Primary Document

The document I chose for my primary document is Religion and the Schools by Washington Gladden. Gladden begins talking about parochial schools. Parochial schools are private schools. An example around here is holy Cross, my alma mater. I think going to a parochial school myself gives me a big insight to this topic. I know firsthand what the experience of going to a private school is like. I personally have mixed reviews from my experience. While I know having faith is very important, to my family and me at least, Holy Cross didn't really help grow my faith. What Holy Cross taught me was the history of my religion, which to me isn't nearly as important as learning what it means to be catholic or how to act on my faith. They did teach me the Hail Mary and the Our Father, but it didn’t teach me how to really follow my faith. Another thing about Holy Cross that did not help was education. I feel I didn’t get the education I needed to succeed in high school. I feel that there is definitely a gap between my education and the education of the public school students.
This article describes the different reactions that different religions had to religion not being in public schools. He wrote that Catholics, Lutherans, and Protestants agreed on how it's bad to not have religion in public schools, whereas the majority of other religions disagree. It also talks about the different approaches schools have made to make it not as big of an argument, but nothing seems to make every side happy.
This is a very difficult subject because as the article says, you can never please everybody. I think the best way to handle it is the way they handle it now. Separate into public and private schools, therefore the students who want to focus on religion can, and those who do not, can avoid it. I think there should be classes offered though, so that if students don’t have the money for a full private school, they can take a class in school to learn more about religion.


Washington Gladden "Religion and the Public Schools," Annals of American History.