The Puritan exodus
Finding that England closed her doors against progress, the Puritans sought greater freedom in the Netherlands. They were disappointed, for they could not there educate their children as Protestantism taught them that they should be educated. As Pilgrims they sought new homes in America, finding a retreat on the bleak shores of New England.
Protestantism reaches America
It is now our duty to trace the growth and decline of Protestantism in our own land. Its prosperity in every other country has been in proportion to its adherence to the correct principles of education; its decline has without exception been the result of a wrong system of education. How is it in the United States?
No student of history, and especially of prophetic history, doubts for a moment that the way was divinely prepared for Protestantism to cross the Atlantic, and it is equally as evident that that same Hand was upholding those principles after they reached these shores. God’s Word spoke often to the hearts of men, leading them to devise plans, pass laws, establish institutions, and in various ways to so work that His truths might here grow to a perfection which they never reached in the old country. On the other hand, those teachings which have frustrated the principles of Protestantism in Europe are seen to be at work in America from the first planting of a colony until the present day. That strength-producing element was Christian education; that counteracting influence was false or papal education. These two form the subject of this chapter.
Educational History of the United States
United States history is interwoven with the history of education. Her founders, especially of the New England colonies, traced their origin to an educational center in England, and as early New England history circles about Harvard, so the fathers and supporters of that institution traced their origin in Old England to the counties of East Anglia, where Cambridge University bore sway. “Of the first six hundred who landed in Massachusetts, one in thirty, it is said, was a graduate of the English Cambridge. These and their companions were rare men. They had the schooling for a service the like of whose execution, in completeness and good sense, the world has never equaled.”[154]
“With matchless wisdom they joined liberty and learning in a perpetual and holy alliance, binding the latter to bless every child with instruction, which the former invests with the rights and duties of citizenship. They made education and sovereignty co-extensive, by making both universal.”[155]