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CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIAN STRATEGIES IN EDUCATION l 889 of the American Church (1994). History and insight into the work of Catholic nuns over the centuries can be found in Jo Ann Kay McNamara’s Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (1996). For the first comprehensive study of the colleges founded by nuns in the United States, turn to Catholic Women’s Colleges in America (2002), ed. Tracy Schier and Cynthia Russett. In this work, thirteen scholars examine the colleges from a variety of historical, educational, and sociological perspectives, including Mary J. Oates, “Sisterhoods and Catholic Higher Education, 1890–1960”; and Dorothy M. Brown and Carol Hurd Green, “Making It: Stories of Persistence and Success.” Older works also shed light on these institutions, including Thomas Woody’s A History of Women’s Education in the United States (1966) and Sister Mariella Bowler’s Catholic University dissertation, “A History of Catholic Colleges for Women in the United States of America” (1933). Individual histories of a number of the institutions are also available. CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIAN STRATEGIES IN EDUCATION James C. Carper and Brian D. Ray SINCE ITS GENESIS during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, public education often has been the subject of heated debate and controversy. In the years following the turbulent 1960s, many conservative Protestants have been critical of public education that they believe embodies a worldview—often labeled “secular humanism”—hostile to their Christian beliefs. “It’s here, Jennie. Humanism in Hawkins County.” So spoke Vick Frost, a leader in the Hawkins County, Tennessee, textbook protest in the early 1980s (Bates, 19). While some of these critics have attempted either to purge the schools of offending teachings and practices or to reintroduce theistic perspectives, other conservative Christians have forsaken their long-standing commitment to the public schools. They left the system to establish Christian day schools or to educate their children at home. Women have played key roles in these controversies and have been prominent in the burgeoning home school movement. Prior to the creation of modern public schooling in the mid-1800s, the rich religious diversity that characterized overwhelmingly Protestant early America (Roman Catholics numbered about 25,000 at the time of the Revolution) was matched by an equally rich diversity of educational arrangements. With few exceptions (namely, when unable or unwilling to direct their children ’s instruction and upbringing) mothers and fathers fashioned an education for their offspring that embodied their religious beliefs. For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the family was the primary unit of social organization and the most important educational agency. As historian Steven Mintz and anthropologist Susan Kellogg point out: Three centuries ago the American family was the fundamental economic, educational, political, social and religious unit of society. The family, not the isolated individual, was the unit of which church and state were made. The household was not only the locus of production, it was also the institution primarily responsible for the education of children, the transfer of craft skills, and the care of the elderly and infirm. (xiv) During the colonial period, then, mothers and fathers generally bore the primary responsibility for the education of their own children and frequently those who had been “fostered out” from other families. Although most white parents sent their offspring to school for short periods of time, much education in religion, morals , and literacy took place in the church and household. When seventeenth- and eighteenth-century parents chose to send their children to school, their experience was quite different from that of parents today. Schooling was unsystematic, largely unregulated, discontinuous, uncontroversial, noncompulsory, and primarily the product of an individual, local community, or church efforts. The colonial education landscape was dotted with a wide variety of institutions, including town schools in New England; denominational institutions (e.g., Quaker, Presbyterian, and Lutheran in the middle colonies); old-field schools established by farm families on fallow tracts of land in the South; and academies, institutions operated by denominations, individuals, or communities that provided formal education beyond the elementary level and appeared throughout the provinces after 1750. With the exception of dame schools, in which New England women taught reading, writing, arithmetic , and Protestant Christian doctrines to young neighborhood boys and girls (most of whom received little additional formal education) in their home for a small fee, most colonial schools were conducted by men. Although parents increasingly looked to schools to carry out what had once been primarily a family responsibility and sent more of their...

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