American Education Was Founded upon Judeo-Christianity

Catholic monasteries  provided education to Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire,  almost singlehandedly until the Reformation.  

      Latin was the lingua franca that crossed all borders to bind students under a Judeo-Christian “common core.”  For more about how Christian churches started American education during Colonial times, read Eric Sloane’s  “The Little Red Schoolhouse,” as below:

       It is true that America’s earliest schools were established for religious reasons, mainly so that children could read the Bible and quote from it.   And there are those who now violently condemn this idea and criticize the early schools for having been overreligious.

    Yet without the available church schoolmasters and the only available book which happened to be the Bible, there would have been a whole century in America without any schools at all….

       In fact, the well-known “three Rs” (now representing “reading and ‘riting and ‘arithmetic”) was originally “reading and ‘riting and religion.”

     It does seem a pity, or even a disgrace, that the Bible, which began American education and taught so many lessons of morality just as important as arithmetic, should now be banned from most of our schooling.  It is, in my mind, bigotry in reverse.

     With the closing of the Colonial period and the waning of Puritanism, schools began to teach more than just reading and writing, and finally there was less involvement with the Bible.  But the job of teaching still lay heavily upon the church, sometimes simply for the want of a better source.