Kuyper / Flikkema On Education

1. Auflage 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68359-116-0
Verlag: Lexham Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 400 Seiten

Reihe: Abraham Kuyper Collected Works in Public Theology

Kuyper on the Divine Purpose for Education Among Abraham Kuyper's many accomplishments was his founding of the Free University of Amsterdam, where he also served as president and professor of theology. This collection of essays and speeches presents Kuyper's theology and philosophy of education, and his understanding of the divine purpose of scholarship for human culture. Included are convocation addresses given at the Free University, parliamentary speeches, newspaper articles, and other talks and essays on the topic of education. Much of the material deals with issues still being debated today including the roles of the family and state in education, moral instruction, Christian education, and vouchers.

Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) was a leading Dutch figure in education, politics, and theology. He was a minister in the Dutch Reformed Church, was appointed to Parliament, and served as prime minister. Kuyper also founded the Free University (VU) in Amsterdam, a political party, and a denomination, in addition to writing on a dizzying array of subjects.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kuyper, Abraham

Flikkema, Melvin

Leseproben

VOLUME INTRODUCTION

KUYPER AND FREE SCHOOLS, THEN AND NOW

During the seven-decade political struggle in the Netherlands to allow parents to select schools corresponding to their religious convictions, Abraham Kuyper articulated a concept of “sphere sovereignty” that translates, in policy terms, into principled structural pluralism. That Dutch experience, and its eventual resolution in the “Pacification” of 1917, is highly relevant for the present situation in the United States: popular revulsion against the condescension and intolerance of a liberal elite toward the values and interests of many of their fellow citizens, leading to deep political and social as well as cultural divides. Kuyper referred to such division, in a 1904 address to teachers from Christian schools, as “the contest between the two forces that contend for the soul of the nation.”1

A primary locus of this conflict, in nineteenth-century Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe, was public schooling, the sphere in which, more than any other, government reaches into the lives and confronts the intimate convictions of parents. While claims of state sovereignty over all aspects of society had been made at least since Jean Bodin (1530–96), the development of a central government role in promoting popular schooling was essentially a nineteenth-century phenomenon, though with earlier anticipations in Prussia and other German states.2

While town support for schooling as early as the late Middle Ages had been motivated by economic motives, such as the advantages of literacy and numeracy in commercial enterprises, the more recent adoption of central-government measures was almost always intended to promote among the common people a shared loyalty to a national project, to turn “peasants into Frenchmen.”3 Thus it was as Prussia absorbed territories in other parts of Central Europe that Prussian leaders made popular schooling a matter of state policy, an example followed with more or less success by centralizing governments in France, Spain, Italy, and other countries a century later. In the Netherlands, this was part of the agenda of the Batavian Republic during the Napoleonic period, influenced by contemporary Jacobin efforts to remake the French people.4

Insistence on the uniquely civic role of government-managed public schools and on the dangers represented by schools not under direct government control, especially if they had a religious character, developed in elite circles over the course of the nineteenth century. Increasingly assertive national states grew unwilling to continue to allow religious organizations not under government control to play a role in shaping the loyalties and mores of the rising generations.

Schooling as an instrument by which the state forms its citizens to a unique pattern of loyalties seeks to create, as Robert Nisbet writes, “a political order free of all ties or relationships save those which proceed directly from the state, itself based upon the sovereign General Will, and empty of all rights and liberties of individuals—whose renunciation or ‘alienation’ of these is the condition of entry into the redemptive state.”5

Kuyper, whose political movement defined itself precisely by opposition to the French Revolution, saw this claim of the state to a monopoly on the schooling of youth as a fundamental threat. “What we combat, on principle and without compromise,” he wrote in laying out the program of his political movement in 1879, “is the attempt to totally change how a person thinks and how he lives, to change his head and his heart, his home and his country—to create a state of affairs the very opposite of what has always been believed, cherished, and confessed, and so to lead us to a complete emancipation from the sovereign claims of Almighty God.”6

Repeatedly throughout his public career, as reflected in the writing and speeches that follow, he rejected the claim of the state to use schooling in this manner. Recalling, as prime minister in 1905, the schoolstrijd thirty years before, he accused Liberal leader Kappeyne van de Coppello (1822–95) of holding “to a religion that is best described as the deification of the state.… The state was for him the Moloch to which children could be sacrificed if need be. Thus with the best of intentions he became the father of the tyrannical [school] law of 1878.”7 Kuyper had earlier warned, as a member of the States General in 1874, that the lack of protection for educational freedom meant that a political group in power “can devote the entire, immense power of the state’s authority in order to indoctrinate the nation with its principles by means of the school.”8

The political and cultural struggle over schooling boiled up in 1878, when a new generation of Dutch Liberals came to power, committed to government intervention in popular schooling and explicitly hostile to confessional schools.9 “Religion, they insisted, especially religious education among young children, bred ignorance, superstition, and backwardness. It stunted the full development of the individual and of the nation.”10 They enacted legislation providing that the state would pay 30 percent of the cost of local public schools, and under some circumstances even more. Other provisions of this law increased significantly the costs of all schools, whether government-supported or not. The legislation was opposed by supporters of unsubsidized confessional education, since it would make their schools much more expensive to operate.

Confessional schools would remain free, Kuyper noted, “yes, free to hurry on crutches after the neutral [school] train that storms along the rails of the law, drawn by the golden locomotive of the State.”11

The Liberals had overreached. This threat against the schools that many of the orthodox common people had labored and sacrificed to establish aroused and created a movement that, in a decade, reversed the political fortunes of the Liberals and brought state support for confessional schools. A massive petition drive collected, in five days, 305,102 signatures from Protestants and 164,000 from Catholics asking the king to refuse to sign the new legislation.

When that failed, a national organization, “The Union ‘A School with the Bible,’ ” created a permanent mechanism for the mobilization of orthodox Protestants.12 Together with the orthodox Protestant Antirevolutionary Party, the Catholic party gained a majority in Parliament by 1888, as a result not only of mobilization around the schools but also of a revision of the election law the previous year, which greatly extended the franchise among the (male) population, thus bringing the religiously conservative common people of the countryside and small towns into political participation for the first time. As a historian of Dutch liberalism has pointed out, the effort to smother the last flickering flame of orthodox religion only succeeded in fanning it into vigorous life, and “no one has done as much harm to liberalism as Kappeyne.”13

Emancipation of the “little people” (kleine luyden), for whom their Catholic or orthodox Protestant beliefs were central, required intensive organization; their emergence into public life brought their convictions with them. The passions and the habits of cooperation developed during the long struggle for confessional schooling and then found expression across the whole range of social life. A Dutch political scientist notes of the phenomenon known as pillarization that “verzuiling is inexplicable apart from the ‘school struggle.’ ”14

In the country that today has the most highly evolved system of educational freedom, under which schools reflecting a variety of worldviews and pedagogical approaches enjoy equal public funding and protection of their distinctiveness, these arrangements did not simply drop from the sky but were achieved through bitter struggle and mobilization of elements of the population who had been seen as the voiceless target of educational policy.

It was the overreach of a liberal and secularized elite that brought to naught what had seemed the inevitable progress of their agenda. In place of the unlimited intervention of the state to shape minds and hearts, loyalties and dispositions, through popular schooling, the resistance of the Protestant and Catholic “little people” led to a great flourishing of grassroots organizations and institutions to meet a wide variety of needs.

It is not that Kuyper denied the state a significant role in promoting schooling and ensuring its quality. In the same 1874 parliamentary speech cited above, he stressed that the state had the right to stipulate the level of educational performance of all schools, including private schools, to inspect them and to certify their results. Associated with this right, however, was a duty: to make it possible for all parents to afford schooling for their children, consistent with their freedom of conscience.15

As a result of the decades-long political struggle on the part of Kuyper’s Antirevolutionary Party and its Catholic counterpart, the Dutch state’s role in schooling became one of coordination, of support, of intervention only when local efforts failed. Since the Second World War, as in other countries, this role has become increasingly prescriptive in countless ways, but the fundamental principles of equal public support for all schools meeting academic standards and of...