Education Begins with God, Part 2
In part one, we saw how the Reformation led to soaring literacy rates in Protestant nations. The Reformation eventually, over the course of the next four centuries, changed the culture of the entire world; today, almost all nation-states, regardless of religion, have adopted the goal of universal literacy. But the Reformation also led to a phase of persecution of Protestants by Catholics, Catholics by Protestants, and more reformed Protestant sects by less reformed denominations. This latter scenario, persecution of the reform-minded Puritans by the Church of England, led a small band of Puritan pilgrims to flee to the New World, a voyage that would eventually lead to the founding the United States.
American Education was Founded Upon Protestant Religious Values
When the Puritans came to the New World, they brought with them the Protestant emphasis on literacy. Some of the earliest laws of the American colonies required villages to teach children to read so that they would be able to read the Bible.
The “Old Deluder Satan Act,” a Massachusetts law of 1647, states:
“It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures, as in former times by keeping them in an unknown tongue. . . . And that learning may not be buried in the graves of our forefathers . . . the Lord assisting our endeavors . . . It is therefore ordered that every township in this jurisdiction, after the Lord hath increased them to fifty households shall forthwith appoint one within their town to teach all such children…to write and read.”
The act required towns of 50 or more households to appoint a teacher, and towns with 100 or more households to establish an elementary or grammar school. The “Old Deluder Satan Act” is sometimes celebrated as America’s first law making education mandatory, but the Massachusetts Bay Colony had already passed a similar, although less comprehensive measure, in 1642. It should be noted that many parents endeavored to teach their own children at home; homeschooling has been with us from the beginning.
Eight years later, the New Haven (Connecticut) Code of 1655 declared:
“It is ordered… that all parents and masters do duly endeavor, either by their own ability and labor to provide… that all their children, and apprentices as they grow capable, may through God’s blessing, attain at least so much, as to be able duly to read the Scriptures… to understand the main grounds and principles of Christian Religion necessary to salvation.”
Clearly, the goal of enabling everyone to read the Scriptures so as to be able to “work out his own salvation with fear and trembling” was a very important motivation of the first laws directed toward establishing public education.
Our Elite Ivy League Universities Were Founded to Train Gospel Ministers
America’s elite institutions of higher learning were established to educate those called to the gospel ministry, and advance the cause of the gospel of Christ.
Harvard University, founded in 1636 by the Massachusetts Bay Colony, declared in its charter that its purpose was to “train a literate clergy,” because the colony’s leaders were “dreading to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches when our present Ministers shall lie in the Dust.” It was named after Reverend John Harvard, who donated his library and considerable funds to establish the university. Symbolic of the first couple of centuries of Harvard’s ideological journey, its Latin motto, Veritas pro Christo et Ecclesia Eius (“Truth for Christ and His Church”) was shortened to Veritas. (It should be updated to mendacia Diaboli.)
In addition to being fluent in Latin and Greek, Harvard students were required “to consider well [that] the main end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life, and therefore to lay Christ . . . as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning.” The Harvard man was required to read the Scriptures twice a day and be ready to give an account of the insights he gained thereby. He was required to avoid “all profanation of God’s name, attributes, word, ordinance, and times of worship,” and to actively retain “God and the love of His truth” in his mind.
A 1693 decree of King William III and Queen Mary II founded the College of William & Mary so that “the Church of Virginia may be furnished with a seminary of ministers of the gospel, and that the youth may be piously educated in good letters and manners, and that the Christian religion may be propagated among the Western Indians to the glory of Almighty God.”
Yale University was founded by ten gospel ministers in 1701 out of a “zeal for upholding and propagating the Christian Protestant Religion.” The Yale coat of arms features an open book with the Hebrew words “Urim” and “Thummim,” the two precious stones placed on the High Priest’s breastplate through which God made His wishes known (Exodus 28:30).
The University of Pennsylvania was founded by Reverend George Whitefield, whose preaching had ignited the Great Awakening. According to the University of Pennsylvania website:
“The University of Pennsylvania dates its founding to 1740, when a prominent evangelist, George Whitefield, and others established an educational trust fund and began construction of a large school building at Fourth and Arch streets in Philadelphia. The building was designed as a charity school for the children of working-class Philadelphians and as a house of worship for Whitefield’s followers.”
Princeton University was founded in 1746 as a seminary to train ministers. The list of its early presidents reads like a “Who’s Who” of Great Awakening figures, including Jonathan Dickinson, Samuel Davies, Samuel Finley, Jonathan Edwards, and John Witherspoon.
Witherspoon, the second longest serving president of Princeton, was a signer of the Declaration of Independence who once famously stated, “Accursed be all that learning which sets itself in opposition to the cross of Christ!” Witherspoon was so influential among our founding fathers that Horace Walpole quipped in Parliament: “Cousin America has run off with a Presbyterian parson.” (A more detailed discussion of the founding of Princeton can be found here.)
Columbia University was founded in 1754 as Kings College. The Reverend Samuel Johnson, the first president of Columbia, set out the school’s Christian mission in no uncertain terms:
“The chief thing that is aimed at in this college is to teach and engage the students to know God in Jesus Christ, and to love and serve Him in all sobriety, godliness, and righteousness of life.”
Columbia’s seal has the name of God (Yahweh) blazing forth in Hebrew. On the bottom, there is a scripture citation (1 Peter 2:1-2), in which the Apostle Paul urges people to “long for pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation.” Above the citation, an enthroned woman holds an open book with the Latin words “Logia Zonta” meaning “living words.” The Hebrew banner unfurled from her throne reads: “God’s Light.” The Latin expression encircling the upper half means: “In your light, we see light.” In the distance (on the right), you find the rising sun which was meant to allude to Malachi 4:2: “The sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings.”
Dartmouth College was founded in 1769 by Reverend Eleazar Wheelock and Reverend Samson Occom (a converted member of the Mohegan tribe) “for the education and instruction of youth of the Indian tribes in this land in reading, writing, and all parts of learning which shall appear necessary and expedient for civilizing and Christianizing children of pagans…”
The oldest public universities were also established for explicitly religious purposes. The University of Georgia, the oldest public university in America, was founded in 1785 by Abraham Baldwin, an ordained minister and signer of the U.S. Constitution; its founding charter, which states:
“It should therefore be among the first objects of those who wish well to the national prosperity to encourage and support the principles of Religion and morality, and early to place the youth under the forming hand of Society that by instruction they may be molded to the love of Virtue and good Order.”
The University of Florida was founded as “East Florida Seminary” in 1853; the Reverend R.H. Howren, the first chairman of its Board of Trustees, wrote, “Observation and experience have taught that an institution of learning cannot be sustained unless controlled by some denomination.”
The Universities of Georgia and Florida were both founded to be religiously affiliated and publicly funded, and they were not anomalies. Almost every university and college founded in the U.S. and Europe until the mid-19th century was founded by some religious organization.
The Founders Encouraged Christianity in Education
One year after the Constitution was ratified, Samuel Adams wrote his second cousin, John Adams (both men were Harvard educated), to celebrate the potential of America’s future:
“Let divines and philosophers, statesmen and patriots, unite their endeavors to renovate the age by impressing the minds of men with the importance of educating their little boys and girls—inculcating in the minds of youth the fear and love of the Deity…. leading them in the study, and practice of the exalted virtues of the Christian system.”
Gouverneur Morris, a New Yorker and a Columbia-educated signer of the Constitution, argued that “education should teach the precepts of religion and the duties of man towards God.”
Benjamin Franklin, the first president of the board of trustees of the Academy and College of Philadelphia, which later merged into the University of Pennsylvania, argued that Pennsylvania’s students should learn the “excellency of the Christian Religion above all others—ancient or modern.” Franklin suggested that law students should learn that the basis of all law was “delivered first and with best warrant by Moses.”
Benjamin Rush, a Princeton-educated physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, who taught chemistry at Franklin’s Academy and College of Philadelphia, called for, “the universal education of our youth in the principles of Christianity by means of the Bible”:
“In contemplating the political institutions of the United States, I lament, that we waste so much time and money in punishing crimes, and take so little pains to prevent them. We profess to be republicans, and yet we neglect the only means of establishing and perpetuating our republican forms of government, that is, the universal education of our youth in the principles of Christianity, by means of the Bible. For this divine book, above all others, favors that equality among mankind, that respect for just laws, and all those sober and frugal virtues, which constitute the soul of republicanism.” (Letter to Rev. Jeremy Belknap)
James McHenry, after whom the fort in Baltimore Harbor is named, was a physician who apprenticed under Benjamin Rush. He attended the 1787 convention, signed the Constitution, and believed that a desire to improve the nation “pleads most forcibly for the general distribution of the Holy Scriptures.”
Noah Webster, called the “Schoolmaster to America,” is most famous for having published in 1828, the first American dictionary. In its foreword, he declared that “the Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government, ought to be instructed.”
In 1788, Congress, still operating under the Articles of Confederation, before the 1787 constitution was fully ratified, passed the Northwest Ordinance. This act created the Northwest Territory, which included what is now Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and part of Minnesota. Article III, of this act states:
“Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”
A Christian Curriculum
Our Founders grew up using textbooks filled with Scripture and Christian teachings. The New England Primer, first published in 1690, was one of America’s best-selling books for more than a century. It sold five million copies during the 18th century, when America’s population never grew much beyond four million. That would be the equivalent of selling 425 million books today. In addition to plentiful references to scripture, The Primer sought to forge Christian character in its students. Consider its daily pledge to be recited by students:
“I will fear God, and honor the King; I will honor my father and mother; I will obey my superiors; I will submit to my elders; I will love my friends; I will hate no man; I will forgive my enemies and pray to God for them; I will, as much as in me lies, keep all God’s Holy Commandments; I will learn my catechism; I will keep the Lord’s Day Holy; I will reverence God’s Sanctuary for our God is a consuming fire.”
Christianity was not stripped from education following the Constitutional Convention. James Madison, the primary architect of the Constitution, presided over the District of Columbia School Board. In 1813, he received the first progress report of the area schools. It boasted, “Fifty-five have learned to read in the Old and New Testaments… 26 are now learning to read Dr Watts’ Hymns.”
The New England Primer remained the most popular and best-selling educational resource until 1836, when William Holmes McGuffey, a Presbyterian minister who was a professor at the University of Miami (Ohio), published The McGuffey Reader. When McGuffey had taught school, he, as was typical at the time, used the New England Primer, Webster’s Dictionary and the Bible as his only texts. But he saw the need for an expanded reading curriculum, one that became more difficult, with a more challenging vocabulary, at each higher grade or age.
By today’s standards, McGuffey’s material was conservative, patriotic, and strongly Christian. He interpreted the goals of public schooling as instilling moral and spiritual values and, as you would expect from a Presbyterian minister, his religious readings tended to be Calvinistic. But clearly most people approved of McGuffey’s approach: The McGuffey reader sold more than 120 million copies between 1836 and 1920. It was officially adopted as a public school textbook by thirty-five states.
In an essay promoting the importance of Christian education for the nation, William McGuffey wrote:
“The Christian religion is the religion of our country. From it are derived our prevalent notions of the character of God, the great moral governor of the universe . . . Its maxims, its precepts, its sentiments, and even its very spirit, have become so incorporated with the mind and soul of civilization and all refinement, that it cannot be eradicated, or even opposed, without imminent hazard of all that is beautiful, lovely, and valuable, in the arts, in science, and in society. . . . At the close of the day, before you go to sleep, you should not fail to pray to God to keep you from sin and from harm…. Put your trust in Him; and the kind care of God will be with you, both in your youth and in your old age.”
Conclusion
Historically, the Church has done more to advance the cause of education than any other institution. The nations most aligned with Protestant Christianity enjoyed the highest rates of literacy, established the most prestigious universities, birthed the scientific revolution, and established norms of justice and liberty. America’s Founders believed that Christian education was essential for the survival of the republic. For more than two centuries, most of our schools were distinctly Christian, and Christians largely held sway over the nation’s educational institutions.
By contrast, today’s public education system is aggressively hostile to Christianity. How did such a radical transformation take place? In Part 3, we will discuss how mainline Protestantism lost its way, and how Marxists ousted Christians from the institutions earlier Christians had established.
“Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom, and to depart from evil is understanding.” Job 28:28
This article is condensed and edited for content from a series by Sam Kastensmidt at the Institute for Faith and Culture.