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The Renaissance began in the 15th century when Turks invaded Greece causing scholars to flee west with their art, architecture, literature, and scriptures.
The scholar Erasmus translated the Bible from Greek into Latin, which helped Martin Luther start the Reformation.
Luther translated the Bible into German, spreading the Reformation, with the help of Gutenberg’s printing press.
French author Victor Hugo wrote:
“Whether it be Providence or Fate, Gutenberg is the precursor of Luther.”
Luther recommended every church have a school, and that offerings were for:
“… ministers, schoolteachers, and sacristans. The first labor for your salvation … The second train children to be good magistrates, judges, and ministers. The third care for the poor.”
Luther wrote in his letter “To the Christian Nobility” (Luther’s Works, American Edition, vol. 44, p. 207):
“I would advise no one to send his child where the Holy Scriptures are not supreme. Every institution that does not unceasingly pursue the study of God’s word becomes corrupt …
I greatly fear that the universities, unless they teach the Holy Scriptures diligently and impress them on the young students, are wide gates to hell.”
Meanwhile, William Tyndale translated much of the Bible into English, 1522-1535, telling clergy:
“If God spares my life, in a few years a plow boy shall know more of the Scriptures than you do.”
Puritans in England taught children the scriptures, following the example of the ancient Hebrew Republic — that first 400 year period when Israel was out of Egypt before they demanded a king.
Deuteronomy, chapter 6, instructed Israelites to teach the law to their children and their children’s children.
Colonists in America used the New England Primer, which taught the alphabet using biblical lessons.
During the Revolution, John Adams saw ahead that if America was NOT going to be ruled by a king through fear, it must be ruled by citizens with virtue.
Adams put into the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution:
“The people of this commonwealth … authorize … the public worship of God, and for the support and maintenance of public Protestant teachers of piety, religion and morality.”
In America, each colony was founded by a different Christian denomination, each with its own educational system.
Anglican Virginia had William and Mary College.
Puritan Massachusetts had Harvard.
Congregationalist Connecticut had Yale.
Presbyterian New Jersey had Princeton.
Baptist Rhode Island had Brown University.
Anglican New York had Columbia University.
Congregational New Hampshire had Dartmouth.
Many colleges were founded for training ministers and missionaries. In the 18th century, Napoleon conquered Europe, resulting in six million deaths and thousands of orphans.
Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi had a vision to educate the orphans.
He asked Napoleon for help, but he was not interested. Pestalozzi returned to Switzerland and acquired an abandoned monastery where he started a school. He then founded schools in Germany and France.
Pestalozzi’s stated:
“I would take school instruction out of the hands of the old order … and entrust it to … the hearts of fathers and mothers, to the interest of parents who desire that their children should grow up in favor with God and man.”
Pestalozzi’s schools inspired America’s founders to set up “common” schools for poor immigrant children.
These common public schools only taught what all denominations held in common, namely, the King James Bible, the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes, and the Our Father.
Public Common Schools used Noah Webster’s Blue-Backed Speller with its moral catechism, which sold 100 million copies.
Webster wrote to David McClure, October 25, 1836:
“In my view, the Christian religion is the most important and one of the first things in which all children, under a free government ought to be instructed.”
At the time of America’s founding, 98 percent of the population was Protestant, one percent Catholic, and one-tenth of a percent Jewish.
When the Irish Potato Famine occurred, millions of Irish Catholics flooded into Boston, Philadelphia and New York, causing the Catholic population to explode from 1 percent to 20 percent.
Catholics objected to their children being taught Protestant doctrine in the Public Schools.
In response, Archbishop John Huges of New York started the parochial school system for Catholic children.
For the next two centuries, there were two main school systems in America: Public Schools for Protestants; and Parochial Schools for Catholics.
Public Schools used Presbyterian minister William Holmes McGuffey’s Readers, which contained biblical moral lessons. These sold a million copies a year for 120 years.
Protestant missionary Dr. Marcus Whitman and his wife Narcissa brought Christianity to America’s Northwest, beginning the Oregon Trail.
His statue is in the U.S. Capital Statuary Hall.
In the next decade, Catholics founded schools in the Northwest: Father DeSmet with Plains Indians, and Mother Joseph of the Sisters of Providence, who founded 11 hospitals, 7 academies and 5 schools in Oregon, Washington, Montana, and Idaho.
Her statue is in the U.S. Capital Statuary Hall.
In 1922, the Oregon legislature passed a law mandating all students 8 to 18 years old attend Protestant Public Schools.
This would effectively shut down all Catholic schools. Since the 1880s, the Society of Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary ran schools in Oregon.
They filed a lawsuit against Oregon Governor Pierce that went to the Supreme Court.
They were joined in their case by the Hill Military Academy for boys.
They won their case in 1925, thus prohibiting states from enforcing mandatory government education of children.
Pierce versus Society of Sisters was a pivotal case as it “applied” the 14th Amendment to the states, being cited in over 100 subsequent cases.
Public schools were still predominantly Protestant. From the beginning of Public Schools, they taught the Protestant Christian faith.
Even in 1946, the Dallas Public School System offered a Bible study course in the New Testament, bulletin number 170.
In 1947, taxpayers in New Jersey objected to tax money being used to pay for Catholic students to get bus rides to Catholic schools.
The Supreme Court decided the Everson case which allowed the bus rides to continue, but in the process, it significantly removed religion and education from state jurisdiction and put it under Federal.
In 1952, the Supreme Court case of Zorach versus Clauson allowed release time for students to receive religious instruction — as long as it was not paid for with tax dollars nor on school property.
LifeWise Academy organizes weekly bus rides for public school students to go to a local church for an hour and receive Bible teaching.
On Flag Day, June 14, 1954, President Eisenhower added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, stating:
“From this day forward, the millions of our school children will daily proclaim in every city and town, every village and rural schoolhouse, the dedication of our nation and our people to the Almighty …
To anyone who truly loves America, nothing could be more inspiring than … this rededication of our youth, on each school morning, to our country’s true meaning.”
Protestant-Catholic tensions resulted in public schools being more generic regarding religion.
Then humanist views began infiltrating schools through teachers associations, beginning with Horace Mann and John Dewey, both of whom signed the Humanist Manifesto.
John Dewey wrote in The Middle Works (1915, vol. 8, p. 398):
“Education which trains children to docility and obedience, to the careful performance of imposed tasks because they are imposed, regardless of where they lead, is suited to an autocratic society.”
William T. Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906, drew from socialist philosophers when he stated:
“Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. The average American should be content with their humble role in life, they’re not tempted to think about any other role.”
Marx and Engles insisted (Marx/Engels Collected Works, Volume 6, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976):
“The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother’s care, shall be in state institutions at state expense.”
Lenin stated:
“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”
Stalin stated:
“Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.
In 1918, the Communist Party Education Workers Congress declared:
“We must turn children, who can be shaped like wax, into real, good communists … We must remove the children from the crude influence of their families … and, to speak frankly, nationalize them … They will grow up to be real communists.”
During the Cold War, socialist-communist thought pushed religion out of American schools.
W.E.B. Du Bois, a founder of the NAACP who joined the U.S. Communist Party in 1961, wrote in his autobiography:
“I think the greatest gift of the Soviet Union to modern civilization was the dethronement of the clergy and the refusal to let religion be taught in the public schools.”
In 1963, Congressman Albert S. Herlong, Jr., read into the Congressional Record a list of Communist goals:
“Control schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current communist propaganda …
Soften curriculum.
Get control of teachers’ associations.
Put party line in textbooks …
Control student newspapers …
Infiltrate churches and replace revealed religion with ‘social’ religion …
Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a ‘religious crutch’ …
Discredit American culture …
Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and divorce …
Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as ‘normal, natural, healthy’ …
Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of ‘separation of church and state.'”
In 1963, a New York atheist Edward Schempp brought a lawsuit to stop students from praying a simple 22-word prayer:
“Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country.”
This case, Abington School District versus Schempp, was combined with the 1963 case brought by militant atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, Murray versus Curlett, to remove prayer and Bible reading from public schools.
In 1979, President Jimmy Carter started the Department of Education.
Since then, public schools and teachers’ associations shifted from academic achievement to using peer-pressure to promote leftist ideologies, behavior modification, social-emotional learning, critical race theory, the pyramid of oppression, and diversity, equity and inclusion.
As Bible beliefs were removed from Public schools it created a vacuum which was filled by secular humanism, atheism, Marxism, socialism, Islamism, transgenderism, and even Satanism.
President Reagan remarked August 23, 1984:
“We even had to pass a special law in the Congress just a few weeks ago to allow student prayer groups the same access to school rooms after classes that a Young Marxist Society … would already enjoy.”
Then began a pushback.
In 2001, Mat Staver and the Liberty Counsel won the Supreme Court case of Good News Club versus the Milford Central School, allowing Bible clubs in the public schools after classes, even being taught by Christian public school teachers.
In 2015, the Bremerton School District fired Coach Joe Kennedy for praying after a game.
Kelly Shackelford and First Liberty Institute won the Supreme Court case in 2022, allowing for private religious expression in public schools.
In 2012, Charlie Kirk began Turning Point USA by going onto college campuses and using reason and common sense to debate students indoctrinated with leftist ideologies.
An exodus of students out of public schools took place.
Parents decided to home school their children, or put them in Christian schools, Classical schools, Charter schools, or micro schools, being supported by organizations like Turning Point Academy.
In closing, here is an excerpt from an 1836 public school textbook, McGuffey’s Eclectic First Reader, a lesson titled “evening prayer”:
“At the close of the day, before you go to sleep, you should not fail to pray to God to keep you from sin and from harm … You should thank Him for all His good gifts; and learn, while young, to put your trust in Him; and the kind care of God will be with you.”
This post originally appeared at https://americanminute.com/blogs/todays-american-minute/an-overview-of-education-in-europe-america