Schools

Schools

Western expansion sparked a movement to establish public schools throughout the West. Advocates hoped public schooling would transform what they perceived as an alarmingly diverse population into a nation of good citizens.
The role of religion quickly posed dilemmas. If schools were to create moral citizens, many expected religion to play a part. But whose religion?

Most advocates for public schools were Protestants. Should their preferences dominate? Should public schools be allowed to favor one religion over another? Could parents be taxed to pay for schools they didn’t want their children to attend?

Arguments over school funding, curricula, school choice, and other issues divided communities, the press, the courts, and every level of government. Many of the country’s most rancorous debates about religious liberty and the place of religion in public life revolved around schooling.

“A Cold Morning in a Country Schoolhouse,” Harper’s Weekly, 1875
Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society

Civics

Separation of Church and State

Ten years after the Civil War, President Grant spoke to veterans he once commanded in the Union’s Army of the Tennessee. Of what did he speak? Religion in the schools! Grant told his listeners that the future of their nation depended on public education free of religious bias.

“Afford to every child growing up in the land the opportunity of a good common school education, unmixed with sectarian, pagan or atheistical tenets. Leave the matter of religion to the family circle, the church, and the private school supported entirely by private contribution. Keep the church and state forever separate.”

Grant sought to spur a nationwide system of public schools. He wanted to keep the schools non-sectarian—unaffiliated with a particular religion or theology—because Protestant voters worried about the spread of Catholic and Mormon teachings in the West. The President’s critics countered that, in practice, his “non-sectarian” schools were biased toward Protestantism.

Geography Lessons

“Dissected maps” were early forms of jigsaw puzzles designed to make learning fun. This one is a map of the United States in 1887, a dozen years after the president's Des Moines speech. The nation's political geography was still in formation, but the image on this puzzle cover conveys confidence in the outcome.

The female “teacher” represents Columbia—the personification of American liberty—who tutors an Indigenous pupil. At the time, Americans would have understood the image as a metaphor for civilizing and Christianizing the continent.

McLoughlin Brothers
A New Dissected Map of the United States, ca. 1887
New-York Historical Society, The Liman Collection, 2000.547

Arithmetic

School Funding

With the Northwest Ordinance (1787), the Continental Congress created a system for opening schools west of the Appalachian Mountains. Land recently taken from Native nations was divided into townships with plots sold to white settlers. A portion of each township was dedicated to supporting new schools.

Public lands and funds continued to support western schools as the nation grew. Instruction in these classrooms often reflected a Protestant bent, even while the responsible parties imagined them as religiously neutral, or non-sectarian. These school leaders thus believed the lessons were suitable for a religiously diverse student body.

One school superintendent expressed this point of view in his clearly Protestant book of lessons. “There is no better place to teach reverence for the God of heaven than the school-room,” he wrote. “It can be done without inculcating sectarian dogmas or trampling upon the rights of conscience.” Non-Protestants, particularly Catholics, sought to change this status quo. They argued for their own portions of the school fund and against paying taxes for schools whose teachings they disagreed with.

"What Sectarian Appropriation is Doing … And What It May Lead To,” Harper’s Weekly, 1873
Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society

Pressing Debate

With this biting political commentary, Harper’s Weekly newspaper dove into the strident debate over public funding for sectarian schools (whose religious teachings privilege a specific group or theology).

The cartoon argues against giving Catholics a portion of school funds for the operation of separate religious schools. It warns that in addition to threatening American freedom, such funding would set a dangerous precedent by someday subsidizing other religious schools the public might find even more objectionable.

Moral Improvement

Teaching Morality

America’s divergent religious groups shared the belief that their own religion nurtured morality. Many thus reasoned that religion belonged in the classroom. Nebraskans explicitly connected religion, morality, and schools in their 1875 state constitution:

“Religion, morality, and knowledge being essential to good government, the Legislature shall pass suitable laws to protect every religious denomination in the peaceable enjoyment of its own mode of public worship, and to encourage schools and the means of instruction.”

But in the exceptionally diverse nation that western expansion helped create, whose moral teachings would get priority? Who would decide whose teachings dominated? And if all religion was removed from the classroom, could children still be taught to distinguish right from wrong? Debate raged over these and other questions.

Lord’s Prayer Controversy

This handkerchief, with its mix of moral and religious messages, may have been created for use in a Protestant Sunday school. Though many Americans believed that moral instruction rooted in Christianity should also be included in public schools, doing so in a religiously heterogeneous society presented difficulties. In many places it led to ongoing skirmishes.

The Lord’s Prayer aroused particular animosity in San Francisco, whose schools served Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish children. The Protestant version of the prayer had once been mandated in city schools. Over the years, its declining use aroused both cheers and bitter denouncements. In 1875, the Lord's Prayer was banished as a sectarian violation of school regulations.

Sunday Lessons No. 1, 1850–55
New-York Historical Society, Purchased from Elie Nadelman, 1937.604

Industrial Arts

Christian Citizens

Indian boarding schools explicitly aimed to Christianize Native children. Some institutions, like the Ramona School for Indian Girls, were founded by Christian organizations under contract with the US government. Others were run directly by the government as Christian enterprises. Few non-Native people considered Indigenous beliefs to be religions or worried about the US government imposing Christianity on Native children.

With most Native peoples now forced onto reservations, government agents could compel or coerce families to part with their children for years. Parental consent was not required.

Boarding school experiences varied, but conditions were often harsh and could be deadly. Instruction in Christianity, industrial training, and labor did the “civilizing work” that supporters believed would assimilate Native children into white society.

Native families went to great lengths to stay connected to children attending boarding schools. This photo documents Cheyenne parents camping near the Cantonment Boarding School in defiance of government aims to separate the children from their communities.

Tipis in field at Cantonment Oklahoma Indian Boarding School, 1899–1900
Denver Museum of Nature & Science, BR61-369

“In Eastern towns, it is hard for educators to induce parents to walk a distance of two or three blocks to visit their children in school. The Apache Indian will ride on horseback one hundred and eighty miles, two or three times during the school term, to see how his children are progressing; while the Pueblo will walk thirty or forty miles for the same purpose.”
—Excerpt from Ramona School for Indian Girls, 1886

These before and after photos advertised the Ramona School’s work to “civilize” Native children entrusted to its care.
Such images helped schools like Ramona solicit funds and support.

Apache Girls on Arrival at the Ramona School, Santa Fe, N.M.” and “Apache Girls Six Days after Arrival at the Ramona School,” in The Ramona School for Indian Girls: Santa Fe, N.M., 1886
Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society

Religion

School Choice

Catholic Church officials and parents wearied of their struggles over religion in the schools. They had fought to make public school curricula more welcoming to Catholics. They had campaigned for a share of public funds to operate Catholic schools. Yet despite their growing numbers, these aims remained largely out of reach.

In 1875, the Church took a firm stance against the public schools. The Vatican declared that sending American Catholic children to public schools would result in "evils of the gravest kind." US Catholic bishops were directed to “spare no pains” in improving and increasing the number of Catholic schools. They were to impress upon the faithful the importance of enrolling their children and the necessity of paying tuition (in addition to public school taxes).

The eventual growth of a separate parochial school system depended largely on the labor of religious sisters. By 1900, more than 40,000 nuns worked in parish schools.

“Jesus Crucified” lesson board
Patricia D. Klingenstein Library, New-York Historical Society

Reading

Religious Liberty

In religiously diverse Cincinnati, Ohio, city leaders considered their schools to be non-sectarian because they assigned readings in the King James Bible without accompanying instruction. Competing Protestant denominations were satisfied but not Catholics, who preferred the Douay-Rheims Bible and believed that biblical interpretation should be guided by the Church. Jews and free-thinkers preferred no Bible reading at all in school.

In 1869, Cincinnati’s school board voted to stop all classroom Bible reading as a way to appease dissenting parties. Some parents were relieved because their children would no longer be instructed in religions or theologies not practiced at home. Others criticized the compromise, arguing that it entirely removed religion from school.

A group of Protestant parents sued to have Bible readings reinstated. They won in Cincinnati’s civil court. The school board appealed. Ohio’s Supreme Court unanimously ruled for the school board and reinstated the ban.

The justices determined that Bible reading was a religious exercise and inconsistent with state constitutional principles, even when conducted without comment and for the purpose of instilling morality rather than religious devotion.

“Let the state not only keep its own hands off religion, but let it also see to it that religious sects keep their hands off each other.”
—Minor v. Board of Education (1873)

The court’s decision in the "Cincinnati Bible War" was an important 19th-century step toward religious neutrality in public education. But Bible reading remained widespread in public schools well into the 20th century.

Doctrinal Differences

The King James Bible and the Douay-Rheims Bible are two different versions of English language Christian Bibles from the 17th century. Protestants have historically favored the King James Version; Catholics, the Douay-Rheims.

Unlike the Jewish Torah seen earlier, both versions include the New Testament, which Judaism does not recognize as a foundational text.

Conclusion