By Bob Sullivan
See Part II in the series here
Looking back on the past three or four centuries, you can see why and how public and Catholic schools have evolved in the U.S. We see that Horace Mann, the father of the American public education system, which he reformed in the 1800s, reformed more than the education system; he reformed much of the American culture.
A significant aspect of that reform was to remove parents as the primary educators of their children on matters of faith and morals and put the public school system in place of the parent. Catholic schools were a way of responding to Mann’s reform by keeping parents in the primary role as educators of their children, preserving the family, and preventing the assimilation of Catholic immigrants and American Catholics into the melting pot of Protestant America.
Horace Mann had great vision, there is no doubt about that. However, he did not see, or at least he did not appreciate, the risk that America would someday cease to be Christian and that secularism, atheism, and anti-theism would find fertile soil in public schools. Mann’s non-sectarian religious instruction opened the door to relativism and universalism by teaching American youth that all beliefs were equal. As non-Christian beliefs became more common, including atheism, non-sectarian religious education found itself at a crossroads (no pun intended).
Fearing lawsuits from groups like the ACLU, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and other groups hostile to Christianity, many educators chose to eliminate all religion from public schools. The elimination process is not quite yet complete. In Elkhorn, Neb., a new principal pushed a little too far, a little too soon, in banning all Christian (and many secular) aspects of Christmas, and was demoted by her school board. Had she waited five years, no one may have noticed.
Today, there has been an even more troubling shift in education. In many public schools, atheism, LGBT Pride, Islam, comprehensive sex education, radical feminism, and other behaviors and beliefs are given protections and special attention.
I am spending a lot of time talking about public education even though this series is titled Catholics and Education, because the two were closely related when Catholic schools were getting their start in the U.S., and, unfortunately, they are still closely related today. While public education has become increasingly secularized (meaning the removal of the limited Christian roots it once had), Catholic schools have been largely unsuccessful at keeping parents in the primary role as educators of their children, preserving the family, and preventing the assimilation of Catholics into the broader American culture.
We pour billions of dollars into the public school system each tax year in an effort to educate more than 50 million K-12 students. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average cost to educate a student in the U.S. in 2017 (the most recent year for which figures are available) was $12,201.00 per student. This means that K-12 public education cost American taxpayers $610,050,000,000.00 in 2017. Education is not cheap, especially when it tries to replace the role of parents.
Horace Mann’s model slowly took over. Many, if not most, American parents have relinquished their role in the education and training of their own children to the state. The state then became more and more secular (irreligious). Now nearly one half of American youth are being raised in single-parent homes and many public school teachers will tell you that it is becoming increasing difficult to teach students because of an annual increase in students who have special needs, including an increase in students with “Adverse Childhood Experiences,” and a significant increase in students with mental illness. Not all of this is due to single-parent homes, as many children in single-parent homes thrive, but Adverse Childhood Experiences are more common due to broken marriages, absent parents, foster homes, and homelessness. The fact is, a school system, public or Catholic, cannot replace a child’s loving family and loving parents.
Unfortunately, the state continues to pour more money, services and programs into the public education system each year. We are all familiar with school lunch programs, but in the last decade or so, breakfast programs have also become common. Some schools even provide their students dinner. However, people soon realized that a weekend is a long time to go without food, so many groups started sending kids home with backpacks of groceries for the weekend.
Schools started inviting mentoring programs for students who did not have an older sibling or parent in their life. Now schools are starting family groups, which is a group of five to seven students of various ages. These family groups spend time together at the beginning of each school day to do things traditionally done in the family home.
Public schools now provide food, clothing, transportation, counseling, childcare, a family experience, companionship, after-school programs, moral training, discipline, and social skills for their students. With schools doing all of this, who needs parents? Well, children do.
As I mentioned earlier, the school cannot replace a loving family, no matter how hard it tries. Yet millions of parents are relying on these programs to their fullest. In many, if not most, cases, they do so for legitimate reasons and sometimes only temporarily. However, because the school is an inadequate replacement for loving parents, the problems will not improve; they will only increase as they have been doing for years. What are public schools doing to train parents or to help them improve at parenting? Not much. Not much at all.
The Catholic school approach is much different, when it is followed closely. Unfortunately, it has not been followed closely for a long time. I’ll discuss this in the next column.
