Before signing the bill allowing religious chaplains in public schools, Gov. Ron DeSantis said the initiative brings Florida closer to what the Founding Fathers wanted when it comes to educating our youth.
“At the beginning of education in the United States, all schools were religious schools. That was just a few. Public schools were religious schools,” DeSantis said at an April 18 press conference.
“Some of the things that have been done over the years have deviated from the original intent,” he continued. ”
Educational historians said the idea that the Founders intended a faith-based public school system is an increasingly common misconception. This provision has been used against taxpayer-funded church-sponsored charter schools in Oklahoma, a lawsuit in Washington over whether public high school coaches can pray at games, and now against school pastors in Florida. It is attracting attention among other high-profile cases.
The reality, they said, is not so simple.
The Founders did not establish a public education system. It took another 50 years or so for the system to actually begin. And when public schools started, no pastors were hired.
However, that does not mean that there was no religion in early schooling.
“As you might expect, the answer is nuanced and difficult to capture in one sentence,” said F. Chris Curran, director of the University of Florida's Center for Educational Research and Policy.
Schooling began in the colonies before the founding of the country and was often closely tied to religion, Curran said in an email.
“The Old Deluding and Devil Act, a law passed in Massachusetts in 1647, is often cited as the first public education in what would become the United States,” Curran wrote. “The general purpose of this law, which requires communities throughout the state to hire teachers, is to ensure sufficient literacy to read the Bible and prevent individuals from falling prey to 'Satan, the deceiver of old.' Was that.”
However, schooling was not organized at that time. According to Bellwether's history of public education, most children had no access to education beyond what their parents could provide, from private tutoring to boarding schools.
By the time of the American Revolution, some Northeastern towns had free local schools paid for by residents, but “this was not the norm,” says a nonpartisan group that conducts research and research. Analyzes educational issues according to the oft-cited history of the Education Policy Center.
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As leaders drafted the Declaration of Independence and later the Constitution, many held strong views about the importance of schooling and the role of religion within it.
“Some of the Founding Fathers, like Benjamin Rush, really wanted public schools to teach children how to be evangelical Protestant Christians.” Part of the State University of New York said Adam Ratz, a professor of education history at Binghamton University. “But others, like Thomas Jefferson, believed that public schools must be completely free of all religious ideas.”
Some people supported a formal education system, Raatz said. Jefferson and others argued that this emerging nation depended on an educated population that understood their role as citizens in a democracy.
But, as Raatz wrote in a Washington Post column, universal public education had not yet emerged at the time, and the Founders had not established guidelines on the issue.
Despite their interest in the subject, the nation's founders “didn't say anything about public education” in their founding documents, said Sevan Terzian, professor of education and social infrastructure at the university's Graduate School of Education and Learning.
“Public education didn't really start until the 1830s,” Terzian said.
It was then that Massachusetts State Board of Education Commissioner Horace Mann came up with the concept of a “common school” in relation to the system the country currently has.
“By the mid-1800s, most states had accepted three basic assumptions governing public education: schools should be free and supported by taxpayers; teachers should be trained; One thing is that children should be required to attend school,” said Wendy A. Patterson. As the dean of the University at Buffalo's School of Education wrote in an article commemorating the school's 150th anniversary:
Early schools paid for with public funds “were not religious schools, but most opened with prayers and Bible readings,” said education historian Diane Ravitch, founder of the Public Education Network. said in an email. “However, such activities were incidental and not the purpose of the school.”
But regular schools sought to provide a unified set of moral values that bound citizens together, Terzian said, and were generally consistent with the values of the Protestant Christian majority at the time. They were Protestant Christians, some of them blatant. ”
This led to sectarian conflicts and the establishment of private religious schools.
Ravitch said Catholic leaders had complained that Protestant Bibles were being used in public schools, and that “there had been violent clashes between the two major religious groups. The immigrants decided to create their own school system using only Catholic materials.
As the nation's economy and demographics have diversified, the focus of public education has changed, Terzian said. “Schools became places where young people were prepared and prepared for the transition to a growing industrial economy,” he explained.
Yet, prayer remained common. Ratz said authorities aimed to have a prayer that was general enough that most people could agree on it, regardless of denomination.
As the number of non-Christian religions increased in the country, views on their importance also changed over time.
“Ultimately, the glossy promise of nonsectarianism was fulfilled, but those who had hoped to support the national religion were greatly dissatisfied,” said Jack Schneider, a professor of education at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. ” he said.
In the 1960s, the U.S. Supreme Court made clear that allowing schools to have a religious dimension should not be considered an endorsement by the government, Raats said. Since then, Americans' views have hardened around the free exercise of religion, he added.
Even if prayer is allowed in the school or religious groups are allowed, all students are given the same opportunity without prioritization. For example, if a group like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes is allowed to meet, so are other religiously affiliated clubs and organizations.
Mr. Raats said he would not participate in the Satanic Temple, which has expressed interest in joining the chaplaincy program, because it is not a real religion, and suggested Mr. DeSantis may be testing that view.
The future of religion and chaplaincy in public schools may still be evolving, and that is a matter for the courts to determine. But historians say the historical truth is that public schools were not established as a religion by their founders.
