Horace Mann, Mathew Brady

Horace Mann agreed with Franklin and the other Founding Fathers that generalized religion and education were inseparable. Mann thought religious instruction in the public schools should be taken 'to the extremest verge to which it can be carried without invading those rights of conscience which are established by the laws of God, and guaranteed by the constitution of the state.' What the schools got was a kind of lowest common denominator Protestantism, based upon the Bible, the Ten Commandments, and such useful tracts as Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. As Mann put it 'our system earnestly inculcates all Christian morals. It founds its morals on the basis of religion; it welcomes the religion of the Bible; it allows it to do what it is allowed to do in no other system, to speak by itself.' In the American system, the school supplied Christian 'character building', the generalized morality of the consensus, in which religious education was 'character training' and part of the preparation for living an adult republican life.