2022 saw conservative gains in education issues. However, they may be short-lived.

On the surface, 2022 appears to have been a triumph for conservatives in courts and schools, as the U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings on religion and education join other precedent-shattering opinions on abortion rights and gun control. The school’s decision seemed to fulfill a long-held conservative dream of pushing prayer back into public classrooms and diverting tax dollars into distinctly religious schools.

But the wording of these decisions, particularly Judge Neil M. Gorsuch’s majority decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, points to a different conclusion. These decisions open the door to a secular vision of America’s public schools by emphasizing the need to look at history, especially the original intentions of the founders, when making decisions about the role of religion in public schools. I opened it without realizing it.

At Kennedy, football coaches claimed the right to lead their students to prayer after football games. For example, the Supreme Court ruled in 2000 that students cannot lead prayers at public school football games. It seems that teachers and coaches were not able to do the same.

To circumvent that precedent, Gorsuch turned to the 1963 decision, Abington School District v. Schempp, but turned it upside down. “”[T]Gorsuch wrote, citing Judge William Brennan’s oft-cited concurring opinion in the Schempp case.[d ] History and faithful reflection[t] Understanding of the Founding Fathers. “

This made Gorsuch wish to cram prayer into public schools. .

But despite Gorsuch’s efforts, the actual history was more complex, and the founders were clearly mixed about the proper role of religion in public schools.

For one thing, talking about the “public schools” of the 1780s and 1790s is utterly anachronistic. They did not exist in any recognizable form. But the founding generation had a range of different visions of the future of public schools and how they should function.

Some founders, such as Thomas Jefferson, explicitly and deliberately banned religion from the public schools they envisioned. provided a vision of what it would be like. He listed the subjects to be taught as “Latin and Greek, English grammar, geography, and the higher parts of numbers (arithmetic),” and markedly omitted instruction on religious ideas. The omission was intentional. In 1781, Jefferson wrote that “instead of handing out Scriptures and Scriptures to schoolchildren,” we must learn “the most useful facts from the history of Greece, Rome, Europe, and America.”

Jefferson was not alone. Noted lexicographer and textbook author Noah Webster envisioned public schools as distinctly civic rather than religious institutions. In his early textbooks, Webster consulted old classics and removed references to God and Christianity. For example, in his early readership, Webster took the famous Puritan opening line from his primer on England. With Adam’s fall, we sinned against all men. Webster replaced it with a more playful, American and worldly line. It was an apple pie made by a chef. “

Indeed, some prominent founders believed that a true American public school should be inculcated with Christianity. When Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia envisioned the new system of public schools, he sketched a definition of public education that some of today’s conservatives might like. As Rush explained, “The only basis for a useful education in the Republic is to be founded on religion.”

But even Rush made some provisions to ensure that the government’s needs were given priority in all matters of education. and their careers are guided first by the needs of the government and second by their own private desires. You must be taught to “forget”.

Moreover, although the founders did not hold a single opinion about the role of religion in schools, they tended to agree on two major issues. Americans in the late 1700s and early 1800s usually agreed that public school religion should be positively “non-denominational,” according to warped language. That is, public schools must eliminate religious ideas that were considered controversial at the time, or ideas that are specific only to certain religious groups and not widely shared as general moral truths. It meant that I had to.

Did Christians need adult baptism, as many Baptists claimed? Did Christians really lack free will, as some Congregationalists still preached? Was Jesus merely a noble teacher of morality, as the deists believed? There was a nature The founders disagreed on many points, but agreed that public schools must diligently avoid any hint of religious controversy.

And perhaps more importantly, the Founding Fathers, and the Founding Mother and her children agreed that for religious reasons, truly public schools cannot be run by the church. They believed public schools should promote a purely public purpose. They thought public schools had to teach citizens how to protect the republic, not how to save souls.

This year’s Supreme Court ruling violates these basic principles. They stuff controversial religious ideas into public schools and pour public money into church schools. Instead of answering difficult questions about the proper role of religion in public schools, Gorsuch’s remarks only raise a number of new and unsolvable dilemmas.

If we were to draw a line today based on the dreams of the founding generation, would that mean broadly supporting Rush’s Christian schools, where families lose the right to control their children’s education? Does it mean that the Bible takes a back seat to all other subjects?

The founders did not provide clear guidance or consensus on the issue, making it a real problem for conservatives today. If the courts follow Gorsuch’s opinion and look to the Founding Fathers for answers, they will certainly find views in favor of the more secular schools. They will oppose sending taxes to church schools. What seems to be a triumph of conservative ideas will instead turn into a denial of a controversial decree.

Adam Lartz Professor of Education at Binghamton University (SUNY), ‘Fundamentalist U. and ‘Reformer of Other Schools’.

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