Warren Nord's thoughtful book tackles an issue of great importance in contemporary America: the role of religion in our public schools and universities. According to Nord, public opinion has been excessively polarized by those religious conservatives who would restore religious purposes and practices to public education and by those secular liberals for whom religion is irrelevant to everything in the curriculum. While he maintains that public schools and universities must not promote religion, he also argues that there are powerful philosophical, political, moral, and constitutional reasons for requiring students to study religion. Indeed, only if religion is included in the curriculum will students receive a truly liberal education, one that takes seriously a variety of ways of understanding the human experience. Intended for a broad audience, Nord's comprehensive study encompasses American history, constitutional law, educational theory and practice, theology, philosophy, and ethics. It also discusses a number of current, controversial issues, including multiculturalism, moral education, creationism, academic freedom, and the voucher and school choice movements.
Excerpt from The Secularization of American Education, as Shown by State Legislation, State Constitutional Provisions and State Supreme Court Decisions For somewhat over a century there has been going on in the United States a gradual but widespread elimination of religious and church in uences from public education. During the early years of our history, especially during the colonial period, educa tion and religion, the school and the church, were close allies. One of the aims of elementary education was to inculcate religious beliefs; of higher education, to prepare religious teachers. The subject matter of instruction was largely religious in its nature. Church authorities exercised considerable control over educational affairs. The warmest advocates of education were those who had in view the needs of the church. Today we find in every state a system of public education in which civic and industrial aims are dominant, in which religious instruction is either entirely eliminated or else reduced to the barest and most formal elements, and the control of which is vested well nigh exclusively in the state or some sub-division thereof. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."
American higher education was transformed between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War I. During this period, U.S. colleges underwent fundamental changes--changes that helped to create the modern university we know today. Most significantly, the study of the sciences and the humanities effectively dissolved the Protestant framework of learning by introducing a new secularized curriculum. This secularization has long been recognized as a decisive turning point in the history of American education. Until now, however, there has been remarkably little attention paid to the details of how this transformation came about. Here, at last, Jon Roberts and James Turner identify the forces and explain the events that reformed the college curriculum during this era. The first section of the book examines how the study of science became detached from theological considerations. Previously, one of the primary pursuits of "natural scientists" was to achieve an understanding of the workings of the divine in earthly events. During the late nineteenth century, however, scientists reduced the scope of their inquiries to subjects that could be isolated, measured, and studied objectively. In pursuit of "scientific truth," they were drawn away from the larger "truths" that they had once sought. On a related path, social scientists began to pursue the study of human society more scientifically, attempting to generalize principles of behavior from empirically observed events. The second section describes the revolution that occurred in the humanities, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, when the study of humanities was largely the study of Greek and Latin. By 1900, however, the humanities were much more broadly construed, including such previously unstudied subjects as literature, philosophy, history, and art history. The "triumph of the humanities" represented a significant change in attitudes about what constituted academic knowledge and, therefore, what should be a part of the college curriculum. The Sacred and the Secular University rewrites the history of higher education in the United States. It will interest all readers who are concerned about American universities and about how the content of a "college education" has changed over the course of the last century. "[Jon Roberts and James Turner's] thoroughly researched and carefully argued presentations invite readers to revisit stereotypical generalizations and to rethink the premises developed in the late nineteenth century that underlie the modern university. At the least, their arguments challenge crude versions of the secularization thesis as applied to higher education."--From the foreword by William G. Bowen and Harold T. Shapiro
R.L. Dabney (1820-1898) -- preacher, theologian, soldier, poet, and essayist -- strongly condemned the public education of his day. He saw with prophetic insight that State education could not help but be secularized since it was designed to please the people. As a result, he argued, public education would begin to teach its students not truth, but the values and virtues which were palatable to society at large. Although a century has passed since Dabney first wrote this essay, the questions that parents face haven't changed. Secular education still seeks to indoctrinate our children under the pretence of objectivity, and truth is still sacrificed for the sake of social "unity." We must acknowledge with Dabney that proper education is about heart and soul, not just propositions and facts. Only then will our children learn truth and be equipped to live out our faith.
