| “Public” Education: An American Outrage |
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| Written by Warren Mass | ||||||||
| Monday, 05 April 2010 16:08 | ||||||||
Page 1 of 6  What the church had been for medieval man, the public school must now become for democratic and rational man. God would be replaced by the concept of the Public Good, sin and guilt by the more positive virtues of Victorian morality ....
— Horace Mann, “The Father of Public Education” So-called public education has become such a staple of life in the United States and other Western industrialized nations that it is now a sacrosanct institution. The transition from the small one-room school of yesteryear, often taught by a teacher privately hired by the parents of the children being educated (for an example of how this worked, read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving), to today’s gargantuan education factories is as big a societal change as the well-chronicled Industrial Revolution. Many people have always rejected so-called public education (the reason for the qualifying adjective will be explained shortly) and opted for private schooling for their children. Their reasons generally fell into one of two categories: 1) To seek academically superior education from private preparatory academies that would help ensure their children’s entry into the colleges of their choice, or 2) to obtain education that reinforced the parent’s religious views, in church-affiliated schools. Though the network of parochial schools established by Catholic parishes represented the largest number of these religious schools, many others exist, including the very large Seventh-day Adventist educational system, schools established by mainstream Protestant denominations such as the Lutherans, and the many nondenominational schools designated simply as “Christian schools.” (Non-Christian religions have also established schools that teach in the context of their faith.) Up until 45 years ago, however, our government-run schools still retained a nominally healthy respect for the Judeo-Christian culture in which they operated. This writer attended both public and parochial elementary schools up until 1959, and at that time, each school day started with the Pledge of Allegiance and a reading from the Bible by a student. During my third-grade school year, the teacher invited a Jewish boy to bring a menorah into class and explain its use in the celebration of Chanukah. |
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| Last Updated on Monday, 05 April 2010 18:30 |
Blessed is he who carries within himself a God, an ideal, and obeys it.