In my “Age of the American Revolution” course today I began teaching Benjamin Rush’s, “Thoughts Upon the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic.” Two things always strike me about this text.
First, Rush believes that “the only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in RELIGION.” Religion, he argues, is the only source of virtue.
Rush explicitly notes that the “religion of Jesus Christ” is the best form of religion and he believes it should be taught in schools. But he would rather see “the opinions of Confucius or Mohammed inculcated upon our youth than see them grow up wholly devoid of a system of religious principles.”
As I read these lines I was struck by just how much Rush worshiped on the altar of republican virtue. While a Christian republicanism was best, he was also willing to allow other religions to be taught in schools as long as they contributed to virtue.
Second, I was struck by Rush’s commitment to the civic humanist idea of sacrificing for the common good or the good of the nation. For example:
Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property. Let him be taught to love his family, but let him be taught at the same time that he must forsake and even forget them when the welfare of his country requires it.
Such republicanism rejected, to an extent, a commitment to world citizenship. Rush argued that one must “be taught to love his fellow creatures in every part of the world, but he must cherish with a more intense and peculiar affection the citizens of Pennsylvania and of the United States.”
And Rush goes on. Children should be taught to “amass wealth, but it must be only to increase his power of contributing to the wants and demands of the state. They should be taught that this life “is not his own,” but it belongs to one’s country.
Some of this stuff, written by one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, might be a cause of concern for today’s libertarians, tea partiers, or anyone else with a high view of Lockean rights.
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And to someone that has Anabaptist leanings, this sounds way to Constantinian a confusion of the Church and the State. When a Christian is told that all else must be subservient to the needs of the State, something is backwards.
Sam:
Right on! I have been trying to get my students to see this.
Constantinism or simply a communitarianism, with ripples from family to community to state to nation?
Again, I think “Lockean individualism” overshoots the mark, since Rush starts here with “family.” What Barry Shain is getting at with “The Myth of American Individualism.”
Again, a dissent from the applicability of Michael Zuckert's “Straussian” Locke to the Founding. The “true” Locke may have been a radical individualist, but did the Founders understand him as such?
http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1727&chapter=81716&layout=html&Itemid=27