Have public schools ever been anti-Catholic? How were Catholic schools received in the U.S.? In this video, Jimmy Akin explores the history of public and Catholic schools in America, examining past tensions and their impact on education today.
Transcript:
Does public school have like anti-Catholic roots, and is it still anti-Catholic today, or is that just like some sort of myth?
Okay, okay. So public schools in this country began in the 1600s, and they were initially founded by the Puritans, um, like in the Massachusetts colony and so forth. And, of course, the Puritans were not big on Catholicism. They thought that even the Ang— the reason they’re called Puritans is because the Anglican Church, the Church of England, was too polluted by Romanist stuff for them. So that’s why they wanted to purify the Church of all that Romanist, all that Catholic stuff.
And so, uh, yeah, those churches had a distinct anti-Catholic bent to them. Uh, but, you know, there weren’t a lot of Catholics in Massachusetts at the time. Of the original 13 colonies, the only one that had a substantial Catholic presence was Maryland, um, which was founded as a Catholic colony. Um, Massachusetts was not a Catholic colony.
Then, uh, public schools kind of went in and out of fashion in different places for a while. They were not universal the way they are now. They weren’t just everywhere. Um, in the 19th century, there was a push in some places to establish public schools, and there was an anti-Catholic, um, tenor to them.
Catholics who had set up their own schools were regarded as being un-American. You know, it’s like, “Oh, those, those Catholics, they’re, they’re, they’re keeping their kids in their own schools, and they’re teaching them Catholic values, and they’re not teaching them American values. They’re, they’re subjects of that foreign potentate, the Pope, and so they’re not being proper Americans.”
And there were, there were various anti-Catholic parties, like the Know-Nothing Party, um, that were active at this time and that were supporters of public education. And, and in, in most communities, you know, they were majority Protestant communities, and so, and so the public schools were anti-Catholic.
Then in the 20th century, uh, you had a lot of support of public schools. That’s, you know, they really spread, they got established all over the place. And in the 20th century, actually, another anti-Catholic organization, uh, kind of was one of the early big supporters of public schools, and that’s the second Ku Klux Klan.
Um, so the Ku Klux Klan was, you know, promoting public schools as the proper way to inculcate American values into children— not Catholic schools— and make them good Americans and de-Catholicize them and their values. Um, so, you know, this is an aspect of public school history. They have, in America, historically been anti-Catholic.
These days, they’re not so much anti-Catholic as anti-Christian, um, you know, because of a fundamental misinterpretation of the, uh, First Amendment. The, you know, the First Amendment of the Constitution says that there shall not be any prohibition— there shall not be a government establishment of religion.
And what that originally meant is there’s not going to be an established church. It’s not like we’re going to have a Church of England— we’re not going to have a Church of America that’s the official American church. That’s what the Establishment Clause in the Constitution means.
But in the 20th century, it got dramatically reinterpreted to mean, “Oh, the government can’t say anything about religion one way or another under any circumstances.” And that’s never what the Establishment Clause meant, you know.
Um, and this idea that there’s supposed to be a separation of church and state, that’s actually something that, um, doesn’t— that’s not even found in the Constitution. That’s found in a letter by Thomas Jefferson, and he didn’t mean by it what modern people mean by it. So there’s been a lot of reinterpretation here, and the public schools have broadened their anti-religious focus from being specifically anti-Catholic to being more broadly anti-Christian.
Having said that, public schools are, you know, reflective of the values of the local community. And so, in many parts of America, there are public schools that, that are pro-Christian. There— in, in areas with high Catholic populations, there are public schools that are pro-Catholic.
So we shouldn’t speak of the public schools as if they were all just one thing. Um, they, they really do, up to a point, reflect the values of the local community they’re in. And they vary in quality. And that’s one of the reasons they vary in quality.
Um, so yes, public schools do have a— an anti-Catholic element in their origins and in their popularization. And in some places, they still have that. But in other places, they don’t. So we have to take it kind of on a case-by-case basis.