RELIGION The early public. schools in America, as well as private and parochial schools, gave full expression to the religious faith of their constituency. Especially in New England, where it was favoured by a sympathetic relation of church and State, the pub lic schools avowed a religious aim and taught religious subjects. The New England Primer, for example, for 150 years widely used as a text-book, was largely composed of scriptural and doctrinal material. Catechisms were taught in the public schools and prayer was offered twice a day.
A relative secularization of education has taken place since about 1775. This is in part due to causes which are world-wide, such as the progress of invention and discovery, the expansion of the sciences and arts, and the materialism associated with the industrial revolution. It is due also to two principles and two sets of circumstances peculiarly characteristic of the United States. The principles are (I) the religious freedom guar anteed by the national Constitution; (2) the assumption by the States of responsibility for education. The circumstances are: (a) the heterogeneity of population which has resulted from im migration; (b) the multiplicity of religious denominations, to gether with the jealous, divisive sectarianism which has in general characterized their defence of their distinctive tenets and prac tices. The secularization of public education in the United States was not purposed, but incidental—a by-product of the working out of these two principles under the circumstances named. When ever a minority, or even an individual, has chosen to object, on what are averred to be conscientious grounds, to some religious element in the programme or curriculum of the public schools, that element has forthwith been eliminated, and no other religious element has taken its place.
The movement has been wholly negative. Each religious group has been more concerned to see to it that the public schools should not contain anything out of line with its peculiar beliefs than it has been concerned to preserve in these schools the great principles of morality and religion upon which American citizens generally agree. The result has been to strip the public schools almost com
pletely of religious teaching and religious worship. It is true that in some States and many communities each day's session is yet opened with the reading of a brief passage from the Bible and the recital in unison of the Lord's prayer. With this exception, the programme and curriculum of the schools give practically no place to religion and afford no conscious recognition of the part that religion has played and is playing in the life of humanity. Re ligious education, it is commonly said, is the business of the home and of the church, not of the school and the community.
In colonial days the churches generally, except in New England, maintained elementary schools, and later took the lead in founding academies and colleges. As the public school system became established throughout the country, most of the churches sur rendered the idea of maintaining church-controlled elementary and secondary schools. The outstanding exceptions to this rule are cer tain German-speaking branches of the Lutheran Church and the Roman Catholic Church. The latter, particularly, dissents in principle from the current policy of public education. Education as a whole is a unitary process, it holds, which must include religion. But the State is not competent to teach religion. The State, may, therefore, levy and collect taxes for the support of schools, may set standards which it requires schools to maintain in certain subjects, and may even conduct schools for those who are without the Catholic faith, if they so desire; but it is the function of the church to carry on through its schools, the education of childhood and youth. Especially since the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore in 1884, this church has laboured strenuously to provide strong schools, organized into diocesan sys tems, for the education of its young.