STEP 1

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Promote and Defend Secular Education

Do you know what they call a Pentecostal with a PhD?

A miracle!

One of the primary functions of education in the United States has been to educate and prepare the workforce for an economy much different from the one that existed in the preindustrial age. Prior to the rise of capitalism and subsequently the industrial revolution, education was important for some, but much less so for others. Changes in the economy have resulted in the development of broad-level, nearly universal education for young people. In 1800, just after the founding of the United States, 74 percent of Americans worked in agriculture. By 1900, that number had dropped to 40 percent. And by 2000, just 1.8 percent of Americans worked in agriculture.

Agricultural workers prior to the 1800s didn't need much if any formal education to perform their jobs, and those working in other areas often learned what they needed to know through the master-apprentice system. What most young people needed to know to survive could be learned from their parents, from relatives, or from their masters. But as the economic system shifted and the industrial revolution took place, several things happened. First, capitalism resulted in a growing group of underemployed individuals or "laborers." Second, the skills required to work in various aspects of the new economy — particularly for those overseeing the laborers but also for the laborers themselves — shifted as well. Increasingly, being able to read, write, and do basic arithmetic became important.

The development of public education was rooted in multiple desires among its early advocates. One prominent desire was to educate the workforce for the capitalists, training future employees to read, write, and do basic math. Another desire was to inculcate morality. And widespread public education would also simply give kids something to do, as the idea of "adolescence" was just being created at this time. Of course, many children of laborers also worked, until government regulation forced them out of the workplace and into the schools. This meant that, despite being motivated by a desire to improve the life chances of the less affluent, widespread public education also reinforced the class structure, which is something it still does.

There is another function of education as well. Education can be — well, who are we kidding, is — used by governments to indoctrinate citizens into believing what the government wants them to believe. It was this function of religion that was used to attempt to assimilate Native Americans into the culture of those in power — white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (aka WASPs). It is this function of education that is used to teach children in the United States about all the benefits of capitalism and none of the potential problems, turning them into relatively mindless consumers. Karl Marx realized this function of education, which is why public education controlled by the government was one of his ten steps to communism.

Public education was mandatory in every U.S. state by 1918, though that mandate did not apply equally to every group; it was largely overlooked for minority groups like blacks and Native Americans. Despite the ever-growing provision of education due to the shifting economy, public education was not universally well-received or implemented. Many minority religions were suspect of public education precisely because of its utility in indoctrinating young people. The majority religious perspective in the United States until 2013 was Protestantism; today Protestants remain the largest religious group but make up less than 50 percent of the population. Early public schooling efforts included a fair amount of Protestant indoctrination in the schools at the primary and secondary (and even the tertiary levels). This Protestant indoctrination was problematic for minority religious groups, like Catholics, Jews, and Mormons, because it resulted in the indoctrination of their children into a different religious tradition. This indoctrination was opposed at various levels and in different ways. Many Catholics, not having much success opposing the Protestant establishment, developed their own system of parochial education to parallel public schools in order to prevent their children from receiving Protestant religious indoctrination. Eventually, the growing pluralism in the United States resulted in a number of court decisions that removed specific forms of school-sponsored religious indoctrination, like Bible readings and prayers led by school faculty and staff. These legal challenges were largely championed by religious minorities and nonreligious individuals, including, famously, Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington School District v. Schempp (1963), in which school-led prayer and Bible readings were declared unconstitutional. While voluntary student-led Bible studies and prayers are legally still allowed in schools, the curricula of public schools have largely shifted to a secular education devoid of religious indoctrination. Discussion of religion is, in many schools, largely confined to the humanities where it is discussed as myth (well, dead religions are discussed as myth; the rest are studied from a comparative perspective). The supposed removal of official-led religious indoctrination — it often continues informally — from public schools led to an outcry of its own, by the Protestant establishment, which began to claim that schools were, instead of teaching children religion, teaching them secular humanism (not really true, but wouldn't that be awesome?!?).

My point in describing this history is that minority religious (and nonreligious) groups in the United States did not want their children indoctrinated, and now that members of the largest religious group cannot mandate the religious indoctrination of both their kids and those of the minority at the hands of school officials, they are unhappy about it (see Katherine Stewart's book, The Good News Club, for how they have tried to reverse this situation). What both groups — (non) religious minorities and Protestants — implicitly recognize is the primary point I want to make in this chapter: schools are highly effective at persuading young minds. Because of our current system of education's efficiency at conveying information, it — flaws notwithstanding — is very effective at filling those minds with information.

But with what does it fill those young minds? It fills them with what government-run school boards dictate. The power of public education and government-mandated educational standards is that they...