Tea at Trianon: The Unholy Trinity of the American Public School

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, July 29, 2025

The Unholy Trinity of the American Public School

From Charles Coulombe:

Perhaps nothing is more indicative of the decline of American culture than the development — if it can be called that — of the American public school system in the past five decades. In every possible respect — academic, cultural, moral, and yes, religious, it has been in a flight from excellence for decades. But For those who believe this to be a process beginning in the 1960s — or even the 50s, when such provocative reports as Why Johnny Can’t Read were published — this writer must submit that, ultimately, it began with independence. Of course, given the strength of the Western Academic Tradition, from whence our system derives, it took a long time; but it seems well-nigh accomplished in our day.

In Christendom, education was intended to open the student’s mind to God and assist his salvation; to teach him to use his intellect for that end and for the lesser ones encompassed in employing a free and formed intellect for understanding the world around him and taking his place at his own level in both Church and State. Naturally, this implies a society ordered to Man’s true last end.

But the newly independent United States would require a new model; this was to make good Americans of the disparate peoples of the colonies, and to assimilate the immigrants as they arrived. Over time, three men would arise who would transform the face of American public education into what we have now.

The first was Noah Webster (1748-1853), a New England Yankee, best known for the fact that in his famous dictionary, he created our idiosyncratic English spelling — a move resisted by Washington Irving, no less. Extremely influential in education as well, he sought to tear American students’ attention away from the Old World whence their fathers had come. Moreover, education for Webster must do more than educate; it must indoctrinate: “It is an object of vast magnitude that systems of education should be adopted and pursued which may not only diffuse a knowledge of the sciences but may implant in the minds of the American youth the principles of virtue and of liberty and inspire them with just and liberal ideas of government and with an inviolable attachment to their own country.” While this last may sound laudable to us to-day, it was revolutionary then. Moreover, as we see now, a lot depends upon whose definition of “just and liberal ideas of government” is used.

His near contemporary, fellow New Englander Horace Mann (1796-1859), is called the “Father of Public Education.” He took things further, and made of public education itself a sort of secular religion: “What the church has been for medieval man, the public school must become for democratic and rational man. God would be replaced by the concept of the public good.” For him, reduction of all religions and ethnicities to a single “American,” who would think in a manner Mann considered rational, was the whole point of education. But coupled with this in Mann was a rigid moralism — a sort of secularised Puritanism. (Read more.)