All education must be moral. Not possible with anti-Christian government schools. There were no public schools in the South before the War Between the States. All were educated in private schools, or didn't need school. Patrick Henry was dirt poor and threadbare and was primarily self-educated. A private school need not be elite or expen…
All education must be moral. Not possible with anti-Christian government schools. There were no public schools in the South before the War Between the States. All were educated in private schools, or didn't need school. Patrick Henry was dirt poor and threadbare and was primarily self-educated. A private school need not be elite or expensive. If the government didn't confiscate so much of your money, in my state its property taxes that fund government schools, most people could afford modest private schools. Many don't need much beyond reading/writing and basic math.
People who want to learn, and have a cultural tradition of literacy, will read and learn whether they have formal education available or not, as with Patrick Henry and countless others. (Schools were forbidden to Catholics in Ireland for 200 years, but the people kept on reading anyway.)
But many people, maybe most people, are sort of "on the bubble"; they need encouragement and support systems, including the message that getting an education isn't a waste of time. That's where a basic "common school" (as they used to call a public school) had its place. And even if most of the students didn't get beyond the 8th grade, that didn't matter much, because they'd learned a lot in that time. A lot more than they'd learn now.
I was so impressed with the 8th-grade educations of all four of my grandparents, whoo were born from 1900 to 1906. And they were all bilingual. They seemed better-educated than the 1980s HS grad of my salad days.
Ireland has enjoyed universal literacy for hundreds of years because of the Catholic Church. Judging by the political and religious leanings of the modern Irish, I'm sure most of them will be illiterate in a generation or two.
Through the incessant din of atheistical and diabolical propaganda (the main driver of political movements for 500 years) it is often hard to remember that Christianity in general, and the institution of the Church, is the very integument that holds together the lifeboat of Western society and culture. (True even for those who sit in the boat and refuse to row.)
All education must be moral. Not possible with anti-Christian government schools. There were no public schools in the South before the War Between the States. All were educated in private schools, or didn't need school. Patrick Henry was dirt poor and threadbare and was primarily self-educated. A private school need not be elite or expensive. If the government didn't confiscate so much of your money, in my state its property taxes that fund government schools, most people could afford modest private schools. Many don't need much beyond reading/writing and basic math.
People who want to learn, and have a cultural tradition of literacy, will read and learn whether they have formal education available or not, as with Patrick Henry and countless others. (Schools were forbidden to Catholics in Ireland for 200 years, but the people kept on reading anyway.)
But many people, maybe most people, are sort of "on the bubble"; they need encouragement and support systems, including the message that getting an education isn't a waste of time. That's where a basic "common school" (as they used to call a public school) had its place. And even if most of the students didn't get beyond the 8th grade, that didn't matter much, because they'd learned a lot in that time. A lot more than they'd learn now.
I was so impressed with the 8th-grade educations of all four of my grandparents, whoo were born from 1900 to 1906. And they were all bilingual. They seemed better-educated than the 1980s HS grad of my salad days.
Ireland has enjoyed universal literacy for hundreds of years because of the Catholic Church. Judging by the political and religious leanings of the modern Irish, I'm sure most of them will be illiterate in a generation or two.
Through the incessant din of atheistical and diabolical propaganda (the main driver of political movements for 500 years) it is often hard to remember that Christianity in general, and the institution of the Church, is the very integument that holds together the lifeboat of Western society and culture. (True even for those who sit in the boat and refuse to row.)