This yr is the centennial of J. Gresham Machen’s magnum opus, Christianity and Liberalism.
Initially revealed in 1923, Machen wrote the guide in response to a rising tide of theological liberalism and modernism in the USA. Machen’s views finally led him out of his denomination and out of Princeton Seminary, each of which accepted extra liberal and modernist tendencies, and led him to assist discovered two enduring establishments—Westminster Theological Seminary (1929) and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (1936).
Whereas Machen’s achievements are mainly theological, he wrote and spoke extensively about training, the place he noticed a few of the deteriorating results of liberalism. 100 years of coverage and analysis have confirmed Machen prescient in his views on training coverage, which may largely be grouped into three themes: resistance in opposition to standardization, opposition to centralization, and insistence on parental selection.
Resistance Towards Standardization
First, Machen resisted developments to standardize each the instructing career and pupil studying. The Lusk Legal guidelines in New York, for instance, required academics to acquire certification from the commissioner of training and made them topic to state visitation. Although repealed in 1923, lower than two years after they handed, the spirit of the Lusk Legal guidelines endures. Almost each state requires academics to acquire some certification, typically along with holding a level within the discipline of training, even supposing analysis fails to doc proof of a significant hyperlink between certification and instructor high quality.
Machen believed the modernist development of coaching academics within the science of training, fairly than with content material of their disciplines, marked a basic shift within the understanding of what instructing is. He lamented that the first preparation of recent academics was not “to check the topic that he’s going to show. As an alternative of finding out the topic that he’s going to show, he research ‘training.’”
In Machen’s view, the good hazard in standardization and in emphasizing methodology over content material is that it could place the kid “below the management of psychological specialists, themselves with out the slightest acquaintance with the upper realms of human life, who proceed to stop any such acquaintance being gained by those that come below their care.”
Treating training as a mechanistic course of would lead to “mental in addition to ethical decline” as a result of in such a context, morality relies “upon expertise, as an alternative of upon an absolute distinction between proper and mistaken,” Machen stated in a 1926 deal with to the Sentinels of the Republic, a libertarian group devoted to resisting federal overreach.
To compensate for the meagerness of character formation in fashionable training, psychological specialists as an alternative attempt to inject civic and ethical values right into a standardized, secularized curriculum. Machen wrote about such “morality codes” in a 1925 essay titled “Reforming the Authorities Colleges.” He noticed that these codes have been “making the state of affairs tenfold worse; removed from checking the ravages of immorality, they’re for essentially the most half themselves non-moral on the root.” Immediately, morality codes have many faces, however the identical empty core. Social and emotional studying (SEL), for instance, offers analogs for cardinal virtues promoted by classical and Christian training, however absent the thick ethical context of faith.
Opposition to Centralization
Machen was additionally against the centralization of oversight of training within the federal authorities, a pure extension of his resistance to standardization. In February 1926, a month after his Sentinels deal with, Machen supplied professional testimony on behalf of the Sentinels for a Congressional listening to coping with a number of points, together with the formation of a federal Division of Training, which he predicted that if enacted, can be “the worst destiny into which any nation can fall.” Whereas he helped defeat the proposal for a federal division, his victory was merely non permanent, as a federal division of training would finally be shaped as a cabinet-level division in 1980.
Machen was not being hyperbolic in his evaluation. For the reason that institution of the primary federal company in 1867, which began with solely a commissioner and a employees of three, the federal position in training has ballooned. For 2023–24, the Division of Training budgeted over $270 billion in spending—all of the extra alarming when one considers that the Division of Training accounts for under three-fifths of all federal spending on training. Once more, Machen has been vindicated by analysis, which has didn’t doc a dependable hyperlink between spending and pupil outcomes.
A typical argument for centralized management over training, each in Machen’s day and at present, is definitely addressed. The notion that the federal government should management training with a purpose to inculcate fascinating civic values in its citizenry—“that the youngsters belong to the State, that their training should be supplied for by the State in a means that makes for the State’s welfare,” as Machen described to the Sentinels. But the irony of this precept is that, although meant to arrange college students to reside out their civil liberties, it “is inimical at each step to liberty.” Analysis evaluating the civic outcomes of personal faculties and public faculties persistently paperwork a non-public faculty benefit with respect to political data, civic engagement, and different civic outcomes. The “private, free, particular person character of training” couldn’t be preserved below centralized management.
Non-public faculty leaders typically determine the looming menace of future rules as a purpose for not taking part in non-public faculty selection applications.
Insistence on Parental Alternative
If the federal government mustn’t oversee training, who then ought to oversee a toddler’s training? For Machen, the reply was unequivocally the kid’s mother and father.
Machen was a extremely educated particular person. He studied Classics at Johns Hopkins College, philosophy at Princeton College, and theology at Princeton Seminary. He additionally hung out finding out overseas at universities in Marburg and Göttingen in Germany earlier than accepting an instructional submit at Princeton Theological Seminary. But for all his coaching and expertise with training, he thought a lot of the affect of his mother and father, and notably his mom, on his coaching. “I didn’t get my data of the Bible from Sunday Faculty or from another faculty, however I received it on Sunday afternoons with my mom at residence.”
So treasured is the connection between mother and father and their youngsters that Machen acknowledged, “In the event you give the bureaucrats the youngsters, you would possibly simply as effectively give them every part else.”
Efforts to undermine parental management of training have been already in progress on the time Machen was writing Christianity and Liberalism. In Oregon, the Obligatory Training Act (1922) required youngsters to attend public faculty. Many non secular organizations objected to the legislation on the grounds that it took away mother and father’ proper to enroll their youngsters in non secular non-public faculties, threatening to “wip[e] out of existence” Christian faculties and personal faculties. Whereas many Protestants supported these and different anti-Catholic training measures, Machen offers a notable instance of a Protestant public mental who favored non secular liberty in training, even for teams outdoors of his private religion.
The Supreme Court docket’s unanimous ruling in Pierce v. Society of Sisters in 1925, two years after the publication of Christianity and Liberalism, protected the mother and father’ proper to make selections a few youngster’s training. Machen would reference the bulk opinion of the court docket in his 1926 Sentinels deal with, “As Justice McReynolds stated within the nice resolution within the Oregon faculty case, the kid, in America, will not be the mere creature of the state—an amazing precept which I feel contains all that we’re right here endeavoring to keep up.”
Machen argues for parental selection on precept, however empirical analysis helps the declare that oldsters must have larger company over their youngster’s training. The weight of proof on parental faculty selection for each non-public and public selection concludes it improves pupil studying outcomes. Past the classroom, attending a parent-preferred faculty improves long-run outcomes together with well being and labor market outcomes, even when controlling for pupil check scores and faculty high quality. These findings could also be associated to the truth that, although mother and father might differ as to their prime purpose for selecting a college, they invariably worth pupil studying and teachers. Mother and father of personal Christian faculty college students, for instance, prioritize non secular formation when selecting a college, however contemplate tutorial high quality almost as extremely.
Training Coverage Immediately
The yr of Machen has additionally been the yr of common faculty selection, with seven state legislatures passing new faculty selection payments and ten states increasing current applications. Eight of those applications have common eligibility. Given Machen’s views on standardization, centralization, and parental selection in training, how would he really feel about reforms in training coverage at present?
There are two potential points that Machen would possibly elevate with faculty selection coverage reforms at present. The primary concern is one in every of standardization. Almost the entire applications enacted or expanded in 2023 embrace a requirement that funds spent on tuition should be spent at an accredited program. Such rules have the tendency to scale back range and innovation in training, in addition to to dissuade participation of high-quality non-public faculties. In addition they channel college students into established applications, fairly than stimulating the creation of recent revolutionary and entrepreneurial faculties.
The second is said to spending. As he testified earlier than Congress, “cash given for training, it doesn’t matter what individuals say, at all times has a string tied to it. That seems in presents of cash by non-public foundations, and it seems much more, in fact, when the present comes from the Federal Authorities, which has already been encroaching to such an extent upon the powers of the States.”
The query of future rules is an actual concern. Non-public faculty leaders typically determine the looming menace of future rules as a purpose for not taking part in non-public faculty selection applications. Alternatively, the spending concern is mitigated by the truth that non-public faculty selection applications save taxpayers cash. One analysis of 40 non-public faculty selection applications estimated that these applications saved taxpayers upwards of $28.3 billion. That is potential as a result of these applications are funded at lower than full per pupil spending on public faculty college students.
Past these considerations, Machen would have supported these reforms on the premise that they improve competitors throughout faculties. As he acknowledged to the Sentinels, “There must be limitless competitors within the sphere of training between one State and one other State and between State faculties and personal faculties.”
To be clear, Machen was not categorically against public faculties. “A public-school system, in itself, is certainly of monumental profit to the race,” he wrote in Christianity and Liberalism. Based on historian D. G. Hart, Machen “opposed Bible studying and faculty prayer in public faculties as a result of these practices violated the liberties of non-Christians.” However a monopolistic public faculty system, left unchecked by the “completely free chance of the competitors of personal faculties,” would turn out to be “essentially the most good instrument of tyranny which has but been devised.”
On this, Machen anticipates the case for college selection that might be additional developed by economist Milton Friedman who in 1955 wrote, “The separation of a kid from a mother or father who can not pay for the minimal required training is clearly inconsistent with our reliance on the household as the fundamental social unit and our perception within the freedom of the person.”
For Machen, the good profit of those faculty selection reforms was that they’d empower mother and father to supervise their youngsters’s training. As he acknowledged to the Sentinels, the hope is that “we might return to the precept of freedom for particular person mother and father within the training of their youngsters in accordance with their conscience.” Faculty selection insurance policies enacted and expanded this yr promote this noble finish and function an sudden tribute to Machen on the hundredth anniversary of Christianity and Liberalism.
