The Messianic Character of American Education: 50th Anniversary
Remnant Review
Five decades ago, R. J. Rushdoony's book on American education was jointly published by the tiny publishing house, Presbyterian and Reformed, and the newly created Craig Press. It remains the most academically rigorous critique of the philosophy of progressive education ever written. Its title tells all.
This book was a follow-up on his 1961 book, Intellectual Schizophrenia. In that book, he set forth the Christian case against the concept of neutral education. He also set forth the case against tax-funded education.
Rushdoony received an M. A. degree in education from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1940. He had assembled by 1963 what most people would regard as an immense personal library, and heavily represented in it was the field of education. He had access to superior libraries, including Stanford University. This is why he was able to reference so many obscure publications that had not seen the light of day in decades. They may have not seen the light of day for a century.
In The Messianic Character of American Education, Rushdoony presented the primary theme of the book on page 2:
But if skills are only a necessary but subordinate part of freedom, then in themselves they cannot constitute a liberal education, however necessary to it. The question again remains basically a religious question, and, to its credit, progressivism has been essentially a religious movement, as indeed has been the whole of the movement from Horace Mann to the present, to liberate man by means of a universal system of state-supported schools.
Rushdoony went through the primary source documents relating to the two dozen founders of American progressive education. Most of the documents which he cited had been long out-of-print. They had been long forgotten. Most of the founders of progressive education had been forgotten by 1963. Only a handful of specialists in the history of the education were ever aware of most of these individuals. So, the book represented not simply educational revisionism, but a much-needed introduction to the educational philosophies undergirding the system of tax funded education in the United States.
There had never been another book like this. There was no comparable introduction to these two dozen figures in one volume. There was no place for any researcher to go to gain access to their names, a summary of their philosophies, footnotes to what they actually wrote, and an assessment of what their influence was.
Second, there had never been a comprehensive critique of these individuals and their philosophies. There were critiques of progressive education. But there was nothing comprehensive. There was nothing that took a fundamental principle of interpretation, namely, the religion of salvation by tax funded education, and then demonstrated, citation by citation, from the original sources, that the founders of American tax funded education really did believe in this religion.
He made it clear in this book that tax-funded education from the beginning was a systematic attempt by Unitarians and humanists to undermine Christianity in every aspect of its influence. He made it clear that this was not a peripheral issue for these people. On the contrary, it was the center of their philosophy. They pursued their competing views of how the public schools should regenerate individuals and society, but they were united in this principle: the Christian worldview must be eliminated, and Christian families must not be allowed to inculcate such a worldview in their children. The public school system was designed from the beginning as a religious enterprise. This had never been made equally clear before. He had the footnotes to prove his case. This is why the book represents a turning point in the history of Christian education in the United States.
Over the years, it was this book which Christian parents used, and Christian lawyers used, to defend their refusal to send their children into the public schools. As the homeschool movement began to expand in the 1980s, various state agencies began to put pressure on families who pulled their children out of the tax-funded school system. The parents claimed that they did so on religious grounds. By doing so, they invoked the First Amendment, as applied to the states by means of the 14th Amendment. But they had to prove their case. They had to prove that they really were pulling their children out on the basis of religious noncooperation. This book became the Bible of the resistance movement. With this book, parents had access to a systematically Christian critique of the systematically anti-Christian philosophy which undergirds the entire American public school system.
Rushdoony in the mid-1980s became prominent as an expert witness in homeschool cases. He was the primary witness in the most important of these cases, Leeper v. Arlington, a Texas case. In the cross-examination, he destroyed the hapless attorney who represented the Arlington Independent School District. The transcript is here. The court awarded settlement fees of about $700,000, or twice that in today's purchasing power. The state appealed. The Texas Supreme Court voted 9 to 0 in favor of the plaintiffs. That ended the school districts' harassment of homeschools in the state of Texas.
THE ROGUES' GALLERY
I am about to do something that I have never done before. I am going to give the chapter titles of the book. Normally, this is a waste of time. In the case of this book, it is the heart of the matter.
A Liberal EducationThe Divine Rights of Education
Horace Mann and the Messianic Character of American Education
James G Carter: An Engine to Sway the People
Edward H Sheldon: Oswego and the Secular School
Henry Barnhart: The Wheeling of the Spheres
William Torrey Harris: The State and the True Self of Man
James Swett: The Self-Preservation of the State
Charles De Garmo: Morality as Social Adjustment
Col. Francis Wayland Parker: The Divine Child and the Divine State
William James: Education and Conditioning
Nicholas Murray Butler: Education for the State
G. Stanley Hall: The Child-Centered Society
Herman Harrell Horne: Man and the Universal
John Dewey's New Jerusalem: The Great Community
J. .B. Watson: Science and Utopia
Carlton Washburn: Education to Save Democracy
Edward Lee Thorndike: Education as a Science
Boyd H. Bode: Is Progressivism a New Absolutism?
William Heard Kilpatrick: The Repeal of the Past
Harold O. Rugg: Democracy as a Messianic Religion
George S. Counts: Who Shall Control Education?
Theodore Brameld: Democracy and Consensus
The kindergarten: Model for a New Eden
Is the University Beyond the Law?
The Freedom of Higher Education
Education as a Religion
The Lowest Common Denominator
The book can be read for free here.
It would be instructive to go through the footnotes in this book, then go to a major research library or search online, and assemble links to all of the documents that he cited. Most of them are in the public domain. That would be a very useful website.
For many years, I have said that a good history of any movement requires three lines of investigation. First, there has to be a systematic survey of the movement's founding documents, especially the documents in which it makes its case for its fundamental principles of interpretation, application, and social transformation. I call this step "follow the confession." Second, there has to be an equally systematic investigation of the funding of the movement. I call this "follow the money." Third, there has to be a systematic investigation of the movement's use of the media. How did it get its message to its early followers? How does it get its message to the general public? I call this "follow the media."
I have never seen a book that does all three well. Historians take one or the other avenue of investigation, but they do not combine all three in one book or study. It is very hard work to do all three. With respect to American education, Rushdoony's book is the most thorough and the most confrontational book ever written on "follow the confession.' The best book on following the money is John Taylor Gatto's Underground History of American Education. You can download it free here. I have never seen a book that explores the use of media to promote public education. Of course, when you have state funding behind you, that is most of the story. The public schools have had public funding since the 1830's in Massachusetts. The practice spread rapidly after the Civil War.
AN ESTABLISHED CHURCH
In his book, Rushdoony refers to the public school establishment as America's only established church. He called the teachers a priesthood. In the same year, liberal church historian Sidney E. Mead made exactly the same comment. It is not random that the last state to abolish tax funding for churches was Massachusetts. It did this in 1833. Within four years, the state created a statewide governing agency of public education: the Massachusetts Board of Education. Horace Mann became the first representative of this transfer of funds.
Robes in the West have been marks of judicial independence. Churchmen have worn black robes for many centuries to assert their independence from the state's jurisdiction. Members of the faculties of medieval universities wore black robes for the same reason, beginning in the 12th century. They claimed independence from the normal church hierarchy of priests. You have heard the phrase "town and gown." It has to do with legal jurisdiction. This began in medieval times. Why do modern universities have their own police forces? This is why: separate jurisdiction. College professors today continue to wear robes in formal occasions. It is unlikely that most of them understand the historic importance of these robes. Judges also wear black robes. This indicates the independence of judges from both king and legislature.
The centrality of the public schools is basic to the replacement of both church and family by the state. There is no other institution that has comparable authority in both realms. This is because it claims jurisdiction over the minds of children. It claims jurisdiction over the input of facts and interpretations.
ACADEMIC FREEDOM
University professors are adamant in their insistence that they possess academic freedom: judicial independence. The doctrine of academic freedom, invented in Prussia as a way for professors at the University of Berlin to immunize themselves against the state bureaucrats who funded the university, has been transferred from universities down to the states' system of compulsory education.
This means academic freedom from the taxpayers. This means academic freedom from parents. In most cases, it means academic freedom from the Board of Trustees, who are laymen. Rare is any church-related university's Board of Trustees that will impose a confession of faith as a condition of employment. The only case like this that I can think of over the last 50 years took place in 2012 at Shorter University, a small Baptist school in Rome, Georgia. A third of the faculty resigned. They were replaced with no problems over the summer. In this job market, college professors are as replaceable as tent pegs.
The heart, mind, and soul of the doctrine of academic freedom can be summarized in one brief sentence: "He who pays the piper does not call the tune." Those who provide the funding are not allowed by the rules to determine either the input or the output of the process. This separates responsibility from funding. In the case of tax-funded education, it separates the teachers and administrators from the taxpayers. Tenure adds to this separation.
A generation ago, Robert Nisbet offered a critique of tenure. He pointed out that tenure protects older men from criticism of their views. He said that, if there were to be a tenure system, it should apply only to younger men on the faculty. This way, they are protected during the formative stage of their academic careers, but this protection is removed when they become experienced professionals. He thought that tenure should not be used to protect older people with older views and older methods from the marketplace.
On what logical ground, then, do we claim exemption for age and rank, in certain respects the most feudal of all feudal qualities? We pride ourselves, as professors, upon inhabiting a shining fastness of meritocracy in a society that still bears too many elements of traditional privilege. How, then, do we legitimately rationalize a system of privilege which can, and frequently does today, exempt a person of thirty or thirty-five years of age (the lowest age at which I have seen life tenure granted is twenty-seven, to a mathematician) for the rest of his life from the competitive pressures and insecurities to which the rest of the intellectual world is subject?
Academic freedom is a self-serving philosophy of those who want funding, preferably derived from state coercion, for whatever they want to say, to whatever group of captive students they have under their authority. They possess almost total authority over the students by way of grading. They possess almost total immunity from the taxpayers by way of the legislature, the Board of Education, the Board of Trustees of the University, the heads of the department, and the legal doctrine of academic freedom.
The separation of funding from authority is more blatant in the field of higher education than in any other area of life, with the exception of the Federal Reserve System. The Federal Reserve does have the power to create the money to buy the bonds, which provide the interest payments, which pay for the Federal Reserve. This, I must admit, has the academicians beaten. But, with the exception of the Federal Reserve, no other institution rivals the academic community from the judgment of those who pay their salaries.
Academics are adamant in insisting that there must be a separation of church and state, and they are equally adamant that there should not be a separation of school and state. But as surely as Congregational ministers were in favor of state funding of their churches in Massachusetts in 1831, so are professors and teachers in tax-funded educational institutions today. The Congregationalist minister said that they deserved the funding based on the will of God. Tenured professors do not invoke God's name. They invoke the doctrine of academic freedom. They invoke the power of the state to collect the money, which is used to keep them on the payroll.
The politicians are willing to go along with this, because it buys the silence of the professors. Pick up any university level economics textbook for freshmen students. Try to find a single chapter or a single paragraph on the economics of oligopoly, as it applies to higher education specifically and to state funding of education in general. There is no such sentence, let alone a paragraph. No matter how committed to the doctrine of the free market that the textbook author appears to be, when he gets to two subjects, he remains strangely silent with respect to his economic analysis of oligopolies. One subject is the Federal Reserve System. The other subject is education.
HOMESCHOOLING AND PRICE COMPETITION
Today, the homeschool movement is spreading rapidly. This is following a fundamental law of economic theory, namely, that when the price of anything declines, more of it is demanded. As the cost of delivering information on the World Wide Web declines, so do the prices charged for homeschool curriculum materials. Sometimes they are free of charge. In any case, it is quite possible to educate your child at home for about $500 a year. This compares very well with the typical public-school price tag to the taxpayers of something in the range of $11,000 per year. Of course, in really substandard systems, such as the Detroit public schools, the cost is around $15,000 a year. When it comes to tax-funded education, not only do you not get what you pay for; the more you pay, the less you get.
Ultimately, however, the issue is not the cost. The issue is religious. It has to do with the worldview that a parent wishes to transfer to his children. Therefore, the issue is also about the authority of parents to determine this worldview as well as the methodology used for imparting it to their children. It has to do with the authority of the family.
The free market economist begins with this slogan: "He who pays the piper calls the tune." Any attempt by the state or any other institution to interfere with this principle is inevitably going to challenge the authority of family in education. A family make consent to this transfer, but it does not do so at zero cost.
CONCLUSION
The Messianic Character of American Education was the first academic treatise to provide a detailed look at the theology of America's only established church. No subsequent treatise has matched it for both conciseness and its comprehensiveness. To understand the confessional war we are in, begin here.