How Christianity Shaped the Minds of Early American Youth
The history of American Education is an interesting topic, especially considering the recent removal of the Department of Education. From the beginnings of colonial education, when mothers taught their children the Bible and the basics of reading, reading, and arithmetic around the hearth in their homes, to the establishment of community schoolhouses where those same principles were reiterated through a carefully chosen schoolteacher. Bernard Bailyn notes the importance of familial involvement in a young person's development in his book Education in the Forming of American Society, petitioning that the "family would not only introduce him to the basic forms of civilized living, but it shaped his attitudes, formed his patterns of behavior, endowed him with manners and morals." 1 Today, children as young as 3 are whisked away from their mothers to VPK programs to prepare them for the rigorous demands of kindergarten. Who are these people molding and shaping the minds of our young people?
School teachers today are required to hold a certificate issued by the state and pass a background check. Hiring and evaluations are not done by the parents and the community, but rather through a system of administrative personnel who often have no ties to the community at all. In early America, religious dominations had standards concerning what students would learn, and that included, first and foremost, the Bible. One commonality shared by nearly all people of America during this time was the foundational belief in God and the Bible. Therefore, there were no discrepancies in what morality was or how the Earth was formed. The King James Bible, with its 8000-word vocabulary of sharp, crisp words, proved an excellent source for teaching children reading and writing. In fact, nearly all colonists were proficient in Biblical literacy, having been raised using the Bible as a learning tool in this very manner. One hundred years later, Horace Mann found fault with this method, stating, "The passions of the children are strong while their intellect is extremely weak, and under the present arrangements of education and general society, the 'evil passions' grow with their growth and strengthen with their strength, while reason is kept in a state of utter imbecility. A principal cause of this, we believe, is that the moral culture of our children is, to a fearful extent, put in the hands of our domestics."2
In his article entitled "Church, State, and Education in the Young American Republic," Daniel Walker Howe asserts that the Awakening and revivalists such as Whitefield, Edwards, and Finney did more to establish religious education than any other force during that time. He declares that "one such initiative was the Sunday School, which provided one day a week of instruction under religious auspices for poor children who might receive no other (and might be employed on farm, factory, or shop work the rest of the week)."2 Originating in Britain in the 1780s, the Sunday School movement quickly gained traction in America, and by 1827, it was providing Bible-centered learning to teach literacy to some 200,000 American children. Only after public primary education became widespread did Sunday schools begin to concentrate solely on religious instruction.
Early literacy and competency were the primary focus for parents, teaching moral lessons that emphasized high character development through moral education. This was furthered using a series of schoolbooks called "McGuffey's Readers." They were used exclusively in America to teach reading, writing, and spelling to youth from the 1830s up until about 1960. Interestingly, Thomas Sowell, in his book Inside American Education, says, "The general decline in educational performance that began in the 1960s encompassed elementary and secondary education, as well as education at the college level. The evidence of this decline includes not only results on a variety of objective tests, but also first-hand observations by teachers and professors, and dismaying experiences by employers who have found the end product seriously lacking."3 Now, while Sowell does not relate the downturn in American education to the removal of Biblical literacy, one cannot help but note the timing of the two being simultaneous.
Next week I'll continue with part 2 in the Series, How Christianity Shaped the Minds of Early American Youth.
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