On educating a Republic(an)

I started going to church again with a friend on sporadic Sundays. I never did embrace theology, but I appreciate the moral teachings of Christianity. As my mother and her mother would say, I would consider myself “christian with a little ‘c’.”

In high school, chapel was a daily and mandatory affair. I would mentally filter out most of it and hope the homily was being given by a favorite or funny teacher. But having returned to Episcopalian services after several years, I discovered that they resonated in a new way. The homily reminded me of the spoken lesson at the beginning of Headspace meditations. The choir performed a small concert of hymns. Chanting the Nicene Creed in unison built an unanimous atmosphere. And after a service, I’ll chat with new friends over coffee and pastries.

If you put theology aside, worship services like these offer a moral nourishment and community spirit that we could use more of.

Today, roughly 30% of Americans describe themselves as non-religious - agnostic, atheist, or “nothing in particular.” Researchers call us lost souls the “nones.” Many “nones” have had negative experiences with religion, dislike the leaders, the politics, and are exhausted of hypocrisy amongst its worshippers. Of course, almost none of the “nones” attend religious services.

But concerningly, Pew Research found that “nones” are also less likely to be engaged civically across several measures, although the relationship is complicated. 17% of “nones” engaged in any volunteering compared to 41% who attend at least monthly services. Our “nothing in particular” subset expressed their extra apathy by voting roughly 40% less frequently (31% vs 50%) than everyone else in the 2022 midterms.

Did the decline of religion in America cause a decline in civic engagement? Or maybe the rapid increase in “nones” is a byproduct of a widespread, all-time-low trust in institutions. It’s hard to pinpoint, but the correlation between religious and civic engagement isn’t. Religion, by and large, reinforces civic values.

Now think of a fiery Baptist preacher warning you about your inevitable march toward damnation, and you'll get a sense of how Horace Mann, the “Father of American Education,” evangelized similar concerns about civic neglect 200 years ago. Without a process to develop informed citizens, he stressed, self-interest and political factionalism would naturally grow unchecked until the United States could no longer function. How can we move forward if everyone only cares about their own outcome? “Compared with our fathers”, he lamented, “we have become a most mercenary race.”1

Born just 20 years after the United States of America, Mann believed the lack of any policy to instill civic engagement in citizens was a critical flaw in the design of the new Republic. The Founders were too optimistic that the Constitution alone could safeguard democratic norms. After all, democracy wasn’t humanity's default setting.

To solve for that, Horace Mann dedicated his life to transforming American public schools into civic institutions. As Secretary of the newly-created Massachusetts Board of Education, he proposed that the goal of education should be to engender a “common spirit” and baseline consensus amongst citizens. Ultimately, such deep consensus would cause political strife to be replaced by pragmatic, cooperative decision-making2 - both an admirable and utopian end state.

Mann also argued that public education must be required at an early age so that the detrimental biases that children inherit from their parents could be counteracted with “redeeming influences.”3 And because we all live in the same democracy, this education could not be optional:

As each citizen is to participate in the power of governing others, it is an essential preliminary, that he should be imbued with a feeling for the wants, and a sense of the rights, of those whom he is to govern.4

Mann had his share of detractors, but he also achieved a minor celebrity status in his time. Speaking at a July 4th occasion in Boston in 1842, Mann brought the house down with thunderous applause when he proclaimed his vision for public education:

Collect whatever of talent, or erudition, or eloquence, or authority, the broad land can supply, and go forth, AND TEACH THIS PEOPLE.5

Mann’s vision for America’s classroom remains compelling today. He fought for everyone’s ability to participate in democracy, not just the elite, and criticized private schools as a threat to social cohesion. And he refused to bend towards relativism, stressing that some ways of engaging in democracy are more productive than others. That seems like a welcome lesson in an age of social justice warriors and conspiracy theorists.

But while Mann’s fear of democratic decline has endured, his utilitarian vision for education lost favor to the liberal arts method. In a liberal arts education, civic virtue is trusted to arise naturally from intellectual growth, a view that political scientist Bob Taylor defends in his review of Mann’s “troubling” legacy. Taylor points out that many of the same qualities useful to civics, such as empathy, openness to ideas, and an ability to question assumptions, are broadly useful in life.6

Taylor’s view also echoes John Stuart Mill, the famous British philosopher and once rector of the University of St. Andrews. If Mann’s goal was to teach the “right” values, Mill instead sought to develop conscientious students who could reason through challenges when right and wrong were not always so clear.7 His choice of textbook was classical Greek and Roman literature, while Mann saw works of fiction as irrelevant and self-indulgent8.

Modern America continues to debate how practical education should really be. The liberal arts education is once again being challenged by a Mann-like utilitarian focus on STEM careers. We half-joke about the value of a PhD in English when we live in the age of artificial intelligence. I imagine it must be difficult for some parents to trust in the indirect benefits of the liberal arts when their kids opt to learn Mozart operas over linear algebra. Even if Mozart can teach you a lot about relationships, the yin-yang of dissonance and harmony, and enough stories to be fun at parties.

If we distill the common thread between Mann, Taylor, and Mill, then we might say education, at its core, helps us break the default focus on ourselves and learn to care for each other.

Let that theory marinade. Perhaps education, in all forms, is how we quietly develop an awareness that real freedom comes from leaning into our communities, not building our individual kingdoms of comfort. If we all train our focus more outward, Mann’s vision of an apolitical future would feel a bit closer.

David Foster Wallace summed it up in a way only he could, in his 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College:

And I submit that this is what the real, no-shit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.

Seen in that light, the lines between religious virtue, civic virtue and intellectual virtue seem to blur. What we’re left with is moral action, which is a fundamentally outward-oriented concept. In turn, we can recast civics as the continual process of learning from, and collaborating with each other—grounded in an openness to new experiences and perspectives. We learn to advocate for long-term outcomes over short-term wins. And we care to participate, because we care about our fellow citizen.

As Mann noted, "to go about doing good is religion."9

And those church doors are always open.