Education belongs to the church
God has placed in the hands of his church the right and privilege to educate the young. In doing this, he has done more; for in educating the youth, the church stands at God’s right hand to guide the nation into paths of rectitude. Not by joining hands can this be done, for church and state must, in order each to be free, be forever separate. Still the pillar upon which the nation must stand, the only one upon which it can stand, is a true system of education, and this is a divine gift to the church, which was born of the Reformation.
Church fails in educational work
To the Lutheran Church the message of education was preached by Luther. The Episcopal Church received this “word and grace of God,” as Luther expresses it; but it passed from them, and they returned to scholasticism. Oxford, Cambridge, Eton, Rugby, all English schools testify to this. The message passed on to the Congregational Church, and Harvard, Yale, and others started on the right road, but through the glories of the world lost sight of their original object. Harvard, founded to educate ministers, sent forth in the year 1896, out of a class of four hundred graduates only six ministers. The Presbyterian Church had its opportunity, and likewise the Baptist and the Methodist. Rapidly education, the scepter with which America was to be ruled, was slipping from the churches. “Of the four colleges established during the war, two were non-sectarian, as were three fourths of the sixteen colleges founded in the twenty years after 1776.”
A momentous time was reached. Not only were the colonies to organize a government which would astonish the world, but the people of these colonies were on the verge of an educational precipice, and mighty interests were hanging in the balance.
Fruit of the classics
We have seen that from the classical academies came forth the minds which, for a generation or two, bore sway while the nation passed its critical period. There were the Adamses and Jefferson, Franklin, Webster, De Witt Clinton, Horace Mann, Joseph Henry, Everett, and Story; Guilford, of Ohio; Grime, of South Carolina; Frelinghuysen, of New Jersey; Wayland, in Rhode Island; and Shaw, in Virginia; besides Kent, Clay, Marshall, and Randolph, who were, many of them, not only solving political problems, but exerting an influence in the school systems planned for their several States.
Many of these were classical academy men, and we can but see that the education received in these schools must affect the systems they would father in their several States. Had the colleges remained true to their trust with Christian education, the academies would have been preparatory schools for Christian colleges, and men sent forth from their walls would have been firmly grounded in the principles of Christian education, going forth into every State of the Union to found Christian schools which would in their turn make earnest and valiant youth, true to Protestantism and true to republicanism.
When the church fails to educate, men turn to the state. These men “differed in their views about the Constitution, and wrangled over the dangers of centralization; the best men were fearful of the inroads of slavery and the dangers to commerce,” says Boone, “but all agreed that intelligence was necessary to citizenship.” Washington said, “In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is necessary that public opinion should be enlightened,” and Jefferson urged that “the diffusion of light and education are the resources most to be relied on for ameliorating the condition, promoting the virtue, and advancing the happiness of man.”