100 years ago, Allen Oscar Hansen, a professor at Columbia University’s prestigious Teacher’s College, published what he called an exposition of sources and a source book entitled Liberalism and American Education in the Eighteenth Century. The title implies what the work is about. Liberalism, so the book says, played an outsized and perhaps even definitive role in shaping American education and the formation of the American republic in the years following the Patriot victory over the British Empire in 1781. The new nation, Hansen believed, was affected by the two great propositions of the liberal Enlightenment. Those were the infinite perfectibility of man, and the destructive tendency of fixed institutions of church and state, the bedrock values of the liberal order. In the ensuing 100 years since 1926, most American educators and educational institutions have affirmed the idea that American education has its roots in liberalism. But a closer reading of the history of education, and particularly collegiate and university education in the United States, reveals that American education’s truest roots did not lie in liberalism, or in the rejection of churchly influence on education, or in the rejection of the citizen’s or family’s duty to state service. American education’s roots were in the Protestant intellectual tradition birthed in the sixteenth century and carried forward by Americans well into the twentieth century. Liberalism’s dominance came only in the twentieth century, well after Protestant churchmen and intellectuals laid the foundations of American education. Those foundations were manifested in the great universities that became the Ivy League and others, and in the commitment of government, churches, and families to education oriented towards things divine and natural. Perhaps most importantly for Protestant intellectuals considering education in the twenty-first century, religion and the law of nature’s God—instead of individualistic civil liberties historically tied to liberalism—were seen as the bedrock necessities for society by Protestant educators.
State universities in the nineteenth century were hardly liberal by the standards of even their own times. Most were administered by conservative Protestant ministers, and most of those ministers rejected the Enlightenment foundations of liberalism. As Europe collapsed into chaos in the wake of the liberal revolutions of 1848, Andrew Wylie, a Presbyterian-turned-Episcopal minister and president of the University of Indiana, took the occasion to warn his students about the nature of liberal so-called freedom. Wylie sneered at “the three words, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, which the French People sang and shouted with so much enthusiasm, near the close of the last century, and which their children are singing and shouting now, with enthusiasm as great, and more enlightened.” But, Wylie warned,
“as in the mouths of the mob then, and the mob now, these words stand for things which are incompatible, which never had, nor ever can have existence in any form of Social Life, nor any where, except in the incoherent dreams and disordered fancies of such madmen as those who tried fifty years ago to realize them in France, and force them upon the other nations of Europe.”
The revolutionary project “failed, not at Waterloo, but all along from the very first bloody step, to that last in the desolating track in which it moved; it failed utterly.” Yes, Wylie admitted, “some good resulted, as some good results from all projects; but not enough, one would think, to encourage a repetition of the experiment. Brute force cannot govern, much less renovate.”
Wylie found the very idea of equality as articulated by the Enlightenment and French Revolution to be fundamentally laughable: “Equality! What equality? In some one thing and not in all things? If not in all things, and to all persons, equality is the very height of in-equality, iniquity, injustice. In all things, and to all, do you then say? Well: try it; and see.” Even if revolutionaries did get their so-called equalized and individualized society, it would still be filled with “injustice,” and “much cruelty.” The principle of equality would “destroy the vital principle of social life, and reduce to barbarism the nation that should adopt, or permit it.”11. Andrew Wylie, Baccalaureate Addressed to the Senior Class at the Commencement, September, 1848 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Tribune, 1848),
Wylie saw in egalitarianism the rise of anarchy, and he committed his university to stand against those who would tear down government, which he saw as the foundation of property and family. “Social Life,” he declared, “is founded on the right of property, which means simply this, that a man should enjoy a portion of what his labor actually produces.” In a statement sure to horrify libertarians, Wylie argued that individuals should not have the whole of a nation’s property, “for government must have a share; since government is the watch-dog without whose aid a man could enjoy nothing at all of the fruit of his labor.” Without government, warned Wylie, “every man must be his own watch-dog, and consequently have no time to labor:—he would have to act as becomes a watch-dog:—and he would turn into a savage wolf at last, prowling through the uncultivated waste for prey—alone or with his kindred gang.”
Wylie impressed upon his students the divine and natural authority and origin of government. Natural law-informed government, Wylie believed, reflected the Creator God. In a state university in the nineteenth century, students were taught to recognize the authority of nature, nature’s God, and the authority of government that recognized natural law and, by inference, the Christian religion. Of government’s need, Wylie left no doubts: “There must be government. Government is as the breath of life to man’s social nature. And, though to the ignorant it sounds like a contradiction, man, as a social being, can be free only in being governed.” A governed man was a free man. Law preceded freedom. “That is the best government which gives to the different powers with which The Blessed and Only Potentate endows each individual, when imparting to him his existence, the most free and perfect scope for exercise.” All men were equal in God’s eyes, but God had not placed every man on a so-called equal footing in human society. The government that governed best recognized that social hierarchies existed, and made laws accordingly. Government, then, used different types of power on different types of citizens. “As these powers are exceedingly diversified, so will be their exercise and its result, production, wherever this freedom is enjoyed.” Some were “better fitted by nature for one kind of work, and another for another; and the complex business of social life goes on to the best advantage for all, when each is left to employ the gifts which the Author of nature has bestowed upon him.” Law had to recognize differences in social value and knowledge:
If a law were enacted that the same rate of wages should be paid for mending a broken gate, as for setting a bone; for making fences, as for making laws; for constructing rat-traps, as for building organs; for steering a ferry-boat, as for navigating a frigate; for butchering pigs, as for commanding an army; for laying out roads in the interiour, as for making a trigonometrical survey of the coast; such a law would be as foolish as unjust, for it could not be enforced.
The president of Indiana’s state university summed it up for his students. Inequality was a fact; government needed to realize it; students needed to learn it. “In the march of life,” Wylie stated, “all cannot be foremost. ‘Wherever there is motion there must be precedence. Gradation is Nature’s law. Man is not exempt from it, in any condition of his social existence.’” There was, he soberly reminded his students, “equality in the grave; but nowhere else on earth.”22. Wylie, Baccalaureate Addressed to the Senior Class at the Commencement, September, 1848, 5-7.
Protestant education in the nineteenth century remained comfortable with hierarchy. Daniel Coit Gilman, the educational innovator who served as the inaugural president of Johns Hopkins, saw the roots of American education in Puritan New England. The ideas of the Declaration of Independence only mattered inasmuch as they conformed to the prior commitments of the Puritans. “From the days of the Puritan minister, who gave his name to our oldest University, and the days of the London merchant, who endowed the second college in New England, each generation has surpassed its predecessors.” It was, said Gilman, “a striking coincidence that among the very earliest names on this heraldic roll is that which our foundation bears. The schools which Edward Hopkins, a colonial governor, established in 1660, by his will, and his gifts to Harvard, still keep alive his name and influence.” Gilman hoped that the “name of our founder live for more than two hundred years to come, and his gifts be immortal.” Johns Hopkins, Gilman continued, might have used the very words of Cromwellian Puritan Edward Hopkins, who desired to bestow “some encouragement for the breeding up of hopeful youths, for the public service of the country in future times.’” Gilman conjectured “a spiritual if not a physical descent in the line of Hopkins. In 1676, the name is written on the door of an endowed grammar school at New Haven, older than Yale, and second only to Harvard; in 1776, the name is signed to the Declaration of Independence; in 1876, it distinguishes a University Foundation.” And the colonial university foundation was not liberty, fraternity, and equality. Colleges existed for “the promotion of religion, science and charity.”
To perform their true function, colleges could not, and should not, allow students every so-called intellectual freedom they demanded. True college education implied as a “general rule, restriction rather than freedom; tutorial rather than professorial guidance; residence within appointed bounds; the chapel, the dining hall, and the daily inspection.” Colleges theoretically stood “in loco parentis; it does not afford a very wide scope; it gives a liberal and substantial foundation on which the university instruction may be wisely built.”33. Addresses at the Inauguration of Daniel C. Gilman, as President of the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, February 22, 1876 (Baltimore, MD: John Murphy, 1876), 19, 32.
Despite the presence of a chapel and a commitment to Christianity in education, Gilman wanted Johns Hopkins to be a non-sectarian institution. This was not because he wanted to free the citizen from the control of Christianity or the American nation, but because he believed that a university “will doubtless serve both church and state the better because it is free from the guardianship of either.” A non-sectarian college was a place where “students would gladly cease to discuss sectarian animosities and political prejudices, in their eagerness for the acquisition of Knowledge and their search for Eternal Truth.” Gilman realized, however, that Johns Hopkins was an outlier. In the United States, “almost every strong institution of learning is either ‘a child of the church’ or ‘a child of the state,’ and is thus liable to political or ecclesiastical control.”
Even after the founding of Johns Hopkins and the rise of nonsectarian colleges, many Americans remained children of the church via their educations. Ecclesiastical leadership in the major Protestant denominations recognized the enduring power of religion in the United States’ educational milieu. Bishop James Hervey Otey pushed the Protestant Episcopal Church to prioritize education and particularly Christian education. At the church’s General Convention in 1859, he used his sermon—later published as “Christian Education”—to emphasize the societal benefits of Christian education. Few other topics, argued Otey, could “more fitly claim the serious consideration of a Christian assembly, or the anxious reflections of American citizens, or the deep and pious thoughts of the right reverend fathers, ministers and brethren composing this council of the church” than the importance of Christian education. “This is not a subject, which may or ought to awaken interest, only in the bosoms of Christian parents. Its range is wide enough to embrace all the families of the land.” Christian education’s influence extended “to many other interests than those merely of domestic life. It is the boast of our countrymen that their social well-being is not dependent for its source nor for its continuance on the circumstances which may surround an individual.” Just because someone was not religious did not mean they should not receive a Christian education.44. James Hervey Otey, Christian Education: A Sermon Before the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church United States of America at Saint Paul’s Church the city of Richmond on Wednesday, October 5, 1859, (Richmond, VA: 1859), 6-7 Societal change and the quixotic nature of humans in general formed the chief reason why Christian education needed to be given to American children. Christianity alone offered a metaphysic enduring enough to withstand societal change.
“Many of us,” he told his fellow bishops, “will probably live to see the sceptre of our civil condition transferred, and the destinies of this nation, social and religious, intellectual and moral, public and individual, pass into the hands of the little beings whose minds are now occupied with the toys of childhood.”
There was, however, no guarantee that the present generation of children would be virtuous republicans as adults. “The next race of the sovereign people may be as degenerate as the successor of an absolute monarch.” History in the form of the Roman Republic and the French Revolution offered a warning to Americans on the inherently unstable nature of republican societies:
The voice of history proclaims the grave and impressive lesson, that the glories of republics have been evanescent—that their energies have become effete and languid, in the transmission through fewer generations than those of some hereditary dynasties. They seem to resemble those vegetable productions which bloom more magnificently, and bear a richer fruitage, but arrive at earlier decay and decrepitude. How shall we, on whom the care of ours is now incumbent, maintain the vital principle with undiminished healthfulness and vigor, that it may flourish for us, and for those who follow after us? There is but one method, and that method is obvious; it is easy, and it is secure, if faithfully pursued.
“Here,” Otey reminded the bishops, “within our reach, under our almost unlimited control, and in a ductile state, is the very material on whose shape the stability of our institutions must depend.” Without religious education, Otey suggested, there could be no stable republican foundation for society.
Otey and most other Protestant churchmen forcefully maintained that American institutions depended on Christianity. Schooling, under largely Protestant control, provided institutions with stability through Christian philosophy and religious principles. “The alternative is before us either to leave that material to be moulded by external circumstances highly unfavorable, or to give it form by that plastic touch of education, whose moral impress the droppings of time can never efface, nor any stroke of accident destroy.” He quoted the aphorism that “The child is father to the man.” Foundations of character and destiny “of every individual element of that rational multitude whose mind will sway the world of thirty years hence, will be laid permanently and indestructibly before it has attained the twelfth year of its being.” By the time a child turned into a teenager, they would either be educated as a Christian, or they would be educated as something else: “Subsequent influences may strengthen or impair that foundation, but they never can displace it.”
Bishop Otey rejected the notion that “the characters of men” resulted “from their own investigations: the patterns are not selected and approved by a mature judgment: they are formed by the combined development of those associations and sympathies of childhood, from whose abiding influence no reasonings or efforts of mature years will ever entirely emancipate them.” The choice for the Episcopal Church was clear, warned Otey: “You must communicate, or you must withhold from that wave of human society which follows after you, and will soon rise in your place, those principles whose infusion will make it pure, and whose absence will cause it to spread bitterness, corruption and desolation wherever it rolls.”55. James Hervey Otey, Christian Education: A Sermon Before the General Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church United States of America at Saint Paul’s Church the city of Richmond on Wednesday, October 5, 1859, 6-7
The belief that God could be removed from education worried Otey. Such presumptions, warned Otey, were “prevalent and dangerous.” Unless this anti-religious trend was “very soon checked, this nation will in a few years be made lamentably, mournfully and woefully sensible.” Dechristianized education was, Otey noted, “advocated sometimes explicitly and often impliedly by men who are set as watchmen for the defence of society from the incursions of moral and religious evil; and yet it virtually admits the claims of infidelity.” These assumptions were “precisely the principle which was preached by skeptics of the last century, and was in truth the fruitful parent of that direful progeny of evils which the world witnessed in the excesses and horrors of the French revolution.”66. Otey, Christian Education, Bishops like Otey desired true denominational colleges for Episcopalians, and he was instrumental in founding the Episcopal Church-run University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. But denominational colleges, as important they were, were still seen as secondary to the primary educational institution of the American republic: the family. Protestant thinkers from Lyman Beecher to William GT Shedd to Robert Lewis Dabney saw education as essentially starting at home. Americans worried over challenges to families’ ability to educate their children. The rise of the Industrial Revolution led some European countries to see mass schooling as a way of alleviating poverty. The subsequent rise of the market economy and the presence of vocational schools elicited concern among bishops and rectors, who feared that parents would neglect catechesis and Bible classes in favor of education focused solely on vocational prosperity.
Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, the rector of Grace Church in New York City and a future bishop, warned parents about the perils of prioritizing vocational training over religious education. “How differently,” Wainwright told his congregants, “are you instructed in the world. There you learn that advancement in the present life is to be the all-important object of attention.” Secular education taught parents that they were “to bring up your children in the nurture and admonition of the teachers of useful and ornamental accomplishments.” This worldly education regime told parents that they “must assiduously prepare them to make their way in society, and you find those esteemed the most successful and enviable parents, whose children obtain the largest portion of worldly honours and emoluments.”77. Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, Sermons Upon Religious Education and Filial Duty (New York, NY: T. and J. Swords, G. Long, E. Bliss, and G.C. and H. Carvill, 1829), Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch statesman and cleric, saw the religious family as the fundamental educator of children. “The father,” thundered Kuyper, “is the only lawful person, called by nature and called to this task, to determine the choice of school for his child. To this we must hold fast. This is the prime truth in the whole schools issue.” The most basic axiom of education was that “parental rights must be seen as a sovereign right in this sense, that it is not delegated by any other authority, that it is inherent in fatherhood and motherhood, and that it is given directly from God to the father and mother.” Moral and religious nurture of children could “only succeed when we begin by seeking out the inclinations and tendencies within the child and bring those to consciousness. And this we can only measure according to what is in us. Just as a mother nurses her infant at her breast, so also with this nurture, our own consciousness must teach us what consciousness is in our child.” Parents’ rights concerned “the principled continuity of the generations. That which you find strange, you cannot give to your child.” True education only existed when “the treasure of moral and religious life that is in the heart of the father, is transferred to the heart of the child.”
As the nineteenth century progressed in Europe and the United States, educational reformers subtly questioned whether parents were necessary for the education of children. Public schools became the special instrument of political liberals, pursuing utopian schemes of universal liberty, fraternity, and equality, the very fantasies Andrew Wylie warned his students against in 1848. At the end of the nineteenth century, Americans and Europeans saw an inevitable educational disaster emanating from liberal government schools. Liberals were not, warned Kuyper, “content to raise their own children as full-blooded liberals, so long as the children of their neighbor (who exceeded the number of their own children by ten percent) were raised in an opposite manner.” Liberals’ secular universalizing dreams translated into national tyranny. State schools tyrannically extended their “reach over the entire land.” Tyrannical schools, warned Kuyper, had more power to shape society than even a tyrannical state. Liberals would only accept a society wherein “the liberal state-school in which they set the tone and inspired all the people with that tone,” was the total educator. Only then, after a tyrannical imposition of government power that the Medievals would have ever dreamed of, was the liberal “position in our land safe.” Liberalism, from being committed to freedom, used state power to coerce Christian families into an educational milieu they did not want. Kuyper therefore rejected secular and liberal education because it was tyrannical. God had said “in his Word that the parents are the first ones responsible for the children.” The new educators, he moaned, did not “want to hear anything of this parental right” because they believed that the “child is the responsibility of the state…and not of the parents. You must entrust the nurture of your child to the teachers that they choose.” Liberal educators were “as afraid of true freedom as they are of death.” Kuyper’s final message for educational liberals was simple. “Stay away from our children!”88. Abraham Kuyer, Jordan Ballor ed., On Education (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2019), editor’s introduction.
Kuyper’s prioritization of the household as the fundamental place for the education of children was shared by his American contemporary, Robert Lewis Dabney. The one-time chaplain to Thomas J. “Stonewall Jackson” taught as a professor of moral philosophy and theology at Hampden-Sydney College and then, after 1883, at the University of Texas. Dabney, like Kuyper, feared that secularism attacked natural and divine associations, particularly through institutions like secular government schools. Sean Michael Lucas, Dabney’s standard biographer, notes that both “Kuyper and Dabney recognized that modernism had the potential to remake society in both the American South and the Netherlands.” Modern secularism sprang “from a principle that substituted human in place of divine authority.” Modernity was, Dabney and Kuyper believed, de-Christianizing the West, “with disastrous results.” Both Kuyper and Dabney prioritized ordered liberty, and rejected the crown jewel of liberalism: individual rights. They preferred “social bond individualism,” essentially Christian communitarianism with a strong Protestant emphasis on economic freedom and individual human worth, “taught by God through general and special revelation and providentially established in local institutions, especially the household.”99. Sean Michael Lucas, Robert Lewis Dabney: A Southern Presbyterian Life (P&R Publishing, 2005), 236. Among the most aggressive rejections of the idea of secular education was Dabney’s 1879 essay, fittingly named “Secularized Education” in Libby’s Princeton Review. Dabney’s essay addressed his concerns about the changing nature of education during the nascent Gilded Age. He served as a professor at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, before moving to the University of Texas in 1883. Dabney’s body of work and his teaching prowess made their mark in his own time, and his voluminous works continue to be read by historians and some theologians; his Syllabus and Notes of the Course of Systematic and Polemic Theology ran to 887 pages of text. Dabney’s support for the Confederacy and comfort with biblical defenses of slaveholding understandably cause modern historians and theologians to treat his works with caution. Nonetheless, his erudition and vision of education deserve consideration in an era when educational institutions are fighting for mission, stability, and even their existence in the face of growing societal iconoclasm and increasingly ossified ideologies that control state universities.1010. Robert L. Dabney, “Secularized Education,” The Princeton Review (July-December, 1879): 377-400.
Religion, Dabney averred, was an antidote to ideological ossification that often occurred in colleges and universities. This sort of intellectual calcifying typifies much of American education in the second quarter of the twenty-first century. The late international studies professor Angelo Codevilla, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institute and at the Claremont Institute, argued that the modern Western ruling class had been formed by “an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits.” The taste and habits that inculcated university students over the last half-century “amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints.” The use of certain appropriate terms and the avoidance of wrong ones when referring to important cultural or social matters–what Codevilla called speaking the “in” language–ultimately “serves as a badge of identity” to maintain proper socio-cultural credentials in the regime.
Dabney, like Codevilla after him, understood that true liberal education was not credentialization in the service of maintaining a regime, but something entirely different. State education, warned Dabney, increasingly became education in the service of a faction. Buzzwords and faddish intellectual constructions were not transcendent or oriented towards the permanent things, but instead relied on unstable, quixotic societal moments and the state’s official approbation to maintain their place in intellectual life. The permanent things that underpinned a true liberal education all had divine origins, and so the truly educated person must understand the divine and theistic origins of learning. State-paid teachers who scrupulously avoided affirming or denying the divine origins of education would ultimately reduce their teaching to a mere shadow of what constituted true education. An educational regime that rejected or was agnostic on the question of the divine would ultimately have to be silent on the very foundations of liberal education. And the state, said Dabney, would mandate that silence. Liberal democratic societies, he warned, would become more censorious than despotic Rome ever was. Codevilla and Dabney believed that the best way to mitigate the power of the state to censure intellectual life was to keep parents involved in their children’s education. “Natural families,” wrote Codevilla, represented affections “into which government has difficulty intruding, and natural families educated the children they produce.” Because of this, the modern state and its education bureaucracy subaltern has done “its best to undermine marriage and to take as much authority from parents as it can.” Robert Lewis Dabney argued that while both parents and state educators were imperfect, the state could not feel parental love and would never be as self-denying and self-sacrificing as a parent. State-education, therefore, had no right or reason to assume the duties or prerogatives of parents.1111. Angelo M. Codevilla, The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It (New York, NY: Beaufort Books, 2023). Kindle, Chapter 2.
In 2026, a century downstream from Allen Oscar Hansen’s claims about liberalism and education, Protestant parents are reevaluating education, and returning to the Classical—and natural—aims that Protestant education prized until the twentieth century. Homeschooling and classical schooling are just two ways in which parents are taking back their rightful place in the educational order. Italian Reformer Girolamo Zanchi, notes David Haines, declared that the natural vocation of humans was the rearing and education of children. The promise of Protestant-influenced education is not, therefore, turning schools into factories of liberal democracy. It is creating spaces for humans to fulfill their generational duty to educate their children according to Classical and natural precepts. Anything less is neither Protestant nor an education.1212. David Haines, “Why Protestants Need Natural Law,” American Reformer (17 May 2022).
