education – Dan Harper

Religion and Public Education

Sermon copyright (c) 2025 Dan Harper. As delivered to First Parish in Cohasset. The sermon as delivered contained substantial improvisation. The text below has typographical errors, missing words, etc.

Readings

The first reading was the poem “Theme for English B” by Langston Hughes.

The second reading was from the essay “The Need of an Industrial Education in an Industrial Democracy” by John Dewey:

“It is no accident that all democracies have put a high estimate upon education; that schooling has been their first care and enduring charge. Only through education can equality of opportunity be anything more than a phrase. Accidental inequalities of birth, wealth, and learning are always tending to restrict the opportunities of some as compared with those of others. Only free and continued education can counteract those forces which are always at work to restore, in however changed a form, feudal oligarchy. Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.” [John Dewey, Manual Training and Vocational Education (1916)]

Sermon: “Religion and Public Education”

Unitarian Universalism has a long history of being concerned with public education. This begins at least as far back as the work of Horace Mann, a Unitarian who served as Secretary of Education in Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century, and did more than anyone to establish the idea of universal, free, non-sectarian public schools as the norm in the United States. Our own congregation was also deeply involved in public education in the mid-nineteenth century; we allowed our then-minister, Joseph Osgood, to serve as the superintendent of the town’s schools while he was serving as minister. Osgood worked tirelessly at the local level for the same goal of universal, free, non-sectarian schools.

The involvement of Unitarians, and to a lesser extent Universalists, in public education continued through the late twentieth century. Many Unitarians became teachers; many Unitarians served on their local school boards; and Unitarians also advocated tirelessly for universal, free, non-sectarian public education at the national and state levels. Our reasons for doing so are fairly straightforward. We Unitarian Universalists believe that public schools are essential for a strong democracy; and we believe in democracy as the governmental system best designed to help us establish a society oriented towards truth and goodness. We are well aware that both democracy and public education are imperfect vehicles for helping to establish a society devoted to truth and goodness. Both democracy and public education can be diverted away from truth and goodness, towards lesser goals like personal gain and power politics. But, to paraphrase the old saying, so far they’re better than any other system anyone has come up with. And public education is essential to democracy because an informed electorate is essential to democracy.

Besides, we Unitarian Universalists are idealists, in the sense that we believe in the perfectibility of humanity. As the Unitarian minister Theodore Parker said, and as Martin Luther King, Jr., later paraphrased, the moral arc of the universe may be long, but it bends towards justice. Thus the reasons why we Unitarian Universalists support public education are fairly straightforward. I’d like to review with you some of our past support for public education, and then I’d like to talk about why we should recommit ourselves to public education.

And by looking back at education in Cohasset, we can see how far we’ve come. Prior to about 1830, those who wanted their children to have more than basic literacy had to pay for their children’s schooling. Younger children paid to attend “dame schools,” often taught by a widow who needed income. For young teens who wanted the equivalent of a high school education, Jacob Flint, minister at First Parish until 1835 and one of the few people in town with a college education, would prepare students for college for a fee. There was also the Academy, a private school organized in 1796 by well-to-do parents who wanted to prepare their children for college. Cohasset finally established a public high school in 1826. At first, the town’s high school was so poorly funded that it shared a teacher with the Academy, and only operated when the Academy was not in session.

Cohasset finally established a school board in 1830, and that committee slowly improved the town’s public education offerings. By 1840, the “dame schools” had mostly given way to publicly funded primary education. It took longer to establish a year-round high school; it wasn’t until 1847 that the town finally provided funding to keep high school open for all year.

When our congregation hired Joseph Osgood as our minister in 1842, we specifically chose him because he had a background in education. According to town historian Victor Bigelow, Joseph Osgood brought about “uniform teaching and systematic promotion in our schools.” Osgood established graded classrooms and regular oversight of teachers. To support his efforts, Osgood could point to the work of Horace Mann. To train teachers, Mann had founded three so-called “normal schools” across the state; one of these normal schools was in Bridgewater (now Bridgewater State University). Mann also published “The Common School Journal,” a periodical filled with practical advice and best practices. No doubt Joseph Osgood read “The Common School Journal,” and (when he could) hired his teacher from the Bridgewater normal school.

Of special interest to us today, given what’s going on in public education elsewhere in the United States, is that both Osgood and Mann believed that publicly funded education should be non-sectarian. This did not mean that Horace Mannn believed that religion should be excluded from the public schools; it only meant that no one denomination or sect should have control over what was taught. In 1848, Mann wrote: “our system earnestly inculcates all Christian morals; it founds its morals based on religion; it welcomes the religion of the Bible; and, in receiving the Bible, it allows it to do what it is allowed to do in no other system — to speak for itself. But here it stops, not because it claims to have compassed all truth; but because it disclaims to act as an umpire between hostile religious opinions.”(1)

I think Mann was wrong in saying that public schools should be founded on Christian morals. In his own day, there were Jews and freethinkers in Massachusetts who did not wish to have their children inculcated with Christian morals. Even among the Christians of Massachusetts, it proved impossible to find common ground. Roman Catholics felt that Massachusetts public schools taught Protestant Christianity, with the result that they established Catholic parochial schools to provide appropriate schooling for their children; indeed, Catholics sometimes referred to public schools as “Protestant parochial schools.”

Yet although I don’t agree with everything that was done by the mid-nineteenth century educational reformers, people like Horace Mann and Joseph Osgood, I give them credit for greatly extending the reach of free public schools. Here in Cohasset, Joseph Osgood provided leadership to extend the school year, and to open the schools to as many children as possible. Over time, other educational reformers worked to further extend the reach of the public schools, and to further reform the content of public schooling.

One of those reformers was one of my personal heroes, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. A Unitarian and a teacher, Peabody became interested in the education of young children. She traveled to Europe to learn about a new educational approach called kindergarten. Peabody and other educators helped to establish kindergarten as an accepted part of the public school system, extending free schooling down to five-year-olds.

One of the people Elizabeth Palmer Peabody trained was Lucy Wheelock, who went on to found Wheelock College. My mother got her teacher training at Wheelock College while Lucy Wheelock was still active, and thus had a direct connection to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. My mother was both a career schoolteacher and a lifelong Unitarian, and I’d like to use my mother’s example to talk about the connection between mid-twentieth century Unitarians and public education.

Unitarianism in the mid-twentieth century was deeply influenced by the Progressive movement. Please note that what was meant by “Progressive” back then is not what is meant by the adjective “progressive” today. The Progressives of that time (spelled with a capital “P”) wanted to reform human society: they believed in the essential goodness of human beings; they believed in the capacity of human beings to progressively establish a more just and humane society; they believed in the power of reason; they believed in democracy. They differed from today’s progressives (spelled with no capital “P”) in that the older Progressives founded their Progressivism in their liberal religious outlook; by contrast many of today’s progressives either have no religious outlook, or they try to divorce their religious outlook from their politics. I’d even say that the earlier Progressivism was not so much a political movement as it was a religious movement.

The wars and economic disasters of the mid-twentieth century caused many people to abandon Progressivism, to abandon their hope for progressively establishing a more humane and just human society. These other people turned to a grim view of humanity, and a grim view of human society; we can see some of this grimmer outlook in today’s political progressives.

But we Unitarians and the Universalists, and some other liberal religious groups, held on to our belief that human beings are basically good. We held on to our belief that human society can be improved through human effort. My mother was one of that generation of mid-twentieth century Unitarians who believed we could make the world better. Like so many Unitarians of her generation, she and her twin sister both trained to become teachers. This was a classic strategy of Progressivism: to reform the world through education. With their sunny view of human nature, my mother and her twin were drawn to John Dewey’s educational philosophy. Dewey said that it was through public education that we could establish a truly democratic society. Dewey taught that “only free and continued education can counteract those forces which are always at work to restore, in however changed a form, feudal oligarchy.”

My mother’s idealism was quickly tested. She got her first job right after the Second World War ended, teaching kindergarten in the public schools in Fort Ticonderoga, New York. In 1946, Fort Ticonderoga was a backwater. At the end of her first year of teaching, the school principal told her that if she wanted to continue teaching in Fort Ticonderoga, she would have to begin to use corporal punishment. This went against my mother’s belief in progressive education. She found another job.

She wound up teaching in the Wilmington, Delaware, public schools when those schools were being desegregated. Once while she was walking down the street with her class, some men drove by and shouted racial slurs because she, a White woman, was holding the hand of a Black kindergartener.(2) The Progressive Unitarian teachers of the mid-twentieth century believed, with John Dewey, that “Democracy has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.” In the 1950s and 1960s, the crisis in democracy centered on racial segregation; and educators and education were the midwives to a very messy birth of equal access to the public schools, all in service of strengthening democracy.

Today, seventy-five years later, we face a different educational crisis, and we Unitarian Universalists are still trying to figure out how to respond. The current presidential administration is in the news this week with their efforts to dissolve the U.S. Department of Education. While this act grabbed the headlines, it’s actually just one event in a longer history of efforts to privatize education. These efforts can be traced in part back to the work of the influential economist Milton Friedman. In 1955, about the time when thugs were shouting racial epithets at my mother, Milton Friedman wrote an essay titled “The Role of Government in Education,” in which he advocated for what he called school choice, based on a voucher system. School choice has been widely adopted both by both political and religious conservatives, and by political and religious liberals. Friedman’s ideas for school choice are rooted in his notion that economic freedom is the crucial freedom that a democracy needs to flourish.

We are in the process of discovering some of the downsides to school choice as promoted by Milton Friedman. School choice policies have encouraged for-profit companies to get involved in education. In theory, this is not a bad thing, but it has led to a definite tendency to establish financial profit as the most important goal of a school, rather than education. School choice also means that one city can see separate schools reflecting the values of a small group of families rather than the wider community. In theory, this is not a bad thing, and indeed Unitarian Universalists have used school choice to establish charter schools that reflect their ideals and values. But this goes against the notion that public schools are where we can learn to live with people who are different from us, an essential skill in a democracy.

At the same time, school choice could be a useful tool for promoting educational reform, because it allows for the testing of innovative ideas. If school vouchers existed in the day of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, perhaps she might have established a charter school to demonstrate that kindergartens really do benefit young children. Similarly, we can imagine John Dewey establishing a charter school, to show that the educational methods he first tried out in the University of Chicago laboratory school could also work in a public school.

And we do face some serious educational problems today. For example, the quality of the schooling a child gets depends a great deal on what city or town they live in. In 2023, the high school graduation rate in Cohasset, where I now live, was 98.3%; in that same year, the high school graduation rate in New Bedford, where I used to live, was 78.6%.(3) Nor can this disparity be explained solely by the per-pupil expenditures; for while Cohasset does spend more, at $23,212.40 per pupil in 2023, New Bedford is not that far behind, at $20,943.37 per pupil in 2023. The reasons behind these educational disparities in Massachusetts are hotly debated, and I’m certainly not qualified to end that debate. My point is simply this: educational reform is still necessary to ensure that all children have equal access to education, and to ensure an informed electorate which is necessary for democracy.

Unitarian Universalists used to see education as a key area where we could make a difference in helping to improve human society. After all, we are one of the top two or three most-educated of all religious groups; thus not only do we place a high value on education ourselves, but our educational attainments mean we should be able to help strengthen the educational system of this country. And as a religious group, we remain committed to education, both as a way to strengthen democracy, and as a way to allow human potential to flourish.

Yet it feels to me as though Unitarian Universalism, as a wider movement, has drifted away from seeing education as a key area where we can make a difference. In the past couple of decades, I’ve heard lots of Unitarian Universalists talk about their commitment to social justice, but I’ve rarely heard a Unitarian Universalist say that their commitment to social justice led them to get elected to their local School Committee, or try to influence state or local policy on education. Similarly, in the past couple of decades, I’ve often heard older Unitarian Universalists encouraging young people to go to college to “get a good job”; much less often have I heard older Unitarian Universalists encouraging young people to go to college so they can become teachers. And in our denominational publications, I read quite a bit about how we should be active in promoting justice, but I don’t read much about the importance of teachers and teaching and education.

Our own congregation is better at seeing education as a central way for us to make a difference. We have quite a few teachers and educators in our congregation, and we honor them and their profession. I’ve listened to older Unitarian Universalists in our congregation encourage young people to follow careers in teaching. A primary part of our mission as a congregation is operating Carriage House Nursery School, a progressive educational institution providing innovation in the area of outdoors education for young children. I should also mention that our congregation provides state-of-the-art comprehensive sexuality education for early adolescents and a week-long ecology day camp; these are both small programs, but they fill an educational need here in Cohasset.

In these and other ways, we’re continuing Joseph Osgood’s legacy. We still consider teaching and education to be a central part of our purpose; we still consider teaching and education to be a central part of how we contribute to the betterment of human society. It might be worth our while to be a little more forthcoming about taking credit for all the ways our congregation supports public education, supports early education, supports teachers, supports other kinds of education — and for us to be a little more forthcoming in taking credit for the way we are thus supporting and strengthening democracy.

Notes

(1) Horace Mann, Life and Works of Horace Mann, vol. III, ed. Mary Mann, “Annual Report on Education for 1848,” pp. 729-730.
(2) I don’t know when exactly this took place. My mother left Wilmington, Del., c. 1956; I can’t find out when primary schools were desegregated. One source I consulted said that desegregation didn’t occur until after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling; see: Matthew Albright, “Wilmington has long, messy education history”, The [Wilmington, Del.] News Journal, 10 June 2016 accessed 22 March 2025 https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/education/2016/06/10/wilmington-education-history/85602856/
(3) The Massachusetts Department of Education has a website where you can compare educational outcomes between school districts: go to the “DESE Directory of Datasets and Reports” webpage, click on “School and district performance summaries.” https://www.mass.gov/info-details/dese-directory-of-datasets-and-reports#school-and-district-performance-and-indicators-

Education and Our Congregation

Reading: “For You O Democracy”

Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,
I will make divine magnetic lands,
With the love of comrades,
With the life-long love of comrades.

I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies,
I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s necks,
By the love of comrades,
By the [life-long] love of comrades.

For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you…!
For you, for you I am trilling these songs.

— Walt Whitman

Sermon: “Education and Our Congregation”

We Unitarian Universalists have our “seven principles,” a statement of values that our congregations agree to. These seven principles are not a creed, mind you; they’re a set of value statements. And one of those seven values statements talks about how we “affirm and promote” … “the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large.” I will make an even stronger statement than this. We do not just affirm and promote democratic process. I’m convinced our Unitarian Universalist congregations have an important role to play in maintaining a healthy democracy.

Yet in spite of my firm conviction that our Unitarian Universalist congregations help maintain a healthy democracy, I find it difficult to explain how we do this. The role we play in maintaining a healthy democracy is not simple and straightforward; it is subtle and complex. This morning, I would like to speak with you about one of the more important ways we help maintain a healthy democracy. And that is that we train our young people — our children in teens — in the democratic process. Our religious education programs support healthy democracy. It may not be part of the explicit curriculum we teach, but democratic process is central to our implicit curriculum; it is woven into everything our young people do in our congregation.

Our Unitarian Universalist religious education programs have four main goals. First, we aim have fun together and build community. Second, we want children to gain basic skills associated with liberal religion, such as public speaking, skills of cooperation, interpersonal skills, intrapersonal skills, basic group singing, and so on. Third, we aim to teach basic religious literacy. Fourth, we want to prepare young people to become Unitarian Universalists, if they choose to do so when they’re old enough to decide on their own.

Now let me explain how each of these four educational goals helps teach young people how to participate in democracy.

The first of our educational goals is to have fun and build community. On the surface, this is an entirely pragmatic goal. Religious education is but one of a great many options open to children and teens. If our programs are going to compete with sports, robotics, or video games, our programs had better be fun. But on a deeper level, we need children and teens to feel that they are a part of a community before we can reach some of the other goals. For example, when we offer Our Whole Lives comprehensive sexuality education classes, young people need to feel relatively safe talking with one another when it comes time to talk about difficult issues and to think about personal goals.

This same principle applies to us adults. We can work more effectively together on committees if we first take the time to get to know one another. It’s easier to rely on one another for help during life’s adversities, if we’ve taken the time to get to know one another first. Then, too, when the inevitable conflict arise, it is easier to manage those conflict productively if we know one another first.

For both adults and young people, we know the basic techniques of building community and having fun together. Eating together is a great way to have fun and build community. Before starting a Sunday school class, or a committee meeting, we take time to check in with one another, each person sharing something about what’s going on in their personal lives. Working together on a common project is actually one of the most effective ways to build community.

This is true of society beyond our congregations, too. Out in California, I volunteered at a homeless shelter, and one of the other volunteers belonged to the local Christian evangelical church. We strongly disagreed with each other about things like abortion, homosexuality, and climate change, but our shared work at the homeless shelter meant we developed respect for each other. Once people have developed mutual respect through sharing work and fun, we are much less likely to demonize one another when we start debating polarizing political issues. Since demonizing others is destructive to democracy, then we can see how learning to build community helps strengthen democracy.

The second goal for our religious education programs is to build the skills associated with liberal religion. Partly, we want to give young people skills to work together towards common goals. We want them to be able to serve on committees when they get older, so we teach them how to compromise, how to look for common ground, how to disagree respectfully, and so on. We want them to be able to communicate their ideas clearly and without being nervous, so we help them speak in small groups such as classes — and a key feature of our Coming of Age programs for grade 8 through 10 is helping young people to speak with ease and comfort in front of the entire congregation. We teach them interpersonal skills, skills like listening well to others, searching for common goals, being empathetic, and so on. We teach them intrapersonal skills, skills like learning how to identify one’s own feelings, learning where the core of one’s being is, moderating one’s own feelings.

Our democracy would be stronger if more people learned these skills. Our democracy needs people who can aim for the highest ideals but who also know when and how to compromise. Our democracy needs people who know how to speak well in public, not to manipulate others, but to encourage people to work together. Our democracy needs people who have enough self-awareness to know what they feel and to know how to listen to the feelings of others.

Another of the skills associated with liberal religion is group singing. Believe it or not, group singing can also serve to strengthen democracy. When we sing together, interesting physiological and psychological things happen to us. Group singing releases hormones that help moderate the amygdala. The amygdala, sometimes called the “lizard brain,” generates some of our most primitive and destructive emotions, so moderating the amygdala is a good thing. In addition, when we sing together, our breathing and our heart rates synchronize, and I believe this physiological response can help people of all ages learn empathy at a deep level.

So all these skills associated with liberal religion, even group singing, can help young people build a strong democracy.

On to the third educational goal: religious literacy. This is not an abstract academic educational goal. Several years ago, I attended a presentation by a doctoral candidate who was researching religious literacy. She found that good religious literacy programs in high school and middle school measurably reduce bullying. Her research supports what the American Academy of Religion says about religious il-literacy: “One of the most troubling and urgent consequences of religious illiteracy is that it often fuels prejudice and antagonism, thereby hindering efforts aimed at promoting respect for diversity, peaceful coexistence, and cooperative endeavors in local, national, and global arenas.” So says the American Academy of Religion in their religious literacy guidelines for grades K-12.

You have to understand that for most people, religion has little to do with intellectual assent to doctrines or philosophical positions. Instead, religion has more in common with the expressive arts, with political life, with culture more generally. The big divide is not between religion and science, but between science and the arts and humanities. Just as the arts and humanities teach us how to have a deeper understanding of other human beings, so too does religious literacy.

And thus we can conclude that learning religious literacy will help strengthen democracy.

Finally, a brief mention of our fourth educational goal: we want to prepare children and teens to become Unitarian Universalists if they choose to do so when they’re old enough to decide on their own. Even this educational goal has a bearing on educating for democracy. Large democracies are made up of smaller groups with different priorities and values. In a healthy democracy, people in these smaller groups have a firm understanding of who they are. They have a nuanced understanding of their core values, and they know that they can choose these values freely. This is exactly the kind of self-knowledge that’s involved in helping young people decide if they are Unitarian Universalists. So even this fourth goal of ours strengthens democracy, by helping young people grow in self-knowledge and self-awareness.

So we teach community building. We teach skills that happen to be useful in a democracy. We teach religious literacy, or cross-cultural understanding. We teach self-knowledge and self-awareness.

All these educational goals teach things that lead to a healthy democracy. A healthy democracy needs people who are know how to build community with one another. A healthy democracy needs people who have skills like empathy, listening well to others, public speaking, and many of the skills that are associated with doing liberal religion. A healthy democracy needs people with skills in cross-cultural understanding. A healthy democracy needs people with self-knowledge and self-awareness.

So you see, the ways in which we teach democratic process to our young people are sometimes subtle and often complex. Yet these are exactly the kinds of skills our young people need to learn. We live in a time when our democracy is in danger precisely because so many Americans lack the skills we teach. When we teach our children the things we teach, we are sending people out into the world who have the skills our country needs.

Lidian Jackson Emerson’s educational method

The sermon below was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Parish of Concord, Massachusetts, at 10:00 a.m. The sermon text below is a reading text; the actual sermon contained improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon copyright (c) 2011 Daniel Harper.

Readings

The first reading is from The Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson, by Ellen Tucker Emerson. Ellen Tucker Emerson, born in Concord in 1839, was the eldest daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Lidian Jackson Emerson.

“Mother used to come up to me to hear me say my prayers and my evening hymn, and then pray for me, every night after I had gone to bed, long before Edith [her sister] slept with me. When she [Edith] came she had her prayers and hymn to say, too. When we were very little Mother began to have Sunday readings and I think also daily readings with us. Chiefly hymns and the Old Testament stories, but she used some other books which were not very interesting to us. I believe she avoided the New Testament, for I found it new to me when I began to read it myself…. she seemed to think the Old Testament stories were the children’s part of the Bible. I think so too.

“I was brought up keep Sunday fitly by having tasks to occupy me. Every Sunday I was to learn a hymn [that is, the text of a hymn, not the tune]. Most of them had five verses of four lines, sometimes they had six. After I was sure I could say that smoothly I was to review another. As I advanced in years I had two to review, finally three. By the time this grew easy, the task of writing out the idea of the hymn in prose was added, varied sometimes by rendering one of Mrs. Barbauld’s prose hymns into verse. These were my solitary labors…. When Mother was ready for us [after church and dinner] I had to recite my hymns new and reviewed and the other children theirs. Then she read to us, and as we grew older she was apt to read to us one of Jane Taylor’s Contributions of Q.Q. and she read more from the Gospels. She used to say to us poems….” [pp. 101, 103]

———

The second reading this morning is taken from the essay “Philosophical issues in spiritual education and development” by Hanan A. Alexander and David Carr. If you don’t do philosophy, feel free to let your attention wander now, because I’ll make the same point in the sermon.

“…[L]iberal society requires that citizens with robust visions of the good actively and substantively participate in democratic debates and discussions…. [T]he quest for spiritual perspectives and values is driven by the failure of thin political liberalism … to provide sufficiently substantial conceptions of the good to guide appropriate and significant life choices…. [A]ny sensible approach to spirituality and spiritual education should aim to steer a middle course between extremes of local cultural attachment and complete disengagement from any and all rooted values. Arguably, however, some such moral and spiritual middle way is a desideratum of liberal polity, insofar as such society precisely aims to foster the critical autonomy necessary for the demands of democratic citizenship without undermining the conditions for substantial identity formation that any society requires for the making of meaningful life choices.”

[“Philosophical issues in spiritual education and development,” Hanan A. Alexander and David Carr, The Handbook of Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence, Eugene C. Roehlkepartain, Pamela Ebstyne King, Linda Wagner, Peter L. Benson, ed., Sage Publications: Thousand Oaks, Calif., 2006, pp. 73 ff.]

Sermon: “Lidian Jackson Emerson’s educational method”

It’s good to be back here, preaching to this historic congregation, in the historic town of Concord, Massachusetts. And with this congregation approaching its 375th anniversary, I thought I’d speak with you this morning about the congregation’s most famous family, the family of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Lidian Jackson Emerson. Specifically, I’d like to speak with you about how Ralph Waldo Emerson and his wife Lidian Jackson Emerson raised their children, and how that might cause us to reflect on the way we raise our children.

In the first reading this morning, you heard a little about how Lidian Jackson Emerson and Ralph Waldo Emerson raised their children to be moral and religious persons. Lidian and Waldo used what we would consider to be traditional methods of religious education. Each day, Lidian went up to say good night to Ellen, and Ellen said her prayers, then Lidian said her own prayer over Ellen. On Sundays, religious and moral education continued the whole day. Ellen writes: “Mother’s method in the religious education of her children [was] to have them made familiar with many hymns, and with all the interesting Bible stories[, t]o accustom them to hearing some serious writing read aloud to them regularly, to make it a habit to omit play on Sunday and have it a day devoted to church and to religious study at home.” (1) The family went to church, the children went to Sunday school; the family went home and ate dinner together. The children would then memorize a new hymn each week while their mother went to church again in the afternoon. Afterwards, the children would recite their hymns, and their mother would read aloud to them. And when the children were old enough that they found it easy to memorize hymns, they were sometimes given the additional task of setting a prose hymn into verse.

Over time, the Emerson family changed their Sunday routine somewhat. They still went to church in the morning, and when Lidian went to church again in the afternoon the children still stayed home and memorized their hymns, and recited them to Lidian when she returned home, and listened to their mother read aloud to them. Then at four in the afternoon, the children would walk with their father to Walden Pond, even when it was raining or snowing. When they returned home, they would all have tea with their Mother. Ellen writes: “This was a very easy and happy Sunday to us all, and when we wanted hours of solitude we found space for them.” (2)

Lidian also taught her children the principles of social justice, as it grew out of her Unitarian faith. Lidian was a zealous abolitionist right up until slavery was finally abolished. Ellen writes: “She read the papers faithfully and their pro-slavery tone made her hate her country. She learned all the horrors of slavery and dwelt upon these, so that it was as if she continually witnessed the whippings and the selling away of little children from their mothers.” On the fourth of July in 1853 — that is, a couple of years after the Fugitive Slave Law had been in effect — Lidian was so disgusted by the United States that, rather than decorate their front gate in red-white-and-blue bunting, she hung black fabric instead, as if in mourning. Ellen writes: “I think the children were a little mortified, but Mother said it did her good to express her feelings.” (3)

There you have a brief picture of how the Emerson family taught religion to their children in the middle nineteenth century. Compare this picture to how we teach religion to our children today.

First, consider how many hymns the Emerson children had to memorize. If they memorized one hymn a week, even assuming they forgot a good many over time, by the time they were in high school they would know perhaps two hundred hymns. We rarely memorize verse today, but in the nineteenth century, most educated people had large quantities of poetry and verse that they had memorized. Thus while it seems odd to us, memorizing hymns fit into a larger cultural pattern.

While we might vaguely understand the idea of memorizing hymns, the idea of Lidian setting her daughter the task of rendering prose hymns into verse is completely alien to us. I don’t know of any liberal religious parents who would ask their children to write anything on a religious or moral topic. We expect the schools to teach children how to write, but it is a rare family that asks children to write verse or prose compositions on moral and religious topics.

Keeping Sunday as a Sabbath day, a day of rest focused on moral and religious thoughts, is also foreign to us today. For today’s families, Sundays are as active as any other day of the week: in the morning, there are sports practices and games, and for a few families there might be regular or irregular attendance at Sunday school; the afternoons may be taken up with errands and household chores, and the evenings are most likely devoted to homework in preparation for school on Monday. If there are any spare hours on Sunday, they are filled with social media and video games and similar pursuits. Not many families find space in their lives for “hours of solitude,” even if they should want solitude.

We do share some things in common with the Emerson family. Liberal religious families are still devoted to social justice. We may not hang back fabric on our front gates on the fourth of July, but parents might wear t-shirts that express a desire for justice in the world, and mortify their children in the process. We still teach our children about humanitarian causes, and explain to them the moral reasoning underlying those causes. Beyond teaching our children about social justice, I know of some families today who still take walks together on Sunday afternoons, just as the Emerson family did in their time.

But in general, we devote far less time and energy to intentional religious and moral education of our children than did the Emersons. We fit in religious and moral education when we can, but it is quite impossible to fit in as much religious and moral education as did the Emersons.

Not that I believe we should go back to the ways of the Emerson family. Our society today is not the same as society in the middle of the nineteenth century. We do not live in a society where the home, the schools, the church, and the town government are all founded on liberal Protestant ideals. First Parish of Concord stopped receiving direct financial support from the town government a mere six years before Ellen Tucker Emerson was born, and in her day the church was supported by income from pew rentals, where the wealthiest families paid the most and got to sit in the best pews. There was not yet a Roman Catholic church in town, there certainly weren’t any Jews, and the schools openly taught Protestant Christian values and religious concepts. A few free African Americans lived in town, and more than a few escaping slaves passed through this town on the Underground Railroad, helped on their way by families close to the Emersons; but blacks had no political or social influence, and this was a white town. That is not a society to which I would like to return.

Nevertheless, we lost something when we progressed beyond that old society. Religious education scholar John Westerhoff says that mid-nineteenth century small town America had a “robust ecosystem” of religious education, where the home, the church, the schools, and the community all taught similar religious values. (4) Ellen Tucker Emerson received substantial religious and moral education at home, and that education was supported by the church, the schools, and the whole community. That old educational ecosystem is now broken, and the average child today gets very little time spent in religious and moral education; a child might attend Sunday school perhaps twenty-five hours a year, with perhaps some additional moral instruction at home.

A democratic society needs citizens who have thought deeply about what it means to live a good life. A great part of the success of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s was due to its roots in the highest moral and religious ideals of the black church. Democracy does not work well when people vote selfishly on the basis of what they think will benefit them; democracy needs people to have a larger vision of a good society.

We need a middle way between two cultural extremes. On the one hand, Ellen Tucker Emerson’s family and community lived lives and taught values that were too narrow, and did not include racial and religious diversity: African Americans, Catholics, Jews, all were left out of the Emerson family’s narrow cultural ideals. On the other hand, today’s society goes too far to the other extreme: we offer so little religious and moral education to our children that our democracy has devolved to the point where many people only vote to protect their own selfish interests. (5)

We cannot change the way families live their lives in this complicated world we inhabit — we cannot tell people that they must devote an entire day each week to focus on moral and religious thoughts — no one is going to do that. Indeed, we want people to be immersed in the wider democratic society, engaged with citizens with different values, engaged with all the problems and challenges of the broader world.

We cannot change the way families live their lives, so we must figure out the best ways to help people grow and learn, religiously and morally. We’ll still have our Sunday morning services, and we’ll keep Sunday school, too — both continue to serve us well. But we will add to them, and I would suggest that we should add intensive short-term retreats and camps and conferences.

Last week, I was at just such a camp, Ferry Beach Religious Education Week. Over the past couple of decades, this annual conference has become a sort of laboratory for religious education professionals and ministers to experiment with creating a week-long intentional community that welcomes children and teenagers with their parents, and other adults with no children including both young adults, empty nesters, and people like me who have never had children.

In this week-long intentional community, people of all ages live for a week in a community governed by the liberal religious ideals of Unitarian Universalism. In addition to explicit moral and religious education — classes, chapel services, and so on — this week-long camp provides a great deal of implicit religious and moral education. The conference center provides vegetarian and vegan food, and more than one teenager has made the moral decision to commit to a vegetarian or vegan diet while at this camp. The inevitable conflicts that arise are managed by referring to shared religious and moral values — and if you really want to put your values to the test, try resolving a conflict based on your values. The camp has a culture that allows any responsible adult to guide or correct a child when needed. Teenagers play games with children; young adults reach out to and mentor teenagers; all adults mentor each other, and all the other age groups as well. (6) This year, I had a long conversation with a young man whom I have watched grow up over the years, whose marriage had just ended;– and for my part, other adults listened to me talk about my own personal and career struggles.

Consider a child who attends this Unitarian Universalist camp. In one short week, this child gets more than a hundred hours of explicit and implicit religious and moral education. Compare this to the child who attends Sunday school for one hour a week on twenty-five Sundays a year. The child who attends this week-long summer camp gets the equivalent of four years of Sunday school in one intensive dose. Some years ago, a teenager of my acquaintance described her experience this way: all year long she would be on a sort of plateau, and then she felt as if she made a quantum leap upwards in her personal development in a week-long Unitarian Universalist camp; then she would proceed on pretty much of a plateau until the next summer camp. This teenager is now thirty years old, and after working in the public sector, moved to a job in the non-profit sector where she does conflict resolution. This is exactly the kind of spiritually developed and religiously grounded individual who can participate in democracy with a robust understanding of the good.

As you listen to me describing this camp, you’ve probably become aware that there are problems to be solved. Week-long camps of the kind I have just described are expensive, and not everyone can afford them. And many week-long camps are not intentional communities that provide solid religious and moral education of the type that serves democracy. And many week-long camps are not good at including the older generations, the grandparents and great-grandparents, people who can provide so much rich religious and moral insight and instruction.

Well, we will have to solve these problems: we’ll have to have scholarships, and better intentions, and we’ll have to include grandparents and great-grandparents. And we’ll have to try other formats:— weekend retreats in addition to week-long camps; extended families and other multigenerational groups; evening events and small groups; and more. We are in the beta testing phase; we will need to keep refining these ideas until we get it right. And you are already doing many of these things here at First Parish of Concord;— you will keep refining them, keep on working to make small groups and extended families and weekend retreats into intentional communities that help us to grow religiously and morally.

And when you come right down to it, we have the same goals that the Emerson family had. We want our children to grow up into adults with high moral values. We want our adults to keep on growing and refining our religious and moral understandings, so that we can better work with others to infuse the highest values into our democratic society. We want to support each other as we grow, and we want to hold the wider society accountable to the highest moral values.

This is what the Emersons wanted to do. This is what this congregation has been doing for the past 375 years — guiding people towards the highest moral standards, nurturing people who will go out and create an earth made fair and all her people free.

Notes and additional information

Continue reading “Lidian Jackson Emerson’s educational method”