A STEP FROM CALVINISM

 

This blog will now turn to an effort this writer will revisit in the future.  He fears he might have misled the reader of this blog a bit and this effort is meant to clear any misconceptions.  He has repeatedly claimed that the US had as a dominant view of governance and politics what he calls the parochial/traditional federalism view or construct.  He described that view in more or less positive language although he has pointed out that it encouraged or justified Americans holding racist and other xenophobic beliefs, attitudes, and values. 

He didn’t underestimate those negative qualities, but he did want to make sure the reader appreciates its positive qualities.  The positive qualities have to do with the construct’s set of espoused values of community, partnership, and collaboration.  But at the same time, people who held on to its espoused values made no excuses for the exclusionary policies its adherents proposed and maintained.  Those policies included slavery, discriminatory practices, and other exclusionary behaviors Americans commonly put into effect.

Probably the most direct and unambiguous pronouncement of this exclusion can be found in the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott Case.  Chief Justice Taney clearly states that African Americans – be they enslaved or not – were not part of the partnership the Constitution established.   Here is a portion of that decision:

In the opinion of the court, the legislation and histories of the times, and the language used in the declaration of independence, show, that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in the memorable instrument … [1]

Taney here is not shy of what he interpreted the founding compact to be in terms of African Americans.

And a lot of this exclusion falls in line with certain religious biases generally held but originating with the Puritan settlers of the Massachusetts colony and, in general, in the New England.  It was the Puritans who introduced the covenanted approach to the establishment of governments. 

Puritanism was based on Calvinism that, in turn, believed in strict moral precepts, predestination, and a rebellion against adorned trappings and the hierarchical organization of the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches.  Through these beliefs, that tradition promoted an equality within its congregations and as interpreted in governance, this sense of partnership was strongly encouraged but as indicated years later by Taney’s opinion, was limited to those considered part of the “tribe.”

Such scholars as Donald Lutz[2] have traced how these precepts, especially those based on congregational ideals, worked their ways into the various founding documents.  These documents were drawn in the localities within the original thirteen colonies.  One can also detect them guiding the development of the states as the nation initially established its governments and expanded westward across North America.

This posting begins this writer’s effort to take a closer look at that historical record.  The postings that will further this effort will not be immediately follow each other (although the next posting, at least, will continue this posting’s message).  Instead, this topic will be revisited here and there but with more frequency in the upcoming year or so. 

This first installment looks at the effect of this tradition on the development of the nation’s public schools.  And the first topic has to do with the hiring of teachers.  By the 1820s, school officials were finding it difficult to fill teaching slots in what had been a male dominated “profession.”  The problem was a reluctance to raise either taxes or church contributions to pay men sufficiently. 

The option was to hire women to those positions.  In terms of timing, this coincided with the efforts to establish independent public schools especially in Massachusetts and through the work of Horace Mann.  His story is telling in terms of how parochial/traditional federalism influenced the development of the nation’s initial efforts to provide public education.

And it is with him that this blog begins its look at this development.  Relevant to this story, Mann was elected to the lower house of the Massachusetts’ legislature in 1827.  His political leanings encouraged him to join up with the initial political organizing that led to the establishment of Whig Party.  This was a movement that brought together socially liberal advocates with northeastern business interests.

They were liberal in that they pushed for the establishment of insane asylums and for public funding of schools for the deaf and blind.  He himself argued for an end to the death penalty and doing away with lotteries as being unchristian.  He attained a level of notoriety when he was assigned to investigate the burning of a Catholic convent in the town of Charleston.  This led to his political advancement that resulted in his election to the state senate.

An ironic aspect of his story was his belief in phrenology – the belief in and analysis of people’s physical attributes as causal factors in their behaviors.  He, unlike others who looked at such characteristics, used the derived analyses as a way to discover potential shortcomings in people that could be addressed by education. 

That is, “[d]uring the nineteenth century, phrenology was considered a progressive ideology.  Its proponents believed that each individual’s deficiencies could be identified, then ameliorated through schooling; … [and therefore] would eradicate poverty and crime in just a few generations.”[3]  Interestingly, he saw the utilization of phrenology as a substitute for the prevailing reliance on religion to guide such judgements.  Further, through that guidance one could lead challenged individuals – even arsonists – to productive lives.

This bent in his public acts did not go unnoticed by local religious personage and elicited a fire-and-brimstone sermon reaction from the local Calvinist preacher.  But the experience led Mann to take up education as an issue that would lead him to establish his place in American history.  School reform became his life’s work.  And in this he bucked the thrust of Whigs who favored laissez faire policies in the economy and other social areas of concern. 

By the late 1830s he was leading Whigs to establish a state board of education to oversee Massachusetts’ local schools and to institute compulsory education.  By that time, as a state senator, he left the legislature to become the first state’s secretary of education.  He took it upon himself to become versed in educational theories and looked to reputable systems particularly Prussian schools.  That European system in the nineteenth century instituted various policies to upgrade the teaching profession including higher pay and prohibition of teachers holding other jobs.

From the Prussian example, Mann instituted the policy for the Massachusetts’ school system that every school have a library and that the state established “normal schools” for the purpose of training teachers.  Again, normal schools were originally only open to women applicants – the reasoning being women could be paid less than men.  Later in the twentieth century, these schools were converted into regional state colleges (having lower admission standards than state universities).

Unfortunately, much of Mann’s reasoning for these sexist policies had to do with his sexist beliefs.  While he saw teaching as a woman’s profession, albeit economic reasoning was offered, he also believed women were not appropriate for certain occupations such as politics, military, and journalistic professions – they were not suitable due to their “black and sulfurous” environments.

All these elements of the Mann’s story were instrumental in defining how Calvinist traditions and biases affected the development of American education.  The aim is to give the reader some of the detail of how this influence was felt and give a hint, at least, as to why it finally gave way to the natural rights view.  There were various social and political forces that pushed toward the eventuality of that transformation.

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[1] “Dred Scott v. Stanford, (19 HOWARD 393 (1857)),” in Major Problems in American Constitutional History, Volume I:  The Colonial Era Through Reconstruction, ed. Kermit L. Hall (Lexington, MA:  D. C. Heath and Company, 1992), 463-470, 465.

[2] Donald S. Lutz (ed.), Colonial Origins of the American Constitution:  A Documentary History (Indianapolis, IN:  Liberty Fund,1998).

[3] Dana Goldstein, The Teacher Wars:  A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession (New York, NY:  Doubleday, 2014), 23.  The historical information in this posting is drawn from this source.