A
PRAYER FOR THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Our
seemingly interminable argument about education now seems to have
boiled down to the debate over school vouchers—both left
and right having more-or-less accepted the idea that we must have
“standards,” i.e., force-feed our children standardized
tests until they collapse over their desks in boredom. And with
George W. Bush's recent initiatives to both provide vouchers and
to aid "faith-based” organizations, the battle has reverted
to an even older national argument. When it comes to public schools,
just how far should the establishment clause of the Constitution
go in separating church and state?
For
all the heat generated by this issue, it is doubtful that many
on either side know its peculiar and contradictory history. That
is, the fact that the American public school system was begun
with the express idea of providing religious instruction to all
pupils. Or that our nation's fine, Catholic parochial school system
came about in good part to escape forced school prayer.
The nineteenth-century conflict over religion in the schools came
to a head in New York City—as so many conflicts do. And then
as now, it was part of a wider battle over not just what our schools
would teach, but what our nation would be. By 1840, New York was
one of many states to offer a free primary or “common”
school education. And as was the case in all public school systems
of the time, this included a “nondenominational” course
of religious instruction.
Of
course, “nondenominational” meant something different
in 1840 than it usually does today. Usually, students recited
a few basic prayers, sang a few hymns, and read the more uncontroversial
passages from the Bible without commentary or interpretation.
This was the result of careful compromise between the myriad Protestant
faiths that had long competed for American souls.
“On
the one hand, the common school stressed the reading of the Bible
and general Christian morality,” Vincent P. Lannie writes
in his lively history, Public History and Parochial Education.
“While, on the other hand, denominational Sunday schools
taught specific sectarian tenets which completed the child's moral
and religious instruction.”
Amazing
as it may seem today, no one filed a class-action suit. But there
was still one little problem. Even in the America of 1840, not
everyone was a Protestant. In New York City alone, there were
now some 200,000 Roman Catholics—or some one-third of the
city's population—and they had some serious objections to
“nonsectarianism.”
For
starters, the Bible that “everyone” had agreed on was
the King James Version—a formidable literary work, but one
that the Vatican did not recognize. To read it was therefore considered
heresy—as was the singing of Protestant hymns, and the recitation
of Protestant prayers. Catholic parents were advised to keep their
children out of the public schools, lest their immortal souls
be endangered, and many did—while agonizing over having to
watch their children grow up in places like the terrible Five
Point slums without any formal education. Nor did it much please
the new bishop of New York, “Dagger John” Hughes. Hughes
was himself a remarkable immigrant story, a self-made man who
had come to the United States from Ireland at the age of 20, in
order to live in a country “in which no stigma of inferiority
would be impressed on my brow, simply because I professed one
creed or another.” He had worked his way through the Mount
St. Mary's seminary in Maryland as a gardener, hired on by the
Reverend John Dubois, then president of the seminary. It was a
measure of both his ability and his determination that less than
twenty years later he would succeed Dubois as bishop of New York.
Practical, energetic, intelligent, uncompromising, and sardonically
humorous, Hughes would be a ferocious defender of both his flock
and his faith. One of the first problems he tackled was what to
do about the schools, though here he found himself in a quandary.
He would have preferred to build a separate, parochial school
system for all of New York's Catholics—but his desperately
poor, immigrant parishioners were as yet unable to afford such
a thing. In the meantime, their tax dollars went to funding public
schools that promulgated Protestant teachings, in however mild
a form.
Fortunately,
the church was not alone in perceiving an injustice here. Even
as he took up the reins of his bishopric, Hughes found an unexpected
and powerful ally up in Albany.
William Seward was not yet forty years old, a first-term governor
produced by Thurlow Weed's autocratic political machine. Yet he
already possessed the independent mettle that would make him one
of the nation's greatest statesmen—along with his own, fierce
faith in human dignity and the vision of a tolerant, democratic
America.
Seward
believed that since America had offered itself as a refuge for
the “oppressed of every nation,” it was only right that
“we should evince wisdom equal to such generosity by qualifying
their children for the high responsibilities of citizenship.”
Furthermore,
he proposed to do something about it. In his annual message to
the legislature in 1840, Seward proposed for immigrant children,
“the establishment of schools in which they may be instructed
by teachers speaking the same language with themselves and professing
the same faith.”
Seward's
speech was a bombshell—and an breathtaking political risk.
New York City's Catholics took it as an invitation to petition
the Public School Society, which administered the common school
fund in New York City, for some small share of public monies to
support their own, existing eight schools.
Pandemonium
ensued. The Catholic petition set off a vituperative public debate,
particularly in the city's boisterous public press. The reaction
of the Protestant establishment generally bordered on the hysterical.
They professed to be shocked that Catholics objected to the reading
of “the Bible,” and insisted that they were petitioning
for special privileges that would bring down the whole public
school system. As proof, they pointed to ensuing petitions from
the Scotch Presbyterians, and New York's then tiny Jewish community,
for similar consideration. It was bad enough that the pope's scheming
minions might get taxpayer dollars‹but Scotch Presbyterians!
Hughes
replied to all this by issuing a magisterial address that began
with the assertion, “We are Americans and American citizens”—a
common and significant salutation in Catholic speeches of the
time—and followed with an impassioned plea for equal justice:
“We hold, therefore, the same idea of our rights that you
hold of yours. We wish not to diminish yours, but only to secure
and enjoy our own.” Hughes went on to concede that if the
schools could be truly neutral on the issue of religion, the church
would have no objection—but referring to common school history
books that routinely depicted Catholics as duplicitous and intolerant,
suggested that such a neutrality was “impossible.” He
concluded by tying the Catholic cause to the whole American tradition
of civil liberty, warning that should the rights of Catholics
be trampled on, “the experiment may be repeated to-morrow
on some other.”
On
October 29, 1840, the debate came to a grand climax before the
Common Council in City Hall. The galleries were packed with New
Yorkers eager to hear Bishop Hughes, speaking alone for the Catholic
side, take on a bevy of lawyers and clergyman representing the
Public School Society and the Protestant establishment. This was
political drama of the highest order, and it would be nice to
report that after some spellbinding oratory, the forces of tolerance
and moderation carried the day.
Alas,
this was not a Steven Spielberg movie, but a time when Americans
actually liked to go listen to people speak for entertertainment.
Hughes opened the meeting with a three-and-a-half-hour address,
and closed it with an equally long rebuttal. In between, the Protestant
clergy and lawyers lambasted nearly all things Catholic for another
day-and-a-half, allowing for adjournments so for activities like
eating and sleeping.
For
all the verbiage expended, both sides did little more than repeat
their previous arguments or insults. Soon thereafter, the Common
Council backed the Public School Society, and denied funds for
the Catholic schools and a few days after that, Seward barely
managed to win re-election despite a national Whig landslide.
It soon became clear that his bold stand had cost him many more
Protestant, nativist supporters, than it had gained him Irish-Catholic
votes from the Democrats.
But
the governor was not dismayed, maintaining that, “If any
man, whether Whig or otherwise, will withhold his favor from me
[over this issue]…then let that favor be withheld.”
He soon came up with a new proposal, whereby all public education
funds would be distributed by the state to individual city wards—which
would then decide strictly on their own just what sort of religion
would be taught in local schools.
This
early attempt at decentralization came to dominate New York politics
over the following three years, with more than one public meeting
exploding into sectarian violence. Following the city elections
of 1842, a Protestant mob attacked Hughes' residence, smashing
doors and windows, and were only prevented from doing worse by
the hasty intervention of the police, the militia, and a group
of Irish women who formed a human chain around the Old St. Patrick's
Cathedral to keep “sinners off.”
Ironically,
when the Democrats swept the state elections that fall, passage
of Seward's bill was all but assured. But a key dilemma remained.
What would happen to those who found themselves in a ward dominated
by a different faith? Didn't they still have some constitutional
rights as individuals?
The
compromise that passed the legislature went a long way toward
the basic shape of the public school today. A crucial amendment
to the bill mandated that no sectarian religious instruction was
to be offered. All public schools would now educate students in
the three 'r's, and leave religion to the churches, plain and
simple.
The
amended bill was triumphantly signed into law by Governor Seward…and
pleased no one. Whigs and nativists swept the city elections in
1843—and promptly ruled that reading the King James Bible
in class was not “sectarian.” This would largely remain
the case for another hundred years or so, until the Supreme Court's
ruling banning organized prayer in the schools.
It
also served to confirm the contention of John Hughes—soon
elevated to archbishop—that a truly neutral public school
system was an impossibility. Out of necessity, he permitted Catholic
children to attend public schools but refocused all his efforts
on building up a parochial system. By 1862, two years before his
death, New York Catholic schools had enrolled some 15,000 pupils,
and Hughes would be known as “the father of Catholic education”
in America.
No doubt, modern advocates and opponents of vouchers alike will
draw what lessons they like from this nineteenth-century debate.
Supporters will heed Hughes' arguments that even supposed “nonsectarianism”
is really sectarian, and back the right of parents to give their
children whatever education they deem fit, without an added financial
burden. Opponents will point to the divisiveness inherent in attempts
to hand over public monies for religious instruction.
Indeed,
perhaps the most intriguing—and exasperating—thing about
the school debate is its ability to entangle political allegiances.
Should supporters of school prayer continue to back a common prayer
for all in public schools—or support vouchers, and many different
prayers? Will multiculturalists really support funding for schools
run by the Nation of Islam—or the Aryan Nation?
Yet
there may be a deeper moral here, beneath William Seward's very
different, pragmatic approaches, made only three years apart and
both to very much the same end. Giving public money to Catholic
schools, or banning religious instruction in public schools altogether—what
Seward sought above all was universal education, which he deemed
necessary to forge a just and democratic society. Or, as he said
in referring in particular to the education of immigrant Americans,
“I solicit their education less from sympathy, than because
the welfare of the state demands it, and cannot dispense with
it.”
No
matter what we decide on the proper boundaries of church and state,
it seems difficult to believe that we can today—anymore than
we could in 1840—dispense with a healthy and accessible public
school system, and still maintain ourselves as a strong and united
nation.
©
2000 Copyright Forbes Inc.
