Overview

During the mid-nineteenth century, Americans created the functional equivalent of earlier state religious establishments. Supported by mandatory taxation, purportedly inclusive, and vested with messianic promise, public schooling, like the earlier established churches, was touted as a bulwark of the Republic and as an essential agent of moral and civic virtue. As was the case with dissenters from early American established churches, some citizens and religious minorities have dissented from the public school system, what historian Sidney Mead calls the country's established church. They have objected to the orthodoxy of the public school, compulsory taxation, and attempts to abolish their schools or bring them into conformity with the state school paradigm. The Dissenting Tradition in American Education recounts episodes of Catholic and Protestant nonconformity since the inception of public education, including the creation of Catholic and Protestant schools, homeschooling, conflicts regarding regulation of nonconforming schools, and controversy about the propositions of knowledge and dispositions of belief and value sanctioned by the state school. Such dissent suggests that Americans consider disestablishing the public school and ponder means of education more suited to their confessional pluralism and commitments to freedom of conscience, parental liberty, and educational justice.

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9780820479200

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«As informed people have known for some time, systematic public schooling was established in the mid-1800s, primarily because the Protestant majority, deeply concerned about rearing its young as committed Christians, thought that publicly run schools, supplemented by the efforts of churches, would serve that purpose well by remaining mainstream-Protestant (and therefore, in a predominantly Protestant nation, presumably neutral). Equally important, most Protestants assumed that public schools would foster good citizenship in virtually all the nation's young, partly by counteracting a frightening influx of Catholics and crime-prone immigrants. In this compelling, utterly timely book, Carper and Hunt demonstrate that several leading Protestant thinkers recognized, surprisingly early, that the dream of the 'neutral, ' basically Protestant public school was not only unfair to Catholics (since it deprived them of the equal right to educate their children, via tax support, in keeping with Catholic principles) but was doomed to backfire as the nation became increasingly diverse, even to the point of much militant secularism. Since every element of a school reflects overarching beliefs and values, agreeing to the public school contract guaranteed, ultimately, the religious mis-education of the descendants of every person of deep faith, with exceptions, often unofficial, where religious parents are very influential. Carper and Hunt demonstrate, with overwhelming evidence, that in every era since Protestants signed the public school contract, some major group has dissented openly and justly from the public school model. That dissent continues and intensifies. Its current forms include openrefusal to include theistic interpretation of evidence on evolution in science classes, sex education that violates the deep convictions of many parents, and disciplinary policies that permit behavior many parents regard as morally corrupting, and a great deal more. If all citizens, and especially all people of religious conviction, would read this book, we'd get drastic educational rearrangements mighty soon.

Author Information

The Authors: James C. Carper is Professor of Social Foundations of Education in the Department of Educational Studies at The University of South Carolina where he has been a faculty member since 1989. His research interests include the history of education in the United States, education and religion, and private schools. In addition to co-editing several books on religion and education, he has published essays in numerous journals. He is the past president of Associates for Research in Private Education. Thomas C. Hunt is Professor in the Department of Teacher Education at The University of Dayton where he specializes in the history of education, particularly that of Catholic schools. Hunt has authored or edited fourteen books mainly on religion and education. The recipient of the 2002 Alumni Award for Scholarship from the University of Dayton, he has served as co-editor of Catholic Education: A Journal of Inquiry and Practice since the fall of 1998.

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