The Founders were obsessed with the idea of public education. They worried that their fragile new republic would not long survive if children—by which they meant white children—did not learn to be proper American citizens.
Some—particularly Thomas Jefferson—took a starkly secular approach. He envisioned an elaborate public-school system that carefully excised any mention of God or the Bible. Jefferson dreamed of a system of free schools for all white children in Virginia, with advanced opportunities available for the more talented white boys. Jefferson hoped for a classical education, free of Christian teaching: He argued against “putting the Bible and Testament into the hands of the children.” Instead, Jefferson wanted them to learn “the most useful facts from Grecian, Roman, European and American history.”
Other Founders disagreed, seeing more of a central role for Christian education in public schools. Benjamin Rush thought that the new nation desperately needed “one general and uniform system of education” but insisted that religion was absolutely essential, and that the proper religion for American public schools was, in his words, “the religion of JESUS CHRIST.”
Rush’s evangelical approach was just as much of a nonstarter as Jefferson’s Bible-free one. The people who created the first generations of American public schools were guided by a different principle: These schools—if they were going to be truly American—should teach a generic, religion-based morality, but they could not be run by any single church or inculcate any specific religious beliefs.
In Massachusetts, for example, a new law in 1789 attempted to clarify the structure of the state’s public-education system. The state was not averse to religion. At the time, the Congregational Church was the official state church, even receiving funding from public taxes until 1833. Ministers were given power to inspect the state’s public schools and authorized to report any religious teaching that seemed divisive. Children in public schools would pray and read the Bible. But even so, lawmakers limited the role of the Church, specifying that “no settled minister shall be deemed, held, or accepted to be a School-Master” in the new system.
A few years later, Connecticut, another state with Puritan roots, passed a similar law, similarly clarifying the role and funding of public schools. The state’s taxpayers certainly considered it vitally important that children learn to be moral, upstanding citizens. Like most Americans at the time, they thought that teaching children vague prayers in public schools was one good way to do that. But they also agreed that any specific religious group, in the words of Connecticut’s 1795 law, “shall have no power to Act on the Subject of Schooling.” In order to be “public,” in other words, schools could include religion, but they could not be run by any single religious group; they could not teach any religious idea that wasn’t generally agreed upon.