education were a secular concern? The Founding Fathers saw education and faith as inseparable. Schools were established in Boston as early as 1635, and in 1 647the Massachusetts General Court passed an act requiring towns within its jurisdiction to set up public schools. Harvard itself had been founded eleven years earlier. These institutions were run entirely by religious bodies, were instruments of the Church and were designed to serve religion. The pattern varied, but the principle was the same throughout the early states. Virginia set up the future William and Mary College in these terms (1661): ‘Whereas the want of able and faithful ministers deprives us of those great blessings and mercies that always attend upon the service of God, be it enacted that for the advance of learning, education of youth, supply of the ministry, and promotion of piety, there be land taken up or purchased for a college and free school.' This tendency was reinforced during the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s. However, at about the same time, American Christian rationalists were finding a way out of the dilemma. Benjamin Franklin's Proposal Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania (1749) put forward a scheme to treat religion as one subject in the curriculum, and relate it to character-training. Similar theories were advanced by Jonathan Edwards when President of Princeton. This was the solution adopted when the modern American public school movement, directed by Horace Mann, came into existence in the nineteenth century. The State took over financial responsibility for the education of the new millions by absorbing all primary and secondary education but not (after the Dartmouth decision of 1819) of higher education, where independent colleges survived side by side with state universities. Thus the true American public school was non-sectarian from the very beginning. But it was not non-religious. Mann thought religious instructions should be taken ‘to the extremist verge to which it can be carried without invading those rights of conscience which are established by the laws of God, and guaranteed by the constitution of the state’. What the schools got was not so much nondenominational religion as a kind of generalized Protestantism, based on the Bible. As Mann put it, in his final report: ‘That our public schools are not theological seminaries is admitted. . . . but our system earnestly inculcates all Christian morals; it founds its morals on the basis of religion; it welcomes the religion of the Bible; it allows it to do what it is allowed to do in no other system, to speak for itself’ Hence, in the American system, the school supplied Christian 'character-building’ and the parents, at home, topped up with sectarian trimmings. Naturally there were objections. The Reverend F. A. Newton, on behalf of some Episcopalians, argued that 'a book upon politics, morals or religion, containing no party or sectarian views, will be apt to contain no distinctive views of any kind, and will be likely to leave the mind in a state of doubt and skepticism, much more to be deplored than any party or sectarian bias.’ This kind of point could be brushed aside. More serious, however, as America increasingly took on the characteristics of a secular state, which she was, ab initio, by definition, and as she accepted millions of non-Protestants, especially Catholics and Jews, was the association of moral character-building in the schools with specifically Protestant labels. Gradually, and especially in the big cities, religion as such was eased out of the schools. As the Presbyterian Samuel T. Spear wrote (1870): ‘The state, being democratic in its constitution, and consequently having no religion to which it does or can give any legal sanction, should not and cannot, except by manifest inconsistency, introduce either religious or irreligious teaching into a system of popular education which it authorizes, enforces and for the support of which it taxes all the people in common.’ But something had to supply the cultural machinery by which the immigrant millions were turned into Americans; and, Spears added, the schools had to have some spiritual foundation. Therefore, since the State was not Christian but republican, republicanism should constitute it. The solution was neat, since in effect republicanism was based on the Protestant ethical and moral consensus, which was what the schools already taught - the two concepts stood or fell together. So in this way the American way of life began to function as the operative creed of the public schools, and it was gradually accepted as the official philosophy 114