Part 2: Education Leadership and Religious Institutions
Immigration and Industrial Revolution: Work and Culture
In the last essay on this topic I noted that in the United States schooling is both compulsory and publicly funded. As we might expect, this means it tends to be politically controversial. Some religious groups have long had an awkward relationship with American education laws. Early on, they were responsible for driving the creation of such laws, but as time passed some groups came into open conflict with compulsory education laws.
One point to note before beginning the next leg of this topic is the use of the word “education” in most of the language regarding law, funding, and compulsion around schooling. This can be a little misleading regarding the position of those who oppose “compulsory education” laws. It would be more precise to describe these laws as “compulsory schooling” laws as there are important distinctions between education and schooling, the latter being a means, and at least possibly not the only means, to the end of the former.
This essay offers a brief history of significant events in compulsory education in the US and considers the relation of religious institutions and their efforts at education to a secular polity.
Massachusetts 1642
In 1642 members of the Massachusetts Bay colony passed the country’s first compulsory education law in order to ameliorate what they saw as widespread parental neglect. Their purpose, clearly stated, was to ensure that all children could “read and understand the principles of religion and the capital laws of this country.” 1 A committee of selectmen was formed with the responsibility of judging how parents were doing and reporting to the courts those who fell short. As far as we can tell, the laws were never strictly enforced. Keeping in mind the religious integrity of the Massachusetts Bay colony, the 1642 law and its subsequent revisions which kept the transmission of religious precept squarely in view, are examples of a religious group instituting compulsory education for its own adherents. On the other hand, it also established a precedent in which the state could mandate educational standards for its citizens.
Industrialism, Urbanism, and Immigration
In the following centuries the US experienced intense growth. By the early 19th century, after massive rounds of immigration, the industrial revolution was in full swing. The agrarian way of life common in early America gave way to industrialization and the urbanization necessary to sustain it. An American man who had formerly worked on his land to cultivate a living, exercising initiative and judgement in response to weather and season, needed to be a generalist and spent each day on a variety of different tasks. The factory workers, on the other hand, and those working in the vast logistical system in place to support their life in cities, away from the food production in the country, required specialization of workers.
This specialization, in tandem with the cultural strain of mass immigration, had an enormous impact on education. In the colonies, as historian Lawrence Cremin notes:
“schooling went on anywhere and everywhere, not only in schoolrooms, but in kitchens, manses, churches, meetinghouses, sheds erected in fields, and shops erected in towns; that pupils were taught by parents, tutors, clergymen, lay readers, preceptors, physicians, lawyers, artisans, and shopkeepers; and that most teaching proceeded on an individual basis, so that whatever lines there were in the metropolis between petty schooling and grammar schooling were virtually absent in the colonies.”
Not so in America’s young industrial cities. Here, “The new immigrants fueled the industrial growth of the cities while simultaneously placing new strains on the social fabric. The particular patterns of urban growth and social dislocation resulted in new efforts at imposing what historian Karl Kaestle describes as "systematic solutions on chaotic urban conditions." Compulsory schooling was just such a systematic solution, an effort to weave a coherent social fabric of the swelling immigrant population which did not share a common culture and were no longer engaged in broad traditional work on the land.
Two Changes: Culture and Work
The first of these two points is often acknowledged. Mass immigration forces different cultures into close proximity forcing confrontation or reconciliation. In America, the “melting pot” approach to establishing and preserving a polity involved (involves) compulsory schooling in which immigrants’ native (usually religious) culture is replaced by a secular political culture.
But the second point is less acknowledged and perhaps more important. People’s work changed from being chiefly oriented toward the land to being oriented toward machines; from considerations of seasons and species to timecards and levers. Formerly work involved a breadth of different kinds of tasks and skills. Now, people were to serve in narrow areas of function or expertise.
My sense is that when folks describe the “melting pot” approach to solving cultural conflict, culture is thought to mean something like the ethnic, religious nuances of one’s background. But of course, those elements of a culture are of a piece with much, much more that is signified by the word. The etymology of culture (to till the soil and tend to the earth) points us toward the kind of human work in relation to nature necessary for sustaining families and therefore human life. Every culture has grown out of a people’s fundamental relationship with the earth where they live, its weather, and how those realities impact producing food for their children. I point this out in order to emphasize that the shift from an agrarian way of life to an industrial one was happening in America at the exact same time as mass immigration. This was not one shock to the system but two, and at the most fundamental levels of life.
The impact on religion of this second point, the change in man’s relation to his environment and his labor is visible in much of the developed world. The religious conviction of those in a village in medieval France and those on the pastoral steppes in contemporary Afghanistan resemble each other more closely than they do those in urban Gary, Indiana. “Perhaps the most troubling consequence of industrialization was that it created conditions under which a healthy religious culture could no longer flourish. For, by severing human beings from family, community, and nature, industrialization had effectively dissolved the primordial bonds that made religion tangible, and hence believable.”2
It is no accident, in my mind, that the major efforts at compulsory secular education emerged at this time. Even had we wanted education to remain in the pluralistic model of the colonies, industrial adults had neither the time nor the breadth of knowledge to conduct such informal education in kitchens, sheds, and shops. So education became an “industry,” like the others, operated by a cadre of specialists trained for their work by other specialists.
The Relation of Religious Institutions
Whether in the Massachusetts colonies on the east coast of the seventeenth century or the Franciscan missions on the west coast in the eighteenth, religious schools have been part of the American story since its beginning. Sometimes missionaries established religious schools and sometimes religious schools naturally followed immigrant adherents of the religion to their new homes in America. In either case, the interests of the religious community were, of course, not identical to the political interests of the country.
Why? Many serious religions understand human beings to have a nature and a destiny which implies a teleological arc to every human life. Especially because that arc extends beyond the physical world into an unknown eternity, religious efforts at education properly take as their object those highest, timeless, eternal aspects of one’s destiny, and the formation in one’s nature on earth that best disposes one to achieve this destiny. But while the interests of the secular polity—necessarily an earthy, temporal endeavor—might align with some of the principles taught by a religion, they are never coextensive, and might just as easily not align.
American politics have been clear on this for a long time, attempting with freedom of religion and freedom of speech to secure a secular public square in which each individual is welcome to believe and practice his faith as he chooses… up to the point where it disrupts the priorities of the polity. Where exactly that point of disruption is has involved the courts since the beginning. But important to this conversation is the fact that frequently throughout our history, religious schools and individual families have become targets of the polity’s compulsory education agenda, an agenda which might make perfect sense from a secular polity’s perspective, and not at all from a religious perspective.
In the next essay in this series on Education Leadership and Religious Institutions we’ll review some of those controversies and their result in the contemporary practices of many religious educational institutions.
Michael S. Katz. A History of Compulsory Education Laws. Bloomington, Indiana 1976.
Dr. Tobias Lanz in his introduction to Flee to the Fields: The Faith and Works of the Catholic Land Movement.