The 250-year American experiment in non-sectarian education has failed

Growing antisemitic tensions on university campuses, the ‘colorblindness’ trap, and elementary school illiteracy are further proof that the 250-year American experiment in publicly funded, non-sectarian education has failed.

As Archbishop John Ireland recognized a hundred years ago, there is no such thing as non-sectarian education. The Bible-based curriculums of 19th-century American public schools were gradually replaced by the 20th-century ‘religions’ of political ideology, leaving us with 21st-century immorality, ignorance, hyper-individualism, and civil disorder.

Education, by its very nature, is sectarian and therefore religious, because education forms the intellect and will, which are faculties of the soul. The human person is created by God with a desire to develop these faculties in accordance with truth. But because The Fall clouded our intellects and weakened our wills, we need divine revelation. Religion encompasses the practices and beliefs that respond to and integrate revealed truths. We can acquire knowledge through our senses and reason, but we need guides—teachers to instruct, train, and morally direct us.

The great historian Christopher Dawson observed that religion is what gives structure and impetus to society because religion provides the primary ideas of society. These ideas direct our culture, our traditions, our work, and form the way we think about ourselves and how we ought to use our environmental resources for the common good. Therefore, all education, especially the formation of youth, ought to be rooted in religious ideas, guided by parents, who have the primary authority to educate their children, and teachers, who assist parents in this supremely important duty.

Thus, parishes and schools work together as the cultural hub of family life in any society and the education they provide must be deeply rooted in religious instruction because religion informs us about how we fit into society, who we are, what we are meant to accomplish with our lives, and how we find true happiness. Society does well to empower, not penalize, parents to elect the sectarian education of their choice.

Education, however, is not merely religious. At the K-12 level, for example, education begins with the tools of learning—how to read, how to write, how to cypher—in addition to learning how to act, how to think clearly, and articulate ideas. As Dorothy Sayers explained in her famous essay “The Lost Tools of Learning”, primary and secondary education provide a framework for how to learn for the rest of one’s life.

Education can also include career training, and this is important for a healthy economy. This is also not a modern idea. Over 1600 years ago, Ambrose of Milan wrote that career training is especially important for young men who will be household providers. However, most career formation in today’s highly specialized economy takes place through licensing and on-the-job training, and it is not the primary subject matter of elementary education.

Civic education is also important if we are to function as responsible citizens in a democratic society. When we look at the history of education in the United States, we see that Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin all understood that education including literacy, virtue training, and civic education would best equip citizens to understand their rights and responsibilities, govern themselves, engage in public discourse, and make informed decisions in elections and governance. To that end, those three Founding Fathers advocated for tax-funded public education programs in their states (Virginia, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania). They argued that the resources of poor citizens often prohibited them from paying for even the most rudimentary education, so the poor needed taxpayer assistance for primary education. Note that Franklin and Jefferson were not ‘religious’ men, and each believed that civic and moral virtue could be taught without confessionalism.

On the other hand, some Founding Fathers (e.g. John Jay, Samuel Adams, John Witherspoon, and Patrick Henry) believed that religious (sectarian) education was essential for instilling the moral values and virtues necessary for the functioning of a free society. Their views influenced early debates on education policy among the Founders concerning the extent to which sectarian and non-sectarian education should be publicly supported.

Before the Civil War, the movement for universal, free, taxpayer-funded, non-sectarian, public elementary school education was strongest in New England. In 1837, the Secretary of Education of Massachusetts, Horace Mann, introduced the industrial Prussian model of ‘common schools,’ instituting a statewide system of professional teachers, licensed by ‘normal schools.’ These normal schools standardized the curriculum for all of Massachusetts with an emphasis on non-sectarian, age (not aptitude) based instruction, ‘social efficiency,’ civic virtue, and character building. By 1852, elementary school education was compulsory in Massachusetts and by 1930, every state in the Union required students to complete elementary school taught by licensed professionals.

However, during the 19th century, the so-called non-sectarian schools were just the ‘lowest common denomination’ (pun intended) Protestant schools, which enforced the King James Bible, for example, as the foundation for virtue and character training. When Archbishop John Hughes of New York and Bishop Kenrick of Philadelphia asked for the Catholic pupils in public schools to be able to use their own Bible in the early 1840s, they were told “No.” Catholics were then accused of hating the Bible, riots ensued, and Catholic churches were burned in 1844. In response, Archbishop Hughes advocated for Catholic schools that provided an integrated program of religious instruction with academic and civic education.

By the late 19th century, Archbishop John Ireland foresaw that the only way to eliminate confessionalism from our education system was to remove religion altogether, particularly Christianity, and that is exactly what we have done over the past century.

The 20th century witnessed a whole slew of bad educational ‘reforms’, from John Dewey to Laura Bush, which have further eradicated religion from public education and reduced it to a pragmatic, Bible-less, grade-based, industrial, ideological, standardized-test-driven, education system. All these reforms have tended to funnel control of education upward to the state and federal government, removing the family and local church communities further and further from control.

In the early 20th century, John Dewey redefined education when we wrote, “education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness, and the adjustment of individual activity based on this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction.” In short, Dewey reduced education to a propaganda tool, a tool to be wielded by the political and social elites in a top-down effort to form a universal ‘social consciousness’ among its citizens.

Our public education system has not only undermined religion in America, it has replaced religion with socio-political ideology. The public school system, which is protected by state licensing and entrenched bureaucracy, has ensured that our children will be subjected to every social, political, cultural fad imaginable—anything but Christianity—and the general trajectory of American ideology since the 1960s has been Marxist, ‘sexual liberation’ ideology.

For over half a century our education tax dollars have been funding an ideological indoctrination of our youth which, for the most part, rejects religion, especially Christianity, and promotes sexual licentiousness to the ongoing destruction of the American family. Our children are being taught to hate their Constitution, Christian religion, and traditional family life, and we wonder why we have so many social and economic problems. If we were honest, we would acknowledge that public schools are still sectarian in America, but the ‘religions’ are atheistic, Marxist, materialism, environmental pantheism, tech-utopian trans-humanism, and woke ideology, which preaches their values and principles.

Thankfully, in 1922 the U.S. Supreme Court in Pierce v. Society of Sisters, upheld that “a child is not a mere creature of the state”, which settled the dispute about whether private schools had the right to continue educating within the United States, and by the early 1990s, homeschooling had become officially recognized and regulated in all 50 states. In this regard, K-12 ‘school choice’ in America is far better than in most countries, but the current system penalizes parents who send their children to private schools.

74% of my state taxes and 56% of my property taxes are still funding a K-12 public education system that I have elected out of. It isn’t right that Jews and Christians should have to pay twice for education: both for the private sectarian education of their children and the anti-religious sectarian education of anti-religious families, or poor families who feel they have no choice.

Many politicians are now advocating for ‘parental choice’ programs as a policy solution to these problems. It seems we are waking up to the fact that ‘non-sectarian’ is very sectarian but in a way that is detrimental to our communities, because secular education is not neutral.

The data confirms that private schools provide a better preparation for family life than public schools, which is not surprising, but what is more, the data also confirms that private schools provide a better civic education than public schools, which nullifies the non-sectarian argument.

Between 1850 and 1950, many Catholic religious communities dedicated to education were founded in America. K-8 tuition was usually subsidized by parish funds, which in most cases made education free or very inexpensive for Catholic parishioners with school-age children. In 1965, 9 out of 10 American children enrolled in a private elementary school were attending Catholic schools.

Unfortunately, most of these religious communities disintegrated in the 1960s and 70s under the influence of the Sexual Revolution, but it would be wonderful to see similar efforts return. In fact, it is already happening. The future of a thriving America will be the fruit of religious revival and parent-elected, sectarian education.

Catholic World Report