The Men Who Invented American Schooling

Failure, Chapter 1, Pt. 1

As a thank you to paying subscribers, I’m going to be sharing chapters of my books fairly regularly. Most of the posts will be from previously published books (all available at Focus Press, most available at Amazon), but as I complete chapters of upcoming books I will be sending those out, too.

Since it’s summer and a new school year is rapidly approaching, I decided to start with my first book, Failure: What Christian Parents Need to Know About American Education, published 10 years ago this month.

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To truly grasp today’s education system we need to understand how public education came about in this country and how public perception of it evolved over the years. When considering the history of the American public school system it seems we first go back to the quaint one-room schoolhouses.

From there we picture bigger schools with separate classrooms and levels based on age and skill level.  And, of course, after that we began to divide the system even more by the use of separate buildings and schools for children and teens.

While I’m sure that such a timeline makes for a decent representation of the development of schools on a basic level, it skims over the changes in laws, teachers, teaching styles, and curricula. Naturally, these are very important parts of what makes up the school systems. To grasp the worldview struggle that is present in today’s education system, we need to go all the way back to the start of American schooling and trace the ideas through to modern times. 

For nearly two hundred years, schooling in this country was looked at as a necessity for the purpose of instruction in Christianity and moral values as they relate to society. Harvard University was founded in 1636 as a college for training men to be ministers (although it wasn’t called “Harvard” until 1639). 

In the next decade, Massachusetts passed the “Old Deluder Satan Act” to ensure literacy for the purpose of moral and spiritual learning. If a town had fifty households or more, they were to hire a teacher who would teach the children to read and write. If the town grew to over one hundred families they would be required to set up a school with a schoolmaster who could prepare the children to the point where they would be suitable to attend university.

Again, all of this was done because that old deluder Satan wants to keep men from knowing the Scriptures. Due to their Puritan influences, Massachusetts was the early leader among education, since they deemed it essential for understanding religious principles.

COTTON MATHER

One of the early champions of compulsory education for spiritual purposes was a Puritan minister named Cotton Mather. He was born shortly after the beginnings of organized education in Massachusetts (1663) and became one of the faces (and voices) of Puritanism.  He was a prolific writer, producing more than four hundred works in his sixty-five year life.[1]

One of those writings (“The Education of Children”) took on the concept of schooling. In it he strongly advocated compulsory schooling and chastised Christians for not strictly enforcing and supporting schooling. In his opinion, schoolhouse development was not just a good idea - it was the Christian’s duty.