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Though Americans today demand all sorts of programs and services from the education system, we still expect children to be schooled in the three R's—reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic. But many people have forgotten that, until very recently, nearly everyone in this country endorsed a fourth R in education: religion. This week's PBS documentary "School: The Story of American Public Education" did little to jog their memory.

(Full disclosure: Due to stiff competition from Grand Slam tennis, only part of the four-hour film made it into my living room. Thus much of my information on the film comes from its Web site, listed below.)

"School" divides the history of American education into four historical blocks. The first block spans the years 1770-1890, the Common School era. The next block covers 1900-1950 and examines schools' response to issues such as urbanization and immigration. The third block celebrates steps toward equality taken between 1950 and 1970, including Brown v. Board of Education, bussing programs, Title IX, and efforts to accommodate disabled students. The last block, 1980 to the present, gets into current debates on academic standards, alternative schools, and vouchers.

Among subjects given little or no treatment are colleges (a high proportion of which began as Christian institutions), church-state educational partnerships throughout the nineteenth-century West, and the 1963 school prayer decision. Of the innovators profiled at the Web site, just two come from religious traditions: Catherine Beecher, whose Calvinist roots (her father was minister Lyman Beecher) are not discussed, and Catholic Archbishop John Joseph Hughes, who merits attention because "his struggles and the fiery debates between Hughes and members of New York's prominent Protestant establishment helped to set in motion the secularization of American public schools."

I can think of three reasons for religion's small role in this drama, not counting a few mostly negative cameos. One, it's PBS, so what do you expect? Two, by skipping the colonial period and cropping colleges out of the picture, the producers eliminated significant areas of Christian influence. Three, because this is the story of American *public* education, religion isn't really part of the narrative. But rather than whine about reason one (a popular but overbroad charge), I'll quibble with the other two.

Starting a documentary on American education at 1770 distorts the story. This framing gives the impression that our education system sprang fully formed from the mind of Thomas Jefferson, and that learning was not pursued before the Revolutionary War. The "School" Web site states, "In the aftermath of the Revolution, a newly independent America came face-to-face with one of its most daunting challenges: how to build a united nation out of 13 colonies with little in common. Many citizens believed that education held the key."

In fact, several colonies were more than 100 years old in 1770 and had already put serious, though not always well-organized, effort into childhood education. As people of the Word, northern Puritans had been filling their kids' heads with Scripture and sermons for decades. Southern, mostly Anglican, colonists lagged in literacy, but they did establish some schools and receive teaching missionaries. As a result, by the 1770s, a majority of Americans could read the Bible and the newspaper. The film may regard this minimum standard as barer than a dirt floor, but America was doing just fine by eighteenth-century standards.

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