By Brian Massie, A Watchman on the Wall, Independent Populist, Calvinist
This article on how and why our current public education was established was sent to us last year. The age old question: “Is man basically good or evil?” continues to influence our ever-changing society. Our question is this: “If we spend the most money per pupil in the world for public education, but are only ranked 38th in the world in proficiency, why do people believe more money will solve the problem?”
We have become a society where many believe that the concept of “Love thy Neighbor” is merely a suggestion rather than a commandment.
https://reason.com/1979/03/01/why-the-schools-went-public
Here are some excerpts from the article:
MAN AND GOD The first 50 years of American history are generally passed over lightly by scholars on their way from the Revolution to the Civil War. We know some general facts about the period: the framing of the Constitution, the Louisiana Purchase, the War of 1812, the Battle of New Orleans, the Jacksonian era. But we are seldom made aware of the incredible intellectual and philosophical changes that were taking place in that transition period from preindustrial to industrial society. The emphasis in the history books is always on political and military events interlaced with material progress: the invention of the steamboat, the development of the railroads, the invention of the cotton gin.
But what also took place during that period was an intellectual event of great importance—probably the most important in American history: the takeover of Harvard by the Unitarians in 1805 and the expulsion of the Calvinists. That takeover made Harvard not only the citadel of religious and moral liberalism but also the citadel of anti-Calvinism. It took me months to understand the significance of all of this because it required a detailed study of Calvinism and the rise of the Unitarian heresy in the heart of the Puritan commonwealth. But when I did, the intellectual history of America suddenly began to make much more sense, for no event has had a greater long-range influence on American intellectual, cultural, and political life than this one.
The issues at stake were fundamental: the nature of God and the nature of man. The liberals, brought up in the moral, benevolent atmosphere of a free, prosperous, ever-expanding society, could no longer accept the Calvinist worldview, which placed the Bible at the center of spiritual and moral understanding. The liberals found the Calvinist doctrines of innate depravity, predestination, election, and reprobation particularly repugnant. Calvin’s was a God-centered worldview in which a man’s life is determined by his personal relationship to an all-powerful God who had expressed his will in the Old and New Testaments. The Ten Commandments were the essence of God’s law. They provided protection to life and property and codified commitment to God and family. They were the restraints that would save men from becoming the victims of their own innate depravity.
The Unitarians rejected all of this. They could not believe in the existence of an unfair, unjust God who elects a few and rejects others, a God who favors some and condemns the rest. Calvin was the first to admit that these doctrines seem unjust and repugnant, but he answered that God has placed a limit on what man is permitted to know and that man therefore has no choice but to accept God’s will as revealed in the Scripture and by the cold facts of life. Those facts include the existence of evil, the sufferings of the innocent, the triumph of tyrants, the general difficulties of the human condition in a world ruled by an omnipotent God who, despite all of this, is still a benevolent God because he created man to begin with.
The Unitarians accepted the notion that God created man, but they also insisted that man was given the freedom to make of his life whatever he can. It is man himself who can decide, through his life on earth, whether he goes to heaven or hell. He is not innately depraved. He is, in fact, rational and perfectible. As for the existence of evil, they believed that it is caused by ignorance, poverty, social injustice, and other environmental and social factors. Education, the Unitarians decided, is the only way to solve the problem of evil. Education will eliminate ignorance, which will eliminate poverty, which will eliminate social injustice, which will eliminate crime. Moral progress is as attainable as material progress once the principles of improvement are discovered.
SECULAR SALVATION It was therefore only natural that the Unitarians would shift their practice of religion from the worship of a harmless, benevolent God of limited powers to the creation of institutions on earth to improve the character of man. The one institution that the Unitarians decided could be used to carry out this formidable task was the public school. Their first organized effort was the campaign in 1818 to create primary public schools in Boston.
Why only public schools and not private or charity schools? Because private schools were run and controlled by individuals who might have entirely different views concerning the nature of man. Besides, private owners were forced by economic reality to concentrate on teaching skills rather than forming character. As for the church schools, they were too sectarian, and the charity schools were usually run by Calvinists. Only the public schools, controlled in Boston by the affluent Unitarian establishment, could become that secular instrument of salvation.
But why did the first organized effort take place in 1818? Because, at around that time, a man in Scotland had proudly broadcast to the civilized world that he had discovered the basic principle of moral improvement. His name was Robert Owen, and we know of him today as the father of socialism. Owen was a self-made manufacturer who became a social messiah when he “discovered” what he considered to be the basic truth about human character: that a man’s character is made for him by society through upbringing, education, and environment—not by himself, as the religionists taught. Children in a cannibal society grow up to be adult cannibals. Children in a selfish, competitive society grow up to be selfish and competitive. No one is innately depraved or evil. An infant is a glob of plastic that can be molded to have whatever character society wishes him to have.
Owen started publishing his ideas in 1813 and, to prove that he was right, in 1816 established his famous Institution for the Formation of Character at New Lanark. Through a secular, scientific curriculum coupled with the notion that each pupil must strive to make his fellow pupils happy, Owen hoped to turn out little rational cooperative human beings, devoid of selfishness, superstition, and all of the other traits found in capitalist man.
All of these ideas were music to the ears of the Boston Unitarians, who wanted confirmation that man is indeed perfectible through the process of education. But Owen had stressed that the earlier you start training the child the better chance you have to mold his character, which is why the Unitarians launched their campaign to create public primary schools. And this was only the first step, for in 1816 Owen had published an essay outlining a plan for a national system of education whereby the character of a whole nation could be molded to the good of all. He wrote in A New View of Society:
At present, there are not any individuals in the kingdom who have been trained to instruct the rising generation, as it is for the interest and happiness of all that it should be instructed. The training of those who are to form the future man becomes a consideration of the utmost magnitude; for, on due reflection, it will appear that instruction to the young must be, of necessity, the only foundation upon which the superstructure of society can be raised. Let this instruction continue to be left, as heretofore, to chance, and often to the most inefficient members of the community, and society must still experience the endless miseries which arise from such weak and puerile conduct. On the contrary, let the instruction of the young be well devised and well executed, and no subsequent proceedings in the state can be materially injurious. For it may truly be said to be a wonder-working power; one that merits the deepest attention of the legislature; with ease it may be used to train man into a daemon of mischief to himself and all around him, or into an agent of unlimited benevolence.
Thus, socialism began as an educational movement to reform the character of man into “future man”—today we call it Soviet man. Leaving education “to chance” meant leaving it private, and that is why in 1818 the Unitarians insisted on creating public primary schools rather than subsidizing pupils to attend private ones. It was also the beginning of the organized movement that was to culminate in the creation of our compulsory public educational system.
SOCIALIZED EDUCATION From the very beginning, the Unitarians and socialists were the prime movers and leaders of this long-range sustained effort. Between 1823 and 1825, James G. Carter, a Harvard Unitarian, published a series of essays deploring the general trend away from the common schools and advocating the expansion of public education and the creation of state-supported teachers’ seminaries. Owen had stressed the need for such seminaries and in his book called them “the most powerful instrument for good that has ever yet been placed in the hands of man.” The Harvard-Unitarian elite gave Carter’s proposals their strongest endorsement and widest circulation.
In 1825, Robert Owen came to America to establish his communist colony at New Harmony, Indiana. The experiment received a great deal of newspaper publicity and attracted a large number of followers. It was called “an experiment in social reform through cooperation and rational education.” But in less than two years it failed. The problem, Owen decided, was that people raised and educated under the old system were incapable of adapting themselves to the communist way of life no matter how much they professed to believe in it. Therefore, the Owenites decided that rational education would have to precede the creation of a socialist society, and they subsequently launched a strong campaign to promote a national system of education.
If both the socialists and the Unitarians embraced educational statism as the future way to human moral progress, it was for two reasons: first, they rejected the Biblical, Calvinist view of man; and second, they rejected the Biblical view of history. Man as sinful and depraved was replaced by man as rational, benevolent, innately good, and perfectible. But the American form of limited government with its elaborate checks and balances had been created on the basis of the Calvinist distrust of human nature. The Calvinists didn’t believe that power corrupts man, but that man corrupts power. Man is a sinner by nature and therefore cannot be trusted with power. Only a true fear of God, they believed, can hold sinful man in check.
Categories: Contributors, Education, Free Speech Zone