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PODCAST: | “Freedom to Learn:” Fighting for the Freedom to Learn

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It’s Freedom to Learn Week! Neal McCluskey and James Shuls join the podcast to discuss their new book.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Please follow or subscribe to Freedom to Learn on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes are released every Thursday!

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So glad that we’re talking about Freedom to Learn on Freedom to Learn.

James Shuls: Just to be clear, we were not fighting for your podcast, although it is a happy coincidence.

It is a great coincidence! And just to be clear, I’m not having you on the podcast just because of the title of your book. This was a really enjoyable read. You found 12 authors, including yourselves, to write 12 chapters, and you bring fascinating historical developments and colorful characters to life. What prompted you to write your chapters and to create this book?

Neal McCluskey: As is often the case with anything I do, it’s because I started to get aggravated by something. It has long stuck in my craw, first, that opponents of school choice love to say that school choice started with people trying to avoid integration after Brown v. Board of Education. In other words, that school choice is really about segregation and racism… But there’s another part of this: On the pro-school choice side, people always tend to say the modern school choice movement started with Milton Friedman, again in the 1950s. The history of school choice is much further back than the 50s.

James Shuls: My PhD is in education policy. You could say I’m a disciple of the great Patrick Wolf. I had been writing about school choice for a long time. And then one day, I came across a group called Citizens for Educational Freedom and Virgil Bloom, who was writing in the 50s and 60s all the way up until his death in 1990. He had a tremendous impact on the school choice literature, on the movement, and yet I had never heard of him. Bloom did tremendous work and gets almost absolutely no credit. Also, part of my effort was to recover some of the arguments that people used to make about school choice because I think they’re still relevant today.

Throughout the early chapters of the book, we learn about dame schools, parson schools, charity schools, old field schools, grammar schools, town schools, academies, night schools, Sunday schools, and, of course, common schools. As we march forward in history, we’ll talk about Catholic schools. There was a diversity of options that varied widely by a region’s history and predominant faith, and, as industrialization came along, by the needs of the local community. What were some of the objectives that these different types of schools hoped to achieve?

Neal McCluskey: A lot of people (historians who are actually really educationists) claim, basically, people were ignorant until Horace Mann introduced common schooling [in the 1830s]. No, Americans were not ignorant. There was a whole lot of education happening in a whole lot of different ways before this idea of common schooling or government-run schools. People wanted their kids to be literate; probably first and foremost so that they could understand the Bible and religion, but that was hardly the only thing. Around the same time, what is huge is newspapers and pamphlets, and people involved in political debates. All of that needs literacy. And so we actually had very rich education with all sorts of different aims, some religious, some political, some cultural. The important takeaway is that there’s lots of education with lots of different purposes because people are all different and they all have different things they need and want. And we had an education system that reflected that.

James Shuls: Adding to that, in many cases, those schools received some sort of public support. Whether it was through land or tax dollars, there wasn’t this clear demarcation between what was public and private. In early America, there wasn’t always the separation of church and state or the separation of public school and private school. It was a much more mixed system in early America.

Certainly, faith played a big part in those educational options early on. A number of your authors mentioned the Old Deluder Satan Act of 1647. James, you want to tell us what that was?

Satan’s goal is to delude you, to make you ignorant, right? So to combat Satan, the Massachusetts legislature said each community had to create schools to teach students to read the Bible so they could combat that “old deluder Satan.” So there’s clearly religious aims in the earliest school laws.

Neal McCluskey: Depending on the size of your town, you had to have a school or just a person to educate, and they weren’t expected to be free. People were expected to pay for them. So, when somebody tells you public schooling started with the Old Deluder Satan Act and just grew from there, the Old Deluder Satan Act was not like public schooling the way we think about it now. There also wasn’t compulsory schooling, although Massachusetts and Virginia, and others said, if you don’t educate your child at all, they can be sent somewhere for education, usually an apprenticeship. And that Old Deluder Satan wasn’t replicated outside of New England and wasn’t maintained in New England. We need to not hold it up the way that the educationists have, saying, “it’s all been one steady movement from ignorance to brilliance because of common schooling, and this was really the start.”

Apparently, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 includes “schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

Neal McCluskey: Clearly, people thought education was important. Notably, this was always tied into the creation or cultivation of virtuous citizens. And importantly, the Northwest Ordinance says education and religion will be supported. When people say, “that’s also the beginning of public schools,” then you should say there should be a religious component to public schools. It reflected that Americans valued education, and they didn’t see this bifurcation of public and private. Again, we need to be careful not to point to that and say, “see, we are just put on the road to government control of education, which is what really everybody wanted.” At that point in time, that was not an expectation.

In early education in America, “there was a great diversity of schooling options funded by a loose blend of public and private sources.” And then things started to change in the 1830s. What happened?

Neal McCluskey: Charlie Glenn is our big common school expert, and this is his chapter. Basically, you have, especially in New England, a change in the religion. It’s no longer all Puritan and Congregationalist, but it is more Unitarian. Horace Mann is an elite, and like many elites, he’s Unitarian. He didn’t like the old religion, and a lot of schools were religious.

In particular, he becomes alarmed because, at the beginning of industrialization in New England, he started to see people from outside of these urban and now burgeoning industrial areas coming in from the outskirts. And Horace Mann said, “ugh, these people are gross.” I mean, that’s basically what it came down to. He felt they were backwards, that they were uneducated, they had poor hygiene, and his goal was to try and shape these people into better citizens, safer citizens. It’s easy to bash Horace Mann, and I will certainly do some of that, but I think he really thought, “I have the answers; these people don’t, and I need to rescue these children.” If you read enough Horace Mann, you get sort of shocked by what a huge paternalist he is. And so he thought we needed common schools not just to educate kids, but to educate entire families.

So, for instance, he writes about how families should invite the teacher into their home so the teacher can educate all of them on such things as hand washing, which is reasonable, and also phrenology, which Horace Mann believed in, but is not as reasonable.

And so a lot of this was wanting to create schools that were common, that were run by elites, in order to take regular people and make them more like the elites. His goal was a paternalistic control of people he thought were backward more than anything else.

Right, so “shaping citizens by the state.” These schools were “liberating students from the influence of their parents.” Apparently, he thought intellectual content should be strictly subordinate to these other goals. He thought rather highly of himself and said something along the lines of the “common school is the greatest discovery made by man.”

Neal McCluskey: He was definitely a salesman because the idea of common schooling was not particularly popular. It was almost struck down not long after he gets into his position [in 1837] because people didn’t like the government telling him what to do. And there were people who disagreed with him on religion in particular, and said, “Wait a minute, you’re going to impose schooling on us that removes all the things we think are important in education and in religion, and we won’t accept that.”

Much of what he’s doing is a sales job, and a sales job often means making great pronouncements of everything your snake oil can do.

James Shuls: You bring up the point of common schools being to form the American citizen. The common schools were supported in large part by a lot of Protestants. The Protestants wanted to create a system of non-sectarian schools that had Protestant Bible reading that were Protestant in many ways. And that’s why we get this separate Catholic system, with the Catholics sort of rebelling against the public school system and creating their own system of schools. By and large, Protestant denominations bought into the common school movement and supported it because Protestants were the dominant class in America at that point in time. So if you go back and look at Protestant magazines and writing of the time, many of the prominent Protestants were supporting the common school movement. And that’s partly how it got the support that it had at that time, because they were pushing a religion in the schools that was the dominant religion of the United States. And then, of course, over time, all of that gets stripped out, and we’re left with a public school system that doesn’t have any Protestantism in it anymore.

But that vision at the beginning was to create a system that was religious. It just was a non-sectarian Protestant variety.

We need to talk about the role of immigration and the concerns about Catholics. Neal, you mentioned that Mann wasn’t necessarily universally beloved. There was some success and then pulling back on his mission, but ultimately, the common school model prevailed. So that was around the concern about all these Catholics coming in, right?

Neal McCluskey: Importantly, when Horace Mann gets started, there are not a lot of Catholics. People think it started with anti-Catholicism, but it really was more that he didn’t like people who weren’t like him. But it’s not long after that you have a lot of Catholics arrive. And as James said, the thought for most people at that time period was, well, a proper American is Protestant. And there were concerns that the Catholic Church was involved in politics. You have Catholics arrive, and that’s the first group that’s very different and can’t accept what Horace Mann’s compromise was on religion, which is that we will have the Bible present in the schools, but it won’t be interpreted in any way in the schools. And Catholics show up and say, “well, actually we kind of need it interpreted.”

And we don’t like the King James Bible and don’t make us recite it.

That’s right. “We want our Douay-Rheims Bible, and it would have annotations.” And the response is, “No, you can’t have that, plus real Americans don’t use that. They use the King James.” We end up with things like the Philadelphia Bible riots of the 1840s, which are two rounds of basically in-street warfare in the Philadelphia region over whose version of the Bible will be in the schools.

This system, which is supposed to unify diverse people, forces them into conflict.

It’s also important to note that people are worried about more than just Americans who are Catholic. They’re really worried about people who speak German and live in Germanic communities. And there was sort of a war on people speaking German, both in public schools and in private schools. The idea is everybody should have to be one version of what the right American is.

James Shuls: Today, I don’t think we can fully comprehend the differences between Protestants and Catholics and the animosity that existed. In the 1800s, there was legitimate anger between these two groups. In the riots that Neal’s talking about, people died. Protestant writings are calling the Pope the Antichrist. There was legitimate anger and animosity between these two groups that helped fuel some of this. It wasn’t only that, but it certainly was a huge boon or a catalyst to the support among Protestants for the common school system.

We have to talk about James Blaine before we can understand the new-ish dividing line between public and private schools. We’ve got this anti-Catholic, nativist, anti-immigrant fervor in the country, and along comes James Blaine. So, James, do you want to talk about who he was?

James Shuls: “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, the Continental Liar from the State of Maine.” That was the campaign slogan against him when he ran for president. Blaine wanted to push through Congress laws that would prohibit funding going to religious institutions, particularly sectarian institutions that were Catholic. And it fails narrowly at the federal level by just a handful of votes. But then Blaine amendments start getting pushed into state constitutions, prohibiting funds from going to religious institutions and targeted directly at Catholic institutions. Following the Civil War, there was a requirement for these types of amendments to be included in state constitutions as states re-entered the union. 37 states have explicit prohibitions on funding going to Catholic institutions and religious institutions. This ends up being a tremendous obstacle to school choice programs. (But you should read the chapter on the evolution of the law related to this, because it talks about how this is starting to be overturned in the courts.)

The Catholic leaders at the time weren’t just taking it. A bishop named John Hughes, who was mentioned in a number of chapters, was very active in the 1800s in ensuring that the Catholic schools were established and, as much as possible, receiving funding. James, we’re about to your period of history where there was a particular organization set up to help further that cause.

James Shuls: The organization you mentioned was called Citizens for Educational Freedom. They formed in St. Louis in 1959, really at the inspiration of a guy named Father Virgil Bloom. Father Bloom was a political science professor at Marquette University, and he had been writing about education in the 1950s from a perspective of civil rights, essentially saying religious schools, especially Catholic schools, shouldn’t lose the public benefit of funding for education simply because they’re religious or simply because parents choose. And he was suggesting people should organize and push for these rights. He was motivated by seeing the civil rights movement and the tremendous success that black Americans were having. He said religious Americans need to organize and fight in the same sort of way for our rights.

People today will say, “School choice is the civil rights issue of our time.” And the point is, no, it’s always been a civil rights issue. We have discriminated against people, Bloom argued, solely based on their choosing of a school. And when they choose not to send to the public school that they’re assigned to, they lose out on the public education benefit. And that’s particularly the case for people who want a Christian or religious school of some sort; they lose out on the public benefit because they choose. So Bloom writes this book in 1959, Freedom of Choice in Education. It helps launch Citizens for Educational Freedom movement in this tremendous push for school choice throughout the sixties.

You mentioned at the beginning of the podcast that some people like to say school choice was started by racists fighting against desegregation in the South, but if you look at Citizens for Educational Freedom, almost all of their members are in the North. They were pushing on all fronts, whether that was tuition support or money for books or money for buses or all kinds of things.

And yet we’re told today, this all started because of either Friedman or the racists in the South. And the record’s clear that that’s simply not the case. There was tremendous support for school choice, and when Bloom enters the picture in the fifties, he’s building on all of the movement that’s happened before.

He’s using these arguments around rights to make a case for school choice that launches a movement that really has significant implications. It’s part of the reason we have Title I funds, the federal government funds that are allowed to go to private schools, partly because of this movement that you see from Bloom and Citizens for Educational Freedom.

Federal funds are allowed to go to [services provided to] students enrolled in non-public schools so that those students can benefit both from Title I and IDEA.

James Shuls: Right, but that wasn’t given, right? When those laws were being proposed, and the unions were supporting them, they did not want any funds going to private or non-public schools. And that was a fight that Citizens for Educational Freedom was a part of, and so were other groups.

James, we do need to address the accusations that the Massive Resistance — the closing of public schools, and then providing vouchers for white students to attend private academies — has something to do with the education freedom movement. You refer to it as a flash in the pan and a stain.

James Shuls: The real purpose in the South, the thing that they wanted, was segregated public schools. That’s what they were fighting for. They were not fighting for educational freedom in the same way that Neal and I are fighting for educational freedom — for people to have the ability to choose the school that aligns with their values and their vision of a quality education.

They were fighting for segregated public schools. And when they would get challenged when they wouldn’t integrate schools, the southern legislatures, especially in Virginia, which is the one I highlight in the chapter, would close the public schools.

It wasn’t like they were integrating them and then also creating some sort of voucher program to expand educational opportunities. No, they closed public schools, and then they also offered vouchers to people that could be used to go to private schools. So the choice people were making wasn’t between an integrated public school and a segregated private school. It was between no school and a private school. And so do we have segregation academies pop up? Yes. And were some of them there because their mission was to serve white students? Yes. But that wasn’t the whole story.

You have to acknowledge the whole story that there were racists, there were segregationists. But the primary effort and goal for them was to create a segregated public school system.

The idea of using vouchers to help support this resistance in the South, it’s true that it occurred, it’s true that there are racist elements to it, but every program that was created with racist intent was struck down. It was unconstitutional in the same way that segregated public schools were unconstitutional. So that’s the flash in the pan. They created them, they’re struck down, they’re no more.

You cannot racially segregate private schools today. Those laws of the 50s or 60s do not resemble the laws of today. They’re not the forebearers. They’re a flash in the pan, and they’re a stain that we have to deal with, but they’re not the whole story.

You point out that at the time that this was happening, the Virginia Catholic schools were desegregating.

James Shuls: Right. There’s a Protestant magazine that was anti-Catholic schools and it was affiliated with Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. So the Protestants said, “those Catholics who normally always are begging for public dollars, they’re not involved with this voucher movement in the South right now.” Some of those voucher programs were not allowing dollars to go to private schools like Catholic schools. And so the Catholics were actually advocating against some of these voucher programs because they weren’t included in them, and they were already desegregated or in the process of desegregating in many of these states. And so you had an admission by the Protestants who were opposed to vouchers that, on this matter, the Catholics in the South were actually pretty good.

This book has a wonderful title, Fighting for the Freedom to Learn. Where can people find it?

Neal McCluskey: It was moving so fast for a little while, it was out of stock on Amazon. If you see that, you can always go to Cato’s website.

How can people follow y’all’s work?

James Shuls: You can follow me on Twitter @shulsie.

Neal McCluskey: @NealMcCluskey. You can also go to the Center for Educational Freedom at Cato. Definitely check out the book and all the contributors.

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