation of articulate Americans who could grapple with the complex problems of self-government. The Federalist Papers, which are seldom read or understood today, even in our universities, were written for and read by the common man. Literacy rates were as high or higher than they are today.[36] A study conducted in 1800 by DuPont de Nemours revealed that only four in a thousand Americans were unable to read and write legibly.[37] Various accounts from colonial America support these statistics. In 1772, Jacob Duche, the Chaplain of Congress, later turned Tory, wrote:[38]
The poorest labourer upon the shore of Delaware thinks himself entitled to deliver his sentiments in matters of religion or politics with as much freedom as the gentleman or scholar . . . . Such is the prevailing taste for books of every kind, that almost every man is a reader; and by pronouncing sentence, right or wrong, upon the various publications that come in his way, puts himself upon a level, in point of knowledge, with their several authors.
Franklin, too, testified to the efficiency of the colonial educational system. According to Franklin, the North American libraries alone “have improved the general conversation of Americans, made the common tradesmen and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen from other countries, and perhaps have contributed in some degree to the stand so generally made throughout the colonies in defense of their privileges.”[39]
The experience of colonial America clearly supports the idea that the market, if allowed to operate freely, could meet the educational needs of modern-day America. In the nineteenth century, the Duke of Wellington remarked that “the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton and Cambridge.” Today, the battle between freedom and statism is being fought in America’s schools. Those of us who believe in Constitutional government would do well to promote the principle of com petition, pluralism, and government non-intervention in education. Years ago, Abraham Lincoln said, “The philosophy of the classroom will be the philosophy of the government in the next generation.”
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We have seen that The United States of America was founded as a Christian Nation with Christian Values. Values that carried our nation a long way. Values that over time made the USA the envy of all people. The GREATEST LAND in the WORLD because it was based on Godly values and FREEDOM.
Parents took their responsibility for their children very seriously and labored hard to instill in them those very values and characteristics as well as passing on to them skills that would enable them to live their own happy and successful lives.
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Massachusetts passed the Old Deluder Satan Act in 1647, laying the basis for public schools in America. The Puritans valued literacy highly; they believed all individuals should be able to read and interpret the Bible for themselves. In 1642 Massachusetts had required parents to ensure their children’s ability to read, and five years later, in this act, the state mandated community schooling. The religious origins of laws providing for education in early America may help explain some of the conflicts that have subsequently developed when courts, enforcing the establishment clause of the First Amendment, have invalidated devotional religious exercises in public schools. This image shows a colonial dame school taught by a woman in her home in 1713. (Image via Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
Act required towns to support teachers for their children
The religious basis of the act was explicit: the act stated its intention was to thwart “ye old deluder, Satan” in his goal “to keep men from the knowledge of ye Scriptures.” To this end, the law required every town with 50 or more families to hire and maintain a teacher to instruct all children in reading and writing. Towns of 100 or more families were required to support a grammar school to prepare students to attend Harvard College. Similar acts were soon adopted in the other New England colonies, except Rhode Island.
Act established principles of public education
The act established several principles upon which public primary and secondary education continues to rest today: that basic education is a public or community responsibility, that the state can require communities to raise and expend local funds for schools, that day-to-day responsibility for the operation of schools rests at the local level, and that schools are to be organized in levels separating elementary from secondary education.
This article was originally published in 2009. Dr. David Carleton is the chair of the Department of Global Studies and Human Geography at Middle Tennessee State University.
1600’s-1800’s Education in America
1. The first schools in the 13 colonies opened in the 17th century. The Boston Latin School was the first public school opened in the United States, in 1635. To this day, it remains the nation’s oldest public school.
2. Early public schools in the United States did not focus on academics like math or reading. Instead they taught the virtues of family, religion, and community.
3. Girls were usually taught how to read but not how to write in early America.
4. By the mid-19th century, academics became the sole responsibility of public schools.
5. In the South, public schools were not common during the 1600s and the early 1700s. Affluent families paid private tutors to educate their children.
6. Public Schooling in the South was not widespread until the Reconstruction Era after the American Civil War.
7. Common Schools emerged in the 18th century. These schools educated students of all ages in one room with one teacher. Students did not attend these schools for free. Parents paid tuition, provided housing for the school teacher, or contributed other commodities in exchange for their children being allowed to attend the school.
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Our nation was built on true bible believers who follow Christ as they are lead by the Holy Spirit. They came to America to escape the persecution of the Roman Catholic Church which they recognized as being a pagan religion and part of the coming Anti-Christ Government and revival of the Roman Empire. So, they fought hard to keep the teachings of the Catholic Church from influencing their children.
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Anti-Catholicism and the History of Catholic School Funding
by Robert P. Lockwood
(2/2000)
The debate over the use of public funds to assist in the education of Catholic schoolchildren has a long – and sometimes violent – history in the United States. While Catholics themselves have been divided on the necessity of such assistance and where it might lead, the issue itself has been a flash point for public, legislative and judicial anti-Catholicism for over 150 years.
While many assume prohibition of aid to Catholic schools or voucher programs to Catholic school parents to be a question of constitutional interpretation of the First Amendment Establishment Clause, the history of Catholic school funding questions is essentially rooted in America’s unhappy history of anti-Catholicism. Unfortunately, that anti-Catholic heritage has become entrenched in judicial interpretations and public policy. The point of this report is not to argue whether specific proposals for vouchers, tuition assistance, or direct aid to Catholic schools are good – or bad – public policy. However, it is the point that forbidding aid to Catholic school children or to the parents of Catholic school children is, no matter how such actions might be interpreted, a remnant of 19th century anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant prejudices.
Catholic schools began in the United States as a reaction against a growing publicly-funded school system that was essentially Protestant. In 1839, the American Bible Society announced its intention to make certain that the Bible was read in every classroom in America.1 There was no disagreement in a country that was essentially Protestant. It was widely – virtually universally – held that education without a religious foundation in the Bible was no education at all. As Horace Mann of Massachusetts, the so-called “father” of the public school system wrote, “Our system earnestly inculcates all Christian morals. It welcomes the religion of the Bible; and in receiving the Bible, it allows it to do what is allowed by no other system – to speak for itself.”2
The Bible – specifically the King James Version – was seen in Protestant America as a universal document that stood above doctrinal divisions within Protestantism. Therefore, use of Scripture in public schools would be viewed as “non-sectarian,” meaning that interpretation of the Bible would not be prejudiced toward a specific Protestant denomination. The public schools would not be Presbyterian or Congregationalist. However, use of the King James translation of the Bible accepted by all Protestants – and with underlying Protestant assumptions – would be the foundation of the public school system.
This became a key understanding in establishing very early in the history of American public schools the definition of “sectarian.” Today, when the word “sectarian” is used in a political or judicial environment, the connotation is religion in general. “Sectarian” would not have that meaning in the 19th century and in the development of the public school system and the laws – as well as the judicial interpretation – that derived from it. In that development, the word sectarian did not refer to a general Protestant outlook. It would mean, in the beginning, sects within Protestantism. Very quickly, however, sectarian would be narrowed to take on a more specific definition as the debate over public school funding began: Catholic.
The New York City Common Schools3
The evolution of the debate over school funding into an anti-Catholic movement was established in the battle over the “common schools” in New York City that began in 1840. The New York City schools at that time were funded by the state through the Public School Society. The Public School Society was “a benevolent association formed in 1805 to care for the instruction of children unable to attend religious or private schools.” A primary goal of the Society was “to inculcate the sublime truths of religion and morality contained in Holy Scriptures” and to assure that Bible exercises were included in the schools it controlled.4
By 1840, the Public School Society dominated the New York City schools by controlling the allocation of the common school fund allocated from the state of New York. Ascribing to its definition of “sectarian,” the Public School Society funded schools that were generically “Christian.” These were “common” schools sharing in the “common” understanding of Protestant Christianity, rather than those operated by a specific Protestant congregation. The Public School Society would not fund schools sponsored by churches explaining, that “if religion be taught in a school, it strips it of one of the characteristics of a common school…no school can be common unless all the parents of all religious sects…can send their children to it…without doing violence to their religious beliefs.” Yet, the difficulty was that the schools they did fund were and had to be generically Protestant. It was accepted as a matter of fundamental pedagogy that a general Protestant understanding of Scripture and devotional life within the schools was central to the curriculum and to normal education. As such, the schools were subtle – and not very subtle – tools for evangelizing the growing Irish Catholic immigrant population to Protestantism.
Within the common schools in New York City – and elsewhere – daily scripture readings from the King James Version of the Bible were required. Prayers, songs and general religious instruction at odds with Catholic belief were the norm. Anti-Catholic sentiments extended throughout the curriculum with references to deceitful Catholics, murderous inquisitions, vile popery, Church corruption, conniving Jesuits and the pope as the anti-Christ of Revelation common place.5 In the face of such bigotry within the common schools, Catholic parishes had begun to develop their own Catholic schools in response. By 1840 in New York City, approximately 5,000 children attended eight Catholic schools. But at least 12,000 more Catholic children either attended no school, or were enrolled in the common schools where their faith was insulted daily.6
The firestorm began when William H. Seward, the newly elected governor of the state addressed the issue in a legislative message delivered in January, 1840. He recommended the “establishment of schools in which (immigrants) may be instructed by teachers speaking the same language with themselves and professing the same faith.”7 In response, Catholic schools in New York City petitioned the common council for a share of the state school fund distributed through the Public School Society. The Society answered with a message that resonates with today’s rhetoric. It argued that by funding Catholic schools, money would be dissipated and that “sectarian” Catholic education would replace the common schools. The common council agreed and the Catholic petition was denied.
It was then that Bishop John Hughes of New York stepped into the picture. “Dagger John” as he was aptly called had been named coadjutor bishop under the ailing John DuBois in 1838 and he would formally succeed to the See in 1842. But by 1840, Bishop Hughes was in command and would take a far more confrontational approach to the question of school funding than his predecessor.8 Blasting the Public School Society for corrupting Catholic children, Hughes submitted a renewed petition demanding Catholics be given a portion of the state funds for schooling. “The petition was answered by both the Public School Society and the Methodist churches of New York, the trustees of the society insisting once more that their teachings were non-sectarian and the Methodist clergy using the excuse to attack the Catholic version of Scripture as upholding the murder of heretics and an unqualified submission to papal authority.”9 In response, the Common Council scheduled a debate on the issue for late October, 1840. At the debate, Hughes represented the Catholic schools and spoke for three hours. The Protestant response covered two days and dealt primarily in anti-Catholic vitriol rather than the issues at hand. “Catholics were represented as irreligious idol worshippers, bent on the murder of all Protestants and the subjugation of all democracies. ‘I do say,’ one minister told the sympathetic galleries, ‘that if the fearful dilemma were forced upon me of becoming an infidel or a Roman catholic, according to the entire system of popery, with all its idolatry, superstition, and violent opposition to the Holy Bible, I would rather be an infidel than a papist.’”10
The parameters of the debate were set and would be adhered to virtually to our own day. On the one hand, Catholics had been forced to set up their own schools because of the overwhelmingly Protestant nature of the public school system. As a result, they wanted a share of the public funding set aside for the general education of children. On the other hand, the public school system viewed itself as the only educational instrument for the “common” culture of America, a culture in the 19th century that was decidedly Protestant. The tools of argument in either case would be to employ anti-Catholic rhetoric and to equate “sectarian” with the Catholic schools.
In January 1841, the Catholic position was rejected overwhelmingly by the common council. Catholics had been put into a difficult position. In the public mind, Catholics appeared to be opposed to reading the Bible, rather than reading the King James Version with its decidedly anti-Catholic slant. It was an incomprehensible position to the 19th century Protestant mind and reinforced two centuries of anti-Catholic prejudice. “They demand of Republicans to give them funds to train up their children to worship a ghostly monarch of vicars, bishops, archbishops, cardinals, and Popes! They demand of us to take away our children’s funds and bestow them on subjects of Rome, the creatures of a foreign hierarchy!”11 This would echo the lament 150 years later in an Indiana daily newspaper over the voucher issue with an editor complaining that his taxes would be used “to teach papal infallibility.”12
Bishop Hughes continued to press the issue and with the support of Governor Seward (after a demonstration of Catholic strength at the voting booth) a bill was passed in the state legislature in 1842 which effectively ended the Public School Society’s monopoly on New York City public education. Riots ensued and the home of Bishop Hughes would be stoned. Yet it was a phyrric victory for Bishop Hughes. Even under the new legislation, control of the public schools effectively remained in Protestant hands through the school boards. When protests were made that reading of the Bible be prohibited as “sectarian,” a new board of education dominated by Protestants responded that the King James Bible was simply not a sectarian book. Reading of the King James Version of the Bible would continue in those schools where Catholics did not hold political power; and Catholic schools would continue to be denied funding as sectarian institutions.
While rocks were thrown, violence was minimal in New York. Such was not the case in Philadelphia. In 1843, Bishop Francis Patrick Kenrick of Philadelphia asked the local school committee to excuse Catholic students from reading the King James Version and from daily Protestant exercises. When the school committee allowed Catholic students in the common schools to be allowed to read their own translation of the Bible, nativists claimed that this was merely the first step to an outright ban on Bible reading in the schools. With a growing anti-Irish sentiment already strong in the city, the dispute erupted in a violent series of riots in 1844 that saw the bishop flee the city, 13 people killed and five Catholic churches burned to the ground.13
The Know Nothings and the Development of Blaine Amendments
“As the Catholic population in the United States grew, ‘sectarian’ took on an even more precise, and more pejorative, meaning. In response to the waves of Catholic immigration in the 19th century, Nativist groups such as the anti-immigrant Know Nothing Party grew in size and political power. These groups sought to insure the ascendancy of their view of the common religion of the United States in the common schools and keep out ‘sectarian’ competition, enacting measures such as requiring the reading of the King James Bible in public schools, and enacting measures barring any public funds to sectarian schools.”14
The popular appeal of the Know Nothing Party prior to the Civil War was based on a growing anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic sentiment, fueled in no small part by the public school question. Catholics were considered illiterate and ignorant Irish immigrants. They were viewed as bible-burners eager to rob the public till to pass on their superstitious beliefs to a new generation. The Know Nothing Party combined nativism, anti-Catholicism, temperance and anti-slavery into a potent political force that would dominate in Northern state houses in the late 1850s. The remnant of the movement after the Civil War would coalesce in the Republican party and promote legislative attacks on Catholic schools that remained in force for a long time.15
As the Know Nothings gained power, they took particular aim at Catholic schools. In the 1854 elections in Massachusetts, they secured complete dominance in both houses and won the governor’s office. “The Know Nothings adopted an amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution barring any part of the common school fund to be ‘appropriated to any religious sect for the maintenance exclusively of its own school.’ The amendment’s proponents were open about their motives: ‘Sir, I want all our children of our Catholic and Protestant population, to be educated together in our public schools. And if gentlemen say that the resolution has a strong leaning towards Catholics, and is intended to have special reference to them, I am not disposed to deny that it admits of such interpretation. I am ready to say to our fellow Catholic citizens: You may come here and meet us on the broad principles of civil and religious liberty, but if you cannot meet us upon this common ground, we do not ask you to come.’”16
“As one might expect with an organization created to decrease the political influence of immigrants and Catholics, Know Nothing office holders devoted the bulk of their energies to the implementation of their nativist agenda. And because Know Nothings believed that the surest method for guaranteeing the supremacy of Protestant values in America lay in promoting Protestantism in the public schools, educational matters occupied a significant portion of their legislative agenda. Addressing Catholic attempts to end the use of the Protestant King James Bible in schools, Massachusetts Know Nothing lawmakers enacted a law requiring students to read that version of the Scripture every day. That legislature also approved an amendment to the state constitution that barred the use of state funds in sectarian schools. This, Know Nothings hoped, would make parochial schools financially unfeasible, forcing the children of Catholics to learn ‘American’ customs in the public schools.”17 One curious aspect of the Know Nothing legislation in Massachusetts was that it prohibited racial discrimination. Though laudable, “blacks were Protestant and native-born and posed no threat to the predominant Protestant curriculum that Know Nothings found so important.”18
In their anti-Catholic zeal, the Know Nothings of Massachusetts also passed a “nunnery inspection” law that included Catholic schools. Committees were to investigate certain unnamed “practices” allegedly taking place within these Catholic institutions, a common enough belief based on decades of popular anti-Catholic literature boldly proclaiming immoral activity and “white slavery” conditions in convents. “The so-called Nunnery Committee undertook three special investigations – one at Holy Cross College in Worcester, another in a school run by the Sisters of Notre Dame in Lowell, and a third at a school in Roxbury operated by nuns of the same order. The investigation at Roxbury was particularly offensive, as some two dozen men suddenly appeared at the school, announced they were on state business, and proceeded to tramp through the building. They poked into closets, searched cellars, intimidated nuns, frightened the children—and found nothing incriminating.”19 When newspapers protested, the Committee responded that surprise visits were necessary because “priests imprisoned young nuns in convents against their will.”20
In the era after the Civil War, anti-Catholic fervor over the school question coalesced in the movement to legislate so-called Blaine amendments into state constitutions. It would be these amendments that codified the nativist identification of “sectarian” with Catholic. These amendments would not be applied to Protestant religious activities in public schools.
President Ulysses S. Grant (1868-1876) was well known for his Know Nothing sympathies and had belonged to the party prior to the Civil War. His vice presidents, Schulyer Colfax and Henry Wilson, had been leading members of the Know Nothings.21 In 1875, President Grant called for a Constitutional amendment that would mandate free public schools and prohibit the use of public money for sectarian schools. (An interesting proposal in that it assumed that the Constitution as written would not ban the use of public funds for sectarian schools.) It was clear that Grant’s concern was rooted in his anti-Catholicism, fearing a future with “patriotism and intelligence on one side and superstition, ambition and greed on the other” which he identified with the Catholic Church. Grant called for public schools “unmixed with atheistic, pagan or sectarian teaching.”22 The assumption would be that these free public schools would be Protestant in nature and that no public funds would be used for sectarian – Catholic – schools.
Senator James G. Blaine of Maine had proposed such an amendment to the Constitution in 1874. It read, in part: “No money raised by taxation in any State for the support of public schools, or derived from any public source, nor any public lands devoted thereto, shall ever be under the control of any religious sect, nor shall any money so raised or land so devoted be divided between religious sects or denominations.”23
The amendment was defeated in 1875 but would be the model incorporated into 34 state constitutions over the next three decades. They have come down to us today. “Thirty-one states presently have Blaine amendments, or amendments derived from the Blaine formula, in their constitutions forbidding state aid to Catholic schools.”24 These “Blaine amendments” are clearly illegal under the Federal constitution. Drafted on the basis of anti-Catholic prejudice, they are aimed at a single class of citizens. The “protestant paranoia fueled by waves of Catholic immigration to the U.S. beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, cannot form the basis of a stable constitutional principle. And the stability of the principle has been undermined by the amelioration of those concerns. From the advent of publicly supported, compulsory education until very recently, aid to sectarian schools primarily meant aid to Catholic schools as an enterprise to rival publicly supported, essentially Protestant schools.”25
Historian David O’Brien concluded that with the Blaine amendments to state constitutions, “the outcome of the great Bible war, then, was forecast in the New York fight four decades earlier: the secularization of public education and the ban on aid to church-sponsored schools.”26 But the reality in the 19th century and virtually the first half of the twentieth century was far different. As noted above, the New York battle did not end Bible reading or Protestant services in public schools in New York City. Long after states adopted Blaine Amendments – well into the 20th century – public schools routinely conducted such services and identified themselves by a generically Christian environment. They would only begin to become secularized, and then only in urban America, in the 1930s with the influx of the new professional public educators inculcated with the teaching philosophy of John Dewey. Even at that point, the impetus for such secularization came from the teaching community and not through judicial or legislative mandate.
Blaine Amendments themselves were squarely aimed at Catholic schools and never interpreted to apply to public schools that were viewed as legitimately Protestant and reflecting that “Protestant hegemony.” “Court decisions of the late 19th and early 20th century demonstrate well the targets of Blaine Amendments. They routinely held that the prohibition on funding ‘sectarian’ schools did not prohibit funding public schools that were religious, only schools with religions that conflicted with the common Protestant hegemony. As one court observed, ‘It is said that the King James Bible is proscribed by Roman Catholic authority; but proscription cannot make that sectarian which is not actually so.”27 That ruling was by a Colorado court in 1927. In a 1903 Nebraska court ruling it was stated that state constitutional prohibition against sectarian instruction “cannot, under any canon of construction which we are acquainted, be held to mean that neither the Bible, nor any part of it, from Genesis to Revelation, may be read in the educational institutions fostered by the state.”28
In general, the Courts paid little attention to Catholic schools themselves. As long as the Church was not attempting to secure the use of public funds, the schools were left alone by the judiciary. However, in 1922 the state of Oregon, under Ku Klux Klan pressure, passed a law requiring that all children between the ages of eight and sixteen attend the public schools. The law was challenged by the nuns who operated Catholic schools in Oregon. The case ultimately made it to the Supreme Court. It declared the law unconstitutional. If nothing else, it guaranteed that at least Catholic schools were allowed to exist as it affirmed “the liberty of parents and guardians to direct the upbringing and education of children under their control.”29 In 1949, Father William McManus appeared before the House Committee on Education and argued that “every school to which parents may send their children in compliance with the compulsory education laws of the State is entitled to a fair share of the tax funds.” He stated that in accordance with the 1925 decision in Oregon, parental rights of choice in education had to be both respected and protected.30
After World War II Catholics had once again begun to seek public aid for schools while, concurrently, the public schools themselves began the movement from essentially Protestant entities to secular institutions. The secularization of public schools in the second half of the 20th century is not germane to this report except to note that this was not simply a result of mandates from the courts. For well over a century, courts had routinely ruled in favor of the generally Protestant nature of the free public school system and assumed that the meaning of “sectarian” referred specifically to Catholic schools. The secularization of public schools was far more a result of new educational theories and the judicial activism of later courts.
In the post-war years, the Supreme Court began to move aggressively to apply the Establishment Clause to issues of school funding and to base their findings on the “sectarian” nature of the entities involved. In Everson v. Board of Education in 1947, the Court upheld the constitutionality of a New Jersey law allowing free school bus transportation for parochial school students. Yet the Everson decision was critical. “For the first time, the Supreme Court read into the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment the First Amendment’s non-establishment clause.” While the busing statute was upheld because the primary beneficiary was the children, opinions “in the case set the direction for the future.”31 In applying the Establishment Clause, the Court moved quickly to complete the secularization of public schools so enamored by the new class of professional educators. At the same time, the “sectarian” – or Catholic – nature of a private institution was the determining factor in rejecting any public aid, even when such aid was directed to the children or the parents.
Following the Everson precedent in 1971, the Supreme Court addressed the issue of aid to Catholic schools – or Catholic educators, parents and children – as a violation of the establishment clause. The Court used the notion of “sectarian” from legislation drafted in a period of virulent anti-Catholicism and applied it directly to the issue. In a series of rulings on the issue, the Supreme Court would go so far as to reference essentially nativist, anti-Catholic material in defining the pervasively sectarian nature of Catholic schools. In Lemon vs. Kurtzman, where the court struck down state legislation permitting supplementary salary payments to parochial school teachers, Justice William Douglas quoted Loraine Boettner’s Roman Catholicism, a virulently anti-Catholic book. (Among quotes in Boettner’s book: “The lesson of history is that Romanism means the loss of religious liberty and the arrest of national progress.”) Justice Douglas’ concurrence in Lemon vs. Kurtzman reads like a Know Nothing commentary: “In the parochial schools Roman Catholic indoctrination is included in every subject. History, literature, geography, civics and science are given a Roman Catholic slant. The whole education of the child is filled with propaganda. That, of course, is the very purpose of such schools…That purpose is not so much to educate, but to indoctrinate and train, not to teach Scripture truths (emphasis added) and Americanism, but to make loyal Roman Catholics.”31 Justice Douglas was essentially making the same arguments as the Public School Society of New York in the 19th century.32
Following these 1971 decisions, courts utilized the nearly farcical procedure of focusing questions of public aid through the prism of the visible sectarian nature of the Catholic institution in question. Crucifixes on walls, mission statements involving faith, even trophies from Catholic sports leagues publicly displayed became part of judicial evidence. In December, 1999, Judge Solomon Oliver, Jr. declared a four-year-old voucher test in Cleveland, Ohio unconstitutional. He called the program “government-supported religious indoctrination” because of the 56 schools involved in the program, many are Catholic. He cited in his ruling that a mission statement in one Catholic school involved the objective to “communicate the gospel message of Jesus.” Another school asked students to “contribute a nominal amount for membership in the Society for the Propagation of the faith.”33
As noted in the 1999 amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the “origins of the inquiry into a school’s ‘sectarian’ character are found not in the history of the establishment clause, but in a dark period in our history when bigotry against immigrants – particularly Catholic immigrants – was a powerful force in state legislatures. To policy-makers in the mid-19th century, ‘sectarian’ did not mean the same thing as ‘religious.’ It was instead an epithet applied to those who did not share the ‘common’ religion taught in the publicly funded common schools.” “Sectarian” meant Catholic and, as the amicus curiae brief concludes, “It is an unhelpful analytical category and an epithet with a reprehensible past.”34
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Power corrupts and the love of Money is the root of all evil. When those two things both come into play there can be nothing but trouble. Too much Government is never good. FREEDOM is what made this country great. BUT, with FREEDOM comes RESPONSIBILITY. We must be diligent at all times to keep government in check. We must be diligent to watch over and protect our children FROM ALL EVIL INFLUENCES. If we surrender our children to be raised in the values and character of the WORLD we are responsible for the outcome.
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The Origins of the Public School
Wednesday, July 1, 1998
Hardly anyone disputes the contention that the modern public school is seriously flawed. Test scores continue to be poor while metal detectors are found in the more violent schools. Welfare-state liberals argue that schools in poor areas need more money to place them on an equal footing with their richer counterparts. Conservatives usually reply that the solution is a voucher system that would break the government monopoly on education by restoring choice and control to parents. But virtually all participants on both sides of the debate concede the nobility of the original reformers; in their view, the “good intentions” of such school champions as Horace Mann and John Dewey led to “unintended consequences.”
Such admiration is misplaced. As historian Michael Katz writes, “The crusade for educational reform led by Horace Mann . . . was not the simple, unambiguous good it had long been taken to be; the central aim of the movement was to establish more efficient mechanisms of social control, and its chief legacy was the principle that ‘education was something the better part of the community did to the others to make them orderly, moral, and tractable.’ ”1
Private Education Displaced
Before the 1830s, education was largely an “informal, local affair,” in which Catholic, Protestant, and other schools competed for pupils.2 Often local governments would provide modest aid to schools, albeit in an unsystematic manner. But there certainly was no conception of a “public” school, neither in the United States nor anywhere else in the Western world. The distinction between private and public schools was not crystallized until the “school wars” of the 1840s, which officially ended the use of public funds to support Catholic schools.3
What were the causes of that shift from private to public education? It is impossible to review the period in question and fail to conclude that the drive for public education was largely a response to the huge influx of poor, non-Protestant immigrants. Between 1821 and 1850 just under 2.5 million Europeans emigrated to the United States, over one million of whom were Irish Catholics. Nativist and “Know-Nothing” backlashes occurred, which included the burning of Catholic buildings and other forms of bigotry.4 Many viewed Catholics as owing their loyalty to the Pope. One editor wrote that “a Romanist minority, trained by nuns and priests . . . furnishes the majority of our criminals.”5
The increase in Catholics naturally led to construction of more Catholic schools. Many Protestants felt that they had to take action to check the rising prevalence of a false creed. Doubtless many would have supported government establishment of the Protestant church. Mann himself lamented that “there had never yet been a Christian government on earth.”6 The general respect for religious tolerance, however, made such a bold move politically impossible. Instead, control of religion was cleverly instituted through the public school. “The public school, an important socializing institution, became the substitute for the American national church,” Susan Rose writes.7
The “nondenominational” religious education eloquently described by Horace Mann was a farce—the schools employed Protestant hymns, prayers, and the King James Bible. It was in response to such non-neutrality that the Catholic parochial system was established in 1874.8
As with all who rely on government, Protestants would eventually rue the unholy alliance of state and school that their predecessors had established. As America became increasingly secularized, so went the public school. Like the Catholics before them, Protestants felt compelled to establish their own private schools to protect their children from the humanist and agnostic education they would now receive at the hands of the state.9 Their forefathers had failed to see the danger common to all “democratic” coercion: one day the comfortable majority may find itself in the oppressed minority.
Schools as Protectionism
While the particular reasons for school consolidation were thus religious at heart, the extension of government influence in the education industry can also be analyzed as an attempt by inefficient “firms” to hinder competitors, a feature common to all expansions of state power. (Indeed, in Oregon, private schooling was literally forbidden until the Supreme Court in 1927 declared the prohibition unconstitutional.10) The primary supporters of Mann’s drive to standardize curricula and centralize the disbursement of public funds were precisely those who would benefit financially from such policies. They included the trade unions, whose members benefited from the removal of children from the labor market, and the upper middle class, whose children were more likely to attend the “free” public schools than were children from poorer families (who often had to work). Thus poor families and childless citizens subsidized those with enrolled children.11
The Protestant schools were losing “market share,” and turned to government to pad their budgets and restrict the actions of their chief competitors, the Catholic schools. In other arenas, people can quickly see through such self-interested “altruism.” When a corporation clamors for an import restriction on foreign competition, most observers agree that it is acting to increase its own profits, not to protect the public from “dumping.” Why then do most people accept at face value the humanitarian justifications offered by the advocates of state education when such a bureaucracy confers immense wealth and power in the hands of an elite?
Once education is viewed as an industry, the consequences of restricted competition are all too predictable. Sever the link between payment and service, and the quality of the product—education—declines. Because the schools are “free,” parents are not as interested in assuring their child’s attendance. Public schools are guaranteed the revenues associated with each pupil in their geographical districts; there is no need for them to strive for excellence. If parents are dissatisfied, what can they do? The rise in taxation and lack of “free” private schools renders any alternative to the state system unattractive.
Although such an analysis of the financial “winners” of the change to a bureaucratic education system is invaluable for the explanation of specific policies, such materialist interpretations are not helpful in determining the reasons for the broad popular support of the “common-school” movement. Clearly, a large number of Americans were convinced that a centralized, standardized school system would be beneficial, and not merely in narrow, pecuniary terms. Earlier it was shown that Protestants viewed the public school as a vehicle for inculcating the true faith in the next generation. This view can be expanded. Not only were the public schools to create Protestants; they were also to instill docile obedience to the state and industry.
Was It a Conspiracy?
To those who dismiss such claims as a “conspiracy theory,” I ask: how can the public school not inculcate obedience to the state? A conscious choice must be made regarding the content of education. Neutrality is not an option. Given this, why would a ruling elite not transmit those same values that it itself possesses? Do the conspiracy-theory doubters truly believe that a teacher extolling the values of violent revolution would long remain on the state’s payroll? Or a teacher who questioned the legitimacy of the democratic system? Or a teacher who cast aspersions on the public-school system itself? Do the doubters deny that children educated in Texas are exposed to teachers and textbooks that blame the War Between the States on the North, while children in New York are taught that Lincoln was a great president? Weren’t every single one of these doubters forced to chant, every single school day of their childhoods, the words “I pledge allegiance, to the flag, of the United States of America . . . .”
The common-school movement paralleled the industrialization of American cities. As such, the public schools were seized on as a tool for the transformation of children into complacent workers. Katz writes that “The values to be instilled by the schools were precisely those required for the conduct of a complex urban society. … The connection was unmistakable; schools were training grounds for commerce. . . . The common school made company men.”12
Thus the public schools did not simply transmit, say, the values of honesty and peace among men; they specifically inculcated those traits necessary for city life and passed over in silence those values held by rural and ethnic Americans. This is not to suggest that such a decision was detrimental to the students, but merely to again emphasize that it is impossible to establish a school that is neutral—the views of one faction will be taught to the exclusion of those views held by the politically weak. Whoever controls the schools will control the next generation. If such a power is nearly monopolized by the government, then the politically powerful will be the ones making such decisions. In this case, that group happened to be the leaders of industry. But it certainly was not—and never will be—the majority of voters who wield such power.
Thus far readers may not be horrified by the behavior and comments of the early reformers. The Protestants sincerely believed they were saving their children from the devil. And who can complain that the schools aided the Industrial Revolution? But when one delves into those justifications of public education that fall outside the merely religious or industrial, its tyrannical and elitist nature is seen clearly. Fundamentally, the purpose of state education was to take children from parents judged incompetent and prevent those children from becoming dangerous, antisocial elements. The politically powerful arrogated to themselves the right to determine which parents were unfit to rear their own children.
Thus Henry Barnard, second only to Horace Mann in championing state education, commented, “No one at all familiar with the deficient household arrangements and deranged machinery of domestic life, of the extreme poor, and ignorant, to say nothing of the intemperate—of the examples of rude manners, impure and profane language, and all the vicious habits of low bred idleness—can doubt, that it is better for children to be removed as early and as long as possible from such scenes and examples.”13
Such an attitude inevitably led to the consideration of children as wards, nay, as property, of the state. Mann wrote, “Our common schools . . . reach, with more or less directness and intensity, all the children belonging to the State,—children who are soon to be the State.”14
This diminution of individualism made possible ever greater encroachment of government in all spheres of life. And, as is the case with all accretions of state power, each increment in government authority itself justified the next increase. This served to further affirm the need for government-controlled education. After all, when the voting citizenry has the ability—via the newly acquired power of the federal government—to wreak great havoc, it becomes tremendously important to regulate their ideas. Thus Mann’s famous dictum is cast into a new and ominous light: “In a republic, ignorance is a crime.” With the establishment of compulsory attendance laws in the 1850s, Mann’s statement was no longer metaphorical.
Most people—who were themselves educated either in the public schools or who used state-approved textbooks and state-licensed teachers—were taught that the founders of the American public-school system were simply devoted to ensuring opportunity to all Americans, rich or poor. But we have seen that the main thrust of the system was to assimilate those elements of the population, such as the Catholics, poor, and foreigners, who did not fit the mold of what a “proper” American should be. School was transformed from a voluntary setting of learning into a coercive institution, with its wards being fed consciously selected information in an attempt to produce acquiescence in the status quo. America’s current education crisis will only be solved when, ironically enough, the words of Horace Mann are followed: “[T]he education of the whole people, in a republican governnent, can never be attained without the consent of the whole people. Compulsion, even though it were a desirable, is not an available instrument. Enlightenment, not coercion, is our resource.”15
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It did not take long for our nation to lose track of the values and character that made our nation great. We can lay most of the outrages changes we have seen befall our nation right at the door step of our education system.
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“Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world.” —Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” —Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
“Destroy the family, you destroy the country.”
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Prayer and the Bible Removed from U.S. Public Schools
(Why should God bless our ungrateful nation?)
“It is impossible to enslave mentally or socially a Bible-reading people.
The principles of the Bible are the groundwork of human freedom.”
—Horace Greeley
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Goodbye God!
Prayer and the Bible Removed from Public Schools
In the Engel v. Vitale case (1962), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-1 against New York’s “Regents’ prayer,” a “non-denominational” prayer which state education officials had composed for public schoolchildren to recite.
The government-sponsored religious devotion was challenged in court by a group of parents from New Hyde Park (some atheists, some believers). O’Hair was not involved in the case at all.
One year later, a case originated by a Philadelphia-area man named Ed Schempp challenging mandatory Bible reading in Pennsylvania schools reached the Supreme Court. At the same time, Murray O’Hair was challenging a similar practice as well as the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in Maryland public schools. The Supreme Court consolidated the cases and in 1963 ruled 8-1 that devotional Bible reading or other government-sponsored religious activities in public schools are unconstitutional.
Truly, these were two of the saddest days in America’s history for God and His people.
The graphs below are NOT opinions. They are fact! Please pay careful attention to the year 1962. This is the year of The Supreme Court Ruling in the case of ENGEL v. VITALE. The year that prayer was removed from our schools, the Bible in 1963. The year that our tax dollars began paying for the brainwashing of our children.
The graphs below are NOT opinions. They are fact! Please pay careful attention to 1962 and 1963, the years that our tax dollars began paying for the brainwashing of our children.
“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.” —Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 3rd U.S. President
“If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher.” —Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865), 16th U.S. President
“Insanity because we’re in sin!” —Brother Lester Roloff (1914-1982), from the sermon “Steps In The Degeneration Of Our Nation.”
“the constitution was made for a moral people” —John Adams (1735-1826), 2nd U.S. President
“The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.” —Plato
“Old-fashioned, Spirit-filled, Christ-honoring, sin-hating, soul-winning, Bible preaching! It is the hope of the church! It is the hope of the nation! It is the hope of the world!”—Pastor Jack Hyles (1926-2001)
“We have not government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” —John Adams (1735-1826). 2nd U.S. President
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Freemasons Were Behind Removal of Bible from Schools
Four out of the six Justices who voted against this prayer and, therefore, voted God out of the Public School System were Freemasons! These Masonic Justices were:
Earl Warren – Sequoia Lodge #349, Oakland, CA.
Hugo L. Black – Raised in Ashland Lodge #356, Ashland, AL who later became a life member of Birmingham Temple Lodge #636, Birmingham, AL.
Thomas C. Clark – Washington Lodge, #117, Dallas, TX.
William O. Douglas – Mt. Adams Lodge #227, Yakima, WA.
Because of the Supreme Court’s decision in 1962 and 1963, prayer in assemblies was banned in all American public schools, eventually leading the way to banning the Holy Bible, as well. So, to reiterate, what did the Masons accomplish in 1962? They kicked God out of America’s public schools. I want you to really think hard and long about this reality and then re-read the Bible verses at the beginning of this expose’.
SOURCE: http://www.jesusisprecious.org/books/freemason warning.pdf
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If you have not viewed the following posts, check them out:
What are we doing to the CHILDREN?
Will You Stand to SAVE THE CHILDREN?? – 6 yr olds taught to Masterbate, 4 yr olds asked to touch each other IN SCHOOL!
SURRENDER YOUR PARENTAL AUTHORITY FOR CHILD ENTITLEMENT
Gender Neutrality
Will No One Stand to Save the Children? – Part 6 – NWO Sex ED GOING BONKERS!
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As long as there are final exams,
there will be prayer in the public schools!
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It has taken a long time, but Parents are finally standing up!! I am very encouraged. It is hard to figure out where to start and what it will finally take to recover the ground we have lost. However, there are numbers and groups of Parents who are taking the first steps. They have started by attending School Board Meetings and City Council Meetings and making their voices heard!!
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CRT and LGBT in the Classroom: Americans Have Had Enough
ByUS Patriot / JUN 17, 2022
He’s right. How did we get here?
I’ll tell you how. Last year, in an article for The American Mind, I discussed something called the gated institutional narrative (GIN), a concept first put forward by the polymath Eric Weinstein. The GIN perfectly encapsulates the madness that has swept, and continues to sweep, through the U.S. education system.
As I said at the time, the “GIN explains the ways in which heavily filtered information is presented to the public by the mainstream media and academics.” Take the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” for example. Although the project has been lambasted by highly-respected commentators, it still, for some unfathomable reason, carries a great deal of authority.
On closer inspection, however, the reason it carries so much authority is entirely understandable. After all, the project was initiated by the NY Times, one of the most influential papers on the planet. Additionally, its historically inaccurate narrative has been pushed by comparably powerful outlets, frequently and forcefully. Furthermore, it appeals not to facts, but to feelings. In this age of speaking “your truth” instead of the truth, the NY Times decided to tell its “truth.”
The GIN, as I said in The American Mind piece, “is like an exclusive nightclub. Only the right kind of people can enter.” Orthodox thinkers—in other words, people willing to follow the herd—are the only people permitted entry. Those who refuse to comply are quickly turned away. “Go away and sober up,” they’re told.
Bad ideas beget bad ideas—the inaccurate (often pernicious) ideas generated within the GIN bounce around in a gigantic echo chamber. Then, like a swift missile strike, they’re launched into broader society.
At the same time, good ideas—that is, ideas that counter the bad ones created within the system—are intentionally blocked from entering. With such a design, it’s easy to see how bad ideas, even wicked ones, continue to circulate and become more virulent in nature.
Bad Ideas Spread Like a Virus
In his latest book, aptly titled “The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense,” Dr. Gad Saad discusses how bad ideas, or “idea pathogens,” spread like a virus, killing common sense in the process. In the American education system, as you’re no doubt aware, commonsense is in short supply.
If in doubt, let me point you in the direction of a recent piece written by Jonathan Turley, one of the country’s leading legal scholars. Unlike so many involved in academia, Turley has a backbone. He has a significant voice and is not afraid to use it. Instead of echoing the narratives of the GIN, Turley exposes the absurdities occurring within the gated community.
In the insular world of academia, he noted, “there have been growing controversies over language guides and usages, including the use of pronouns that some object to as matters of religion or grammar.” Now he warned, the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), “the largest association of science teachers in the world,” wants to add to the controversy.
Take a read of the NSTA’s latest guide, and you’ll quickly see that Turley’s concerns are very much warranted. The educators are now pushing for “gender-inclusive biology.” What, you’re probably wondering, could this new-age biology entail?
In short, unscientific calls to permanently abandon everyday terms like “men,” “women,” “parent,” “mother,” and “father.” Mothers, according to the guide, should only be referred to as “persons with ovaries.” Fathers, meanwhile, should be referred to as “persons with testes.”
Although tens of millions of Americans have had enough, don’t expect the GIN to stop churning out bad ideas anytime soon.
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Parents pack Gwinnett County School Board meeting
Many parents were forced to join the homeschooling bandwagon by the pandemic. Granted, some parents had been considering homeschooling their children even before lockdown. Homeschooling has been praised because of the freedom it gives to both parents and children. Beyond that advantage, however, are there other benefits of homeschooling?
1. The Schedule Is Flexible
The parent sets the homeschooling schedule, something that allows the whole family to benefit. For example, your child is not forced to wake up very early in the morning so as not to miss the school bus.
You’ll decide how many hours your child will spend on actual learning. That means, if you feel they are getting tired or losing focus, you can end the lesson. You are also free to reschedule classes for another time when the kid is more active.
2. It Is More Secure Than Traditional Schooling
Public schools are well known to have kids who can have a negative influence on others. However, when you homeschool your children, negative peer influence is non-existent.
Your child will be with you all the time. And incidents of misbehaviors such as smoking, sneaking out of school, doing drugs, and bullying won’t be there.
3. Takes Special Needs Children into Account
One reason why some parents choose homeschooling is that their child is intellectually challenged. Such children are often stigmatized and mistreated in public or even private schools.
When you homeschool your special needs child, you’ll consider their emotional and intellectual well-being. Those are areas not adequately catered for in public schools. This neglect usually stunts their academic performance.
4. It Is Affordable
Parents who are short on money can homeschool their kids successfully. You can be sure that the cost of uniforms, private tuition, and daily transport won’t be on the budget.
Your child can learn in pajamas because homeschooling allows it. You can also cut costs by using resources from the internet which are cheaper or even free.
5. Help Your Child Develop a Sense of independence
Homeschooling provides the opportunity for your child to think on his or her own. This means they are less dependent on peers for anything, including advice.
The reason why college admissions favor homeschoolers is that they have had a different experience. They have grown up thinking for themselves and have been struggling to find solutions to problems.
6. Gives Learners Individualized Attention
When compared to crowded public schools, homeschooling provides an opportunity for learners to get personalized help.
Parents who homeschool ensure that their children’s weaknesses are addressed through one-on-one tutoring. The result is that they begin understanding concepts they once struggled with. This boosts their confidence.
7. It’s Tailored to the Learner’s Needs
Your child will learn at a pace that you decide. That’s not the case with public and private schools. The teachers are usually in a hurry to complete the syllabus at a given time. They end up ignoring struggling learners.
With homeschooling, however, you can choose to move fast, or slowly. It simply depends on your child’s needs.
8. There’s No Homework
Homework is a source of stress for many learners in both public and private schools. And if your child is struggling, it makes matters even worse.
With homeschooling, you cover the important concepts during the learning period. Thereafter, learners are free at the end of the day to rest.
9. Distractions are Minimal, Or None At All
You might assume that homeschooling has a lot of distractions. But both public and private schools have more distractions. They include the class clown and bullies.
At home, however, you are in charge of the environment. That means you decide when your child watches TV or uses the computer without supervision.
10. Provides Family Bonding Time
Today’s fast-paced world has resulted in children getting emotionally distant from their parents. Homeschooling ensures kids spend more time with their parents at home. This way, there are no rushed dinners and more time for bonding.
Homeschooling also ensures that parents get to learn more about their own children. For example, if they have a particular issue in any subject, the parent will immediately notice. They’ll thereafter try to rectify it, not laying blame on the teacher.
11. There’s Room for More Physical Activities
The fact that the homeschooling schedule is flexible means that more time can be allocated for exerting activities. During field trips, nature walks, and games, learners’ mental and emotional well-being is positively impacted.
Homeschooling allows the parent to decide how many outdoor activities should be there. The more outdoor activities, the less likely a learner will lose focus.
If you feel that homeschooling is something you’ll want to consider, contact us. We will arrange for one of our tutors to visit you at a place of your choosing. At Outstanding Outcomes Home Tuition, we offer homeschooling services to parents who feel ready to join the homeschooling movement.
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The Benefits of Home Schooling. A short essay which … – StudyMode
Aug 10, 2021With the increased amount of drugs, school shootings, and other dementia in these schools, more and more parents are making the choice to home school their children. Although many people claim that public education is better and more suitable for children, many facts and statistics show that home schooling is equally, if not more, beneficial.
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Homeschooling Advice For Raising Smarter Children – Linksnake
Apr 14, 2022Understanding exactly how homeschooling should work can be initially intimidating. After reading the article, homeschooling won’t be able to give you anything that you don’t already expect. The transition from public school to homeschooling can be rocky, which is why it is important to be prepared with as much information as you can gather.
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Mar 26, 2022The home-educated typically score 15 to 30 percentile points above public-school students on standardized academic achievement tests. (The public school average is the 50 th percentile; scores range from 1 to 99.) A 2015 study found Black homeschool students to be scoring 23 to 42 percentile points above Black public school students (Ray, 2015).
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The Major Benefits Of Homeschooling – Learnopoly
However, the findings comparing outcomes for homeschooled children compared to public schooled children are largely favourable and show that: Homeschooling results in: Above average performance: Homeschooled children consistently score well above the public school national average and usually in the 65-80th percentile. (Ray, 2017) Even When spacer
Homeschooling Statistics: Breakdown by the 2022 Numbers – Admissonsly
May 27, 2022According to data provided by Nheri, homeschooled students often do better than their public schooled counterparts while in college. Despite their small number, they have a high graduation rate. Early Trends in Homeschooling – 2020 Homeschooling was not a legal option for students in the United States until 1993.
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Homeschool Vs. Public School: What You Need to Know
Feb 8, 2021 The first and arguably most beneficial advantage to homeschooling over public school is the custom-tailored, student-paced nature of the learning. Homeschooled students can have a much more tailored learning experience and schedule, slowed down or accelerated to best accommodate the student’s grasp of the materials.
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The Benefits of Homeschooling Vs Public Schooling
Your child can grow up better compared to other kids in public school. According to Family Education, kids who are homeschooled tend to develop fewer problems compared to kids who went to public school. This is because homeschooled kids have some alone time where they can self-reflect on what they learn and what topics and subjects they enjoy.
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Homeschooling vs. Public Education: A Worthwhile Debate
Homeschooled children have even been shown to attain four year degrees at much higher rates than students from public school and private schools. The benefits don’t stop there. Whereas the average total expenditures for a child in public school near $10,000 a year, those for the homeschooled child average somewhere between $500 and $600 a year.
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The Major Benefits Of Homeschooling – Learnopoly
However, the findings comparing outcomes for homeschooled children compared to public schooled children are largely favourable and show that: Homeschooling results in: Above average performance: Homeschooled children consistently score well above the public school national average and usually in the 65-80th percentile. (Ray, 2017)
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Homeschooling is Better than Public School – Kompasiana.com
Lack of violence, better social development, more effective learning, better education, and flexibiliy are several advantages that support people to choose homeschooling rather than public school. Homeschooling is lack of violence based on a survey in Mary Pride’s book that stated four to ten children feared violence at elementary school
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Advantage Of Homeschooling – 1124 Words | 123 Help Me
Homeschooling a child can increase the likelihood that they will advance in reading, writing, and mathematics, as well as be able to comprehend the fundamental principles of science, history, art, and geography. When homeschooling, parents can customize the type of work the child does, and can decide what curriculum the child works out of.
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Benefits of Homeschooling – TheHomeSchoolMomTh
ere are even benefits of homeschooling for parents. Continuing education. You can continue learning alongside your child. Learn a foreign language, brush up on algebra, rediscover maps of the world, learn to code, visit museums, and enjoy field trips. Sharing your hobbies and interests.
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Harvard Law School hosts a program called the “Child Advocacy Program,” or CAP, which works on weakening “parent rights” and diminishing the idea of “family preservation,” done in the name of fighting abuse. Fighting abuse is good and important. Children often need protection from abusive parents. But the latest crusade by CAP’s director, Harvard law professor Elizabeth Bartholet, is basically to abolish homeschooling.
“The Risks of Homeschooling” is Harvard Magazine’s headline on an article about Bartholet’s crusade. It was flagged on Twitter over the weekend by education scholar and homeschooling advocate Corey DeAngelis. Bartholet’s latest law review article is titled “Homeschooling: Parent Rights Absolutism vs. Child Rights to Education & Protection.”
This is how Bartholet sees homeschooling, per that law review article: “Many homeschool because they want to isolate their children from ideas and values central to our democracy, determined to keep their children from exposure to views that might enable autonomous choice about their future lives.”
She advocates “a presumptive ban on homeschooling, with the burden on parents to demonstrate justification for permission to homeschool.”
Bartholet describes homeschooling as a shield or excuse for child abuse. For instance, her law review article states that “child abuse and neglect characterize a significant subset of homeschooling families. Many families choose homeschooling precisely because it enables them to escape the attention of” Child Protective Services.
IF YOU DON’T KNOW HOW EVEL CHILD PROTECTIVE SERIVICES IS, VIEW THE FOLLOWING POSTS:
SURRENDER YOUR PARENTAL AUTHORITY FOR CHILD ENTITLEMENT
YOU BETTER PRAY! – THEY ARE COMING FOR YOUR CHILDREN!
Will No One Stand To Save the Children? Part 3
Her citation? A 2015 law review article that states “a substantial amount of anecdotal evidence showing that some abusive parents, who have no intention of educating their children, have taken advantage of lax homeschooling laws to hide their children from mandatory reporters.”
So, based on this second-hand anecdotal evidence of some horrific cases, Bartholet tries to create a presumption that homeschoolers are abusers. The weight of anecdotal evidence on this specific question, however, doesn’t exactly recommend public schools. See Illinois’s practice of locking misbehaving children in solitary confinement, where at least one child ended up in a pool of feces and urine, “crying for his mom.”
Or here’s a story about another threat at school: “The Associated Press uncovered roughly 17,000 official reports of sex assaults by students over a four-year period, from fall 2011 to spring 2015.”
But back to Bartholet: Much of her argument is standard, paranoid “what’s to stop x from y” reasoning. She argues that under current state laws and enforcement, there are all sorts of bad things some parents could be doing.
“We have an essentially unregulated regime in the area of homeschooling,” Bartholet asserts. All 50 states have laws that make education compulsory, and state constitutions ensure a right to education, “but if you look at the legal regime governing homeschooling, there are very few requirements that parents do anything.”
But her real worry isn’t children getting no education. It’s children getting the “wrong” education.
Basically, Bartholet stays up at night, worrying that some parent, somewhere, is preparing a lesson plan on Psalm 23.
Read this paragraph from the Harvard Magazine piece, and pay attention to that “but” (emphasis mine):
“She notes that parents choose homeschooling for an array of reasons. Some find local schools lacking or want to protect their child from bullying. Others do it to give their children the flexibility to pursue sports or other activities at a high level. But surveys of homeschoolers show that a majority of such families (by some estimates, up to 90 percent) are driven by conservative Christian beliefs, and seek to remove their children from mainstream culture.”
See, she grants there are legitimate reasons to pull your children from school. But she is really worried about religious parents who don’t like public schools teaching their children transgender ideology, moral relativism, or radical feminism.
To drive that home, Harvard Magazine had an insane picture illustrating the story. Public school children are all running around freely, while the homeschooled child is locked in a literal prison made of books — including the Bible. (Oh, and Harvard Magazine misspelled “arithmetic” in the illustration.)
This is Alice-in-Wonderland, truth-on-its-head stuff. The idea that homeschooled children run around outdoors less than public-schooled children is totally insane. The notion that public schools provide more meaningful education than the average homeschooler is also insane. The idea that homeschoolers are, de facto, not exposed to “community values, social values, democratic values” is also totally unfounded. Unless, again, by “social values,” she means the values of the secular Left.
The Harvard Magazine article is getting plenty of hate on Twitter, and not just because of its insane illustration and radical proposal of a presumptive ban on homeschooling. It scares people because this is part of a movement in powerful circles.
Harvard is planning to host an anti-homeschooling conference in June, DeAngelis points out. “The focus will be on problems of educational deprivation and child maltreatment that too often occur under the guise of homeschooling.”
Bartholet will speak, along with a handful of other anti-homeschool activist lawyers and professors.
If you live in a state with a Democratic legislature, you need to worry about these people. They will craft an agenda to make it illegal to homeschool your children unless you can prove good reason. They will do this precisely because they don’t want conservative Jewish, Muslim, and Christian parents passing down their values. And while these activists will lead by focusing on the rare and horrific abuses, they clearly believe that religion and conservative values count as “maltreatment.”
These people have a dangerous agenda. We shouldn’t ignore their work.
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If you just don’t believe they have an agenda or that anything here has been exaggerated take a look at the following videos.
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To Watch This Video on BitChute Click the Title Link Below
Utah teacher wants students to hate their parents! (bitchute.com)
