Schools have bid fair to replace the weather as everybody’s daily subject of conversation, and, to press Mark Twain’s quip further, nobody’s doing anything about them either. To be sure, the quip, like all such remarks, overstates the case in both instances. People are always doing something about the weather; something, that is, to protect themselves from it. So it is with the schools. People are doing all sorts of things to protect their children and themselves from the gigantic government school system now gripping the United States. Christians have tried everything from daily stone-faced Bible reading to “released time” programs without much avail. But just as nobody is changing the weather itself, neither is anybody seriously tackling the school situation.
The trouble lies in the very constitution of the state school system, which poses for Christian people a very serious dilemma. Teaching and learning based upon Christian faith and Christian scholarship are ruled out. They are ruled out not by any political considerations, or even by any inherent “secularism” or “godlessness” of temporal governments as such, but they are ruled out by Christian conviction. Being what it is, faith in Jesus Christ cannot brook a religious structure based upon the temporal power of physical force. Political powers object to the teaching of Christianity only when they themselves happen to be committed to anti-Christian powers; that is, when politicians reach out to enthrone “the leader” in the place of God.
But there is nothing inherent in political power as such which would make it impossible to buttress a religious hierarchy with the policeman. Tudor England tried it boldly by the simple expedient of passing a law requiring all Englishmen to show up in the government church on Sunday morning. That arrangement did not endanger the existence of temporal police power, but it did threaten the existence of true religion in England—so much so that men gave their fortunes and their lives in dissent. So far as I know, the world has always tolerated the totalitarian government which is capped by the king-priest; in fact, it is only Christ who has opened a way to overcome the totalitarian monster. One of the great benefits of his Death and Resurrection was that he freed religion from the grip of temporal government. He would not have been the victor if temporal government had emancipated religion. Christ seized it for himself, and entrusts it only to those ministers of his who will act independently of the sword. Thus, what we in the United States call the doctrine of separation of Church and State, is demonstrably a religious doctrine about politics, not a political doctrine about religion.
ANTI-CHRISTIAN INDOCTRINATION
The matter comes to a head in the schoolroom where everybody is there on pain of punishment. Clearly there is no more room for the free play of persuasion, willing consent and convicted loyalty than there would be in the parish church that was filled by threat of fine and imprisonment. It simply violates Christian conscience to teach the Faith under such circumstances. And let me say again, the matter poses no problem for the non-Christian. The Communist, to take a living example, makes no bones about the fact that his schools are a vast machine for indoctrination with communism. But Christianity presented by force of arms is, for Christians, plainly not Christianity.
When a try is made to present Christianity as an optional intellectual possibility to those whose presence is enforced, a prior assumption has been accepted: namely, that it is possible to understand faith without faith. Such an assumption, I think, would be denied in every persuasion. “When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made wine, and [he] knew not whence it was: (but the servants which drew the water knew) …” (John 2:9).
The dilemma presented to Christians by compulsory school attendance laws appeared at once and has altered only in the steady dilution of what is regarded as sectarian teaching as opposed to general Christianity. It seemed to have slipped by almost unnoticed that Horace Mann’s solution of introducing Bible reading without comment, and instruction in morals, was in fact Mann’s own personal and largely Unitarian sectarianism which was clamped upon school children. The orthodox Calvinists as well as Roman Catholics demurred and have often been the ones to object to that kind of use of the Bible in government schools.
Undoubtedly one reason denominational objection is raised is that denominational leaders, quite rightly, do not want their children taught Christian precepts by persons whose outlook would seem to be at variance with their own. A Baptist clearly would be unhappy to have his child given daily Bible instruction by a Roman priest; and a Roman Catholic would just as surely be alarmed to have his child sitting at the feet of a Methodist or Presbyterian.
ON GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS
But another even more inflexible reason was advanced many years ago when it was commonly admitted that the whole scheme of police-enforced schooling was a daring and dangerous innovation.
Just after the Civil War, according to Ken Templeton in his private study of schools, a Princeton theologian, Dr. A. A. Hodge, issued this analysis: “I am as sure as I am of the fact of Christ’s reign that a comprehensive and centralized system of national education, separated from religion, as is now commonly proposed, will prove the most appalling enginery for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief, and of anti-social, nihilistic ethics, individual, social, and political, which this sin-rent world has ever seen.…” “It is capable of exact demonstration that if every party in the state has the right of excluding from the public schools whatever he does not believe to be true, then he that believes most must give way to him that believes least, and then he that believes least must give way to him that believes absolutely nothing, no matter in how small a minority the atheists or the agnostics may be. It is self-evident that on this scheme, if it is consistently and persistently carried out in all parts of the country, the United States’ system of national popular education will be the most efficient and wide instrument for the propagation of atheism which the world has ever seen.”
I think all that could be added to Dr. Hodge’s statement is that his argument is demonstrated by the event. Modern writings on the subject for the most part seem to be limited to a rather pitiful bewailing of the fact that has come to pass, and a catalogue of examples and illustrations. Yet we must never forget that it is Christian conscience itself which must step aside to respect the rejection of any point of doctrine by any person, even a child. For it is a Christian insight into unchanging truth that if a man is not free to believe according to his own lights, he is not free. Therefore, unless we are prepared to go all the way with the ungodly who say men are not free, we are by our own conviction forced into Dr. Hodge’s pattern. Nobody seems to be prepared to say really that a child confined behind the walls of a classroom is free: ergo, he cannot be forced to hear any Christian doctrine to which he may object.
CHURCH-OPERATED SCHOOLS
The way out of the dilemma would seem to be that of the age-old simplicity of repentance. All that is necessary to get out of the suburbs of hell, writes a novelist, is to leave. All that people of the United States need to do is to restore the function of teaching to the control of the various churches. Granted that the task may be mountainous in prospect, faith has removed greater mountains. And faith would dictate that Christian parents tackle the mountain in their own province by sending heir children to schools run by their own churches, or by churches of which they approve.
The parental option, of course, depends upon the existence of church schools which acknowledge no political control. But any congregation can have its own school. There is no magic in numbers in schooling. Strangely enough, in an age when it is only the big school that is supposed to be any good, both parents and school people are talking about small classes. The fact is that many of the greatest Americans have been taught almost entirely by private tutors and millions have known nothing but the little red schoolhouse. Modernists would be hard put to demonstrate a superior product today, or even a general populace as alert, as reasonable, and as discriminatory as in every generation past. No evidence can be advanced to support the thesis that bigness in schools tends toward excellence. It is, rather, all the other way.
The feasibility of church-operated schools has been demonstrated by the rapid increase in these schools during the past ten years. Mr. Templeton shows that in the period between 1940 and 1956, when public school enrollment increased by 22 per cent, enrollment in nonpublic schools increased by 86 per cent. Since 1956 the trend has been ever more marked, and most of the new schools are church operated.
The new schools have been forced to adapt to all sorts of conditions, and have shown a surprising flexibility and often have pioneered into whole new areas of pedagogy. Not the least among these is the rediscovery of the excellence of the non-graded school—the school patterned on the old English form system, or, better still, the little red schoolhouse. That means the small congregation, with only ten to twenty children of school age, can have a first-rate school of its own quite as well as the city congregation with 500 children. Any school, large or small, is only as good as its teachers and its students; these are not modulated by numbers.
Physical facilities are rarely, if ever, a problem. In fact, many communities today are renting church buildings for state schools that are overcrowded. There are few communities where there are not elaborate and extensive church facilities standing idle all week while the same people who paid for them pay to erect separate rooms for week-day school use.
The lack of teachers is pure myth. Scores of excellent teachers would leave the public school in a minute for a church school. I know several who have, at a cut in salary. At the same time there is a vast reservoir of very capable teachers now untapped for the simple reason that many of the best educated and most intelligent people of our country have never spent an hour in a so-called “education” course and would refuse to do so to qualify for a job. Church people, who should be far more concerned to have Christians for teachers than experts in Deweyism and modern methodology, may be expected to change and raise the standards of teacher training materially.
The key to the whole matter is a conviction that teaching cannot be separated from religion; that to teach at all one must teach something about God and about Jesus Christ, the Son of God; and that, therefore, it is the inherent responsibility of free religious institutions to operate schools. It would be unthinkable to compel attendance in any way, and every church must be free to teach children what their parents want to have them taught. If schools are to be truly free they must be free to be bad and to fail to conform to the pattern of the majority. And parents must be free to send their children or not as they decide. For it is also a Christian tenet that parents have sole responsibility for the training of their young—not the state.
Samuel M. Shoemaker is the author of a number of popular books and the gifted Rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh. He is known for his effective leadership of laymen and his deeply spiritual approach to all vital issues.
