On April 1, as a room full of elementary students looked on, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders touted the successes of Arkansas’ year-old education freedom accounts, otherwise known as school vouchers.
Sanders noted that the success of the voucher program’s first year among military families enabled Fort Smith’s Harvest Time Academy to add a grade level next year. The private, Christian preschool and elementary school was started by Harvest Time Church. It’s one of about 100 schools that benefited from the new voucher system in its first year.
The occasion also marked the opening of the application period for the EFA program’s second phase. Eligibility in the coming school year expands to include students at “D”-rated public schools and children of veterans, military reservists or first responders. The state will pay almost $7,000 per voucher recipient in the 2024-25 school year.
In 2025-26, all Arkansas school-age children will be eligible to participate in the voucher program.
For supporters of public education, the continued spending of tax dollars on religious indoctrination remains a cause for dismay.
The governor’s presence at a private school with a clear religious mission demonstrates her preference for schooling that stresses a particular faith. Harvest Time Academy’s website notes: “One primary objective is to see our students grow spiritually. This is reinforced in every subject, not just Bible class or chapels.”
The spread of voucher programs that shift public funds to private, religious schools in several states threatens the very foundation of public education.
As a nation, we’ve been here before.
Almost from the beginning, tension existed between public schools and religion.
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As the idea of compulsory, taxpayer-funded public education began to take root in the mid-1800s, its leading supporters sought to keep political and sectarian disagreements out of the schools.
“Horace Mann, the first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, and other leaders of the common school movement were terrified by the prospect of sectarian religious divides and partisan politics blowing up what was a fragile new experiment in universal education at public expense,” education historian and Carleton College professor Jeffrey Aaron Snyder wrote in a September 2022 essay.
Mann wanted education to be more than indoctrination and made sure to ban political proselytizing by educators while giving students lessons in the civic foundations of the country: the Constitution, the three branches of government and elections, Snyder wrote in “Education and Indoctrination” in The Point magazine.
Regarding religion, Mann asserted that schools would inculcate Christian morals but not act as theological seminaries or arbiters of religious conflicts.
Almost immediately, this seemingly nondenominational and nonpartisan approach to education ran into trouble, because of its Protestant roots and because of immigration. By 1840, Ireland accounted for one of every three immigrants to the United States. As with many immigrant groups over the country’s history, the mostly Catholic Irish faced hostility and discrimination from the Protestant majority.
“In the fledgling public schools of Boston, New York and Philadelphia, Catholics found that the ostensibly nonsectarian common-school curriculum was in fact steeped in Protestantism,” Snyder wrote. “Moreover, textbooks consistently denounced ‘popery,’ a synonym for Roman Catholicism, which Catholics themselves viewed as a term of ‘insult and contempt.’”
In 1840, an influential New York City bishop in an open letter, wrote: “We are unwilling to pay taxes for the purpose of destroying our religion in the minds of our children.” In a petition to city aldermen, Catholics “lamented that the Catholic children who attended public schools ‘become intractable, disobedient, and even contemptuous towards their parents,’ and said they could not in good conscience entrust their children to the public schools,” according to Snyder.
In 1842, the Catholic bishop of Philadelphia, concerned that children were being forced to read the King James Bible, asked the school board to allow Catholic children to read the Douay version used by Roman Catholics. School officials ordered that no child should be forced to participate in religious activities and that children could read whichever version of the Bible their parents wished.
You’d think that might have resolved the matter, but no, the move only inflamed Protestant evangelicals and anti-immigrant residents.
In 1844, the tensions erupted into two significant riots. The first occurred in early May after a Protestant group held a meeting in a predominantly Irish suburb, provoking a group of Irish residents to attack the speakers platform. In two days of intermittent mob violence, 14 people were killed and 50 injured, and two Catholic churches and a convent were burned. Nevertheless, a grand jury blamed the Catholics for trying to exclude the Bible from public schools.
Two months later, more sectarian violence broke out in Philadelphia. From July 5 through July 8, anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic mobs attacked a Catholic church, firing a cannon into a wall. Almost 5,000 soldiers from the Pennsylvania militia were used to quell the chaos but not until soldiers and rioters exchanged cannon and musket fire. The fighting ended on July 8 with 15 people, rioters and soldiers, dead.
Again, a grand jury blamed the Catholics for daring to arm themselves against threats of violence, but it supported the militia’s response.
Reciting this history should remind everyone that, from the beginning, the notion of nonreligious, nonpartisan education has been attacked by groups and individuals of all persuasions who fear that public schools are indoctrinating their children.
From opposition to the teaching of evolution to efforts to remove insufficiently patriotic textbooks to sex education bans to today’s laws seeking to stamp out “critical race theory,” a parents-know-best attitude has guided the backlash even when parents aren’t pushing the agenda.
U.S. Supreme Court decisions and evolving educational approaches have until recently broadened public education, encouraged open inquiry among students and helped them develop the ability to think critically about information they receive. But social and legislative forces, from across the political spectrum, seem to be closing the door on both thinking clearly and evidence-based conclusions.
This trend is once again allowing religion to bully its way into the public education tent to the detriment of public schools. Just last week, the Oklahoma Supreme Court heard arguments in a case involving a Catholic charter school, which would be the first religious public charter school in the nation if it prevails.
Religious teachings belong in the home, church, or Sunday school and catechism classes, not in the public school classroom.
Otherwise we are truly trying to indoctrinate rather than educate.
