A History of the American People

characteristic of the Shakers in their American manifestation that they took the principle of
minimalist government to its ultimate conclusion-their many communities, of l00 or more, lived
in happiness and content without taxes, spending nothing on police, lawyers, judges, poor-
houses, or prisons. They even dispensed with hospitals, believing they had special powers' to cure sickness-that may explain, of course, why they are now extinct. (As their founder Miss Lee, known as Mother Ann, believed herself to beThe Female Principle in Christ,' Jesus being The Male Principle,' and taught that the Second Coming would be marked by an assumption of power by women, the sect, whose full title isThe United Society of Believers in Christ's Second
Coming (The Millenarian Church),' is due in a feminist age for a revival.)
The existence of these angular sects, and many others, in addition to the half-dozen or so great
imperial' religions of American Protestantism, inevitably raised the question, early in the 19th century if not before, of how, granted America's doctrine of religious toleration, all could be fitted into the new republican society. Curiously enough Benjamin Franklin, far-sighted as always, had thought about this problem as early as 1749 when he published his Proposal Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania. He thought the solution was to treat religion as one of the main subjects in the school/college curriculum and relate it to character-training. A similar view was advanced by Jonathan Edwards when president of Princeton. It was, in effect, adopted by the greatest of all American educationalists, Horace Mann (1796-1859), when he began to organize the public school system in Massachusetts. Mann graduated from Brown, became a Unitarian, and, from 1837, was appointed the lawyer-secretary to the new Massachusetts Board of Education. At such he opened the firstnormal' school in the United
States at Lexington in 1839, and thence reorganized the entire primary and secondary education
system of the state, with longer terms, a more scientific and modern' pedagogy, higher salaries and better teachers, decent, clean, and properly heated schoolhouses, and all the elements of a first-class public school system. Massachusetts' framework served as a model for all the other states and Mann, by propaganda and legislative changes during his period in Congress, 1848-53, led the movement which established the right of every American child to a proper education at public expense. Thus the state took over financial responsibility for the education of the new and diverse millions by absorbing most primary and secondary schools (though not tertiary colleges; in 1819 Marshall's Supreme Court, bowing to the eloquence of Daniel Webster (1782-1852), rejected the right of the New Hampshire legislature to interfere in the running of Dartmouth College, thus establishing once and for all the freedom of all America's privately funded universities). That meant that the true American public school, in accordance with the Constitution, was non-sectarian from the very beginning. Non-sectarian, yes: but not non-religious. Horace Mann agreed with Franklin and the other Founding Fathers that generalized religion and education were inseparable. Mann thought religious instruction in the public schools should be takento
the extremest verge to which it can be carried without invading those rights of conscience which
are established by the laws of God, and guaranteed by the constitution of the state.' What the
schools got was not so much non-denominational religion as a kind of lowest-common-
denominator Protestantism, based upon the Bible, the Ten Commandments, and such useful
tracts as Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. As Mann put it, in his final report to the state of
Massachusetts, `that our public schools are not theological seminaries is admitted ... But our
system earnestly inculcates all Christian morals. It founds its morals on the basis of religion; it
welcomes the religion of the Bible; it allows it to do what it is allowed to do in no other system,
to speak for itself.' Hence, in the American system, the school supplied Christian 'character-