Scott Kamps
* Final in a 3-part series
Our founders “pursuit of happiness” was the quest for the good/virtuous life.
Virtue wasn’t viewed merely as an individual pursuit not affecting others; it was a necessity for a functioning republic. John Adams catches the founders’ prevailing sentiment saying, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Without good men you can’t have good/free society; education was deemed an important means to instilling virtue in the commonwealth. The purpose of education was more than vocational training or creating citizens to serve the state.
This is consistent with the classical understanding of virtue; Plato said, “Education is teaching our children to desire the right things.”
This is an area where Athens (i.e., the classical tradition) converges with Jerusalem (i.e., the Judeo-Christian heritage).
G.K. Chesterton communicated the long-standing Christian understanding of education by writing, “The most important fact about the subject of education is that there is no such thing. Education is not a subject and it does not deal in subjects. It is instead the transfer of a way of life.”
True education is more about the formation of hearts/desires than absorption of ideas/information. The task of educating is the shaping of a certain kind of people who live life pursuing the good, true and beautiful – training up future generations to live in accordance with the standard of virtue.
The Confederation Congress – while debating the Constitution – addressed the role of education in the Northwest Ordinance in 1787. The third article of this important founding document starts, “Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”
A precedent was set by the founding generation for the government’s involvement in education. While the federal government encouraged and even gave land for schools, they imposed no rules on what sort of education was to take place – that was under state/local control (a marked distinction from modern public schools).
The founders promoting schools to facilitate “religion, morality and knowledge” demonstrates that religious instruction in public schools is in no way unconstitutional – people arguing otherwise today have a very different understanding of the Constitution from those who wrote it.
Unfortunately, today’s government run schools are now banned from teaching the very things the founders argued are necessary to “good government and the happiness of mankind!”
Kudos to Louisiana for putting the Ten Commandments in every school classroom, though it seems too little, too late. In light of where our nation is, the best way for government to encourage true education is probably by promoting school choice – like education savings accounts.
An even-more pressing issue is the separation of religion/morality from education that modern secularism has instilled in public schools – and the hearts and minds of the majority of citizens.
Will the decline of faith affect the republic the way the founders anticipated?
We’ve been blessed to live in this republic; will we be able to keep it?
Scott Kamps writes a bi-weekly column for The Graham Star. He can be reached via email, thestableguy@frontier.com.