Indianapolis Star columnist James Briggs was, as typical, provocative in his weekend essay “Indiana Is a College or university Degree Desert and the Financial state Is Wilting.” I surely agree with Briggs that much too several Hoosiers, both voters and policymakers, do not adequately benefit bigger education or even education generally. (Entire disclosure — I am a faculty professor.) But I was taken aback when Briggs cited an posting by Manhattan Institute fellow Aaron M. Renn to blame that partly on the prominence of Quakers, users of the Spiritual Culture of Good friends, in Indiana’s record and inhabitants.
Renn will get some of his information completely wrong. For illustration, he says that Indiana “still has a lot more Quakers than any other state.” That has not been real for a quarter of a century. And even in the 19th century, Quakers never accounted for a lot more than 2 or 3 % of Indiana’s populace. Their prominence in reform actions like antislavery, jail reform, and women’s legal rights almost certainly contributed to the effect that their quantities ended up increased than they genuinely were being.
In reality, Quakers have constantly been advocates of schooling. Renn depends on sociologist E. Digby Baltzell’s book “Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia” to argue that Quakers traditionally opposed general public education and learning. That, in change, qualified prospects him to conclude that Quakers bear element of the accountability for Indiana’s troubled academic legacy.
That argument has two weaknesses. It is legitimate that ahead of the Civil War, Indiana Quakers urged the importance of “a guarded spiritual education and learning.” Like the Amish now, they saw on their own as a “peculiar folks,” and feared that training in non-Quaker colleges would lure their children absent from Quakerism. But that did not translate into a normal hostility toward community education and learning. Hundreds of Quakers have taught in Indiana’s general public educational facilities. A person of the state’s most outstanding Quakers, Barnabas C. Hobbs, was elected superintendent of general public instruction in 1868. Swain Corridor at Indiana University’s Bloomington campus commemorates Joseph Swain, a Quaker from Pendleton who was the university’s president from 1893 to 1902. And the present-day president of the Indiana Affiliation of Public University Superintendents, Greg Hinshaw, is a Quaker.
The second weak spot in blaming Quakers for Indiana’s ambivalence about education and learning currently is that it ignores the emphasis that Quakers, nearly from the starting of the Quaker movement in 17th-century England, placed on schooling. George Fox, the founder of Quakerism, known as for Quaker little ones, equally boys and girls, to be schooled in “all points civil and handy.” When Quakers started to settle in Indiana just after 1800, they systematically set up universities. Certainly, a long time in advance of Indiana Friends compiled membership stats, they mandated the collection of details on how a lot of Quaker kids were being of faculty age and how several ended up getting an schooling. Prolonged in advance of community secondary schooling turned the norm in Indiana, Quaker academies in communities like Fairmount, Spiceland, Westfield, Bloomingdale, Plainfield, and New London furnished just that.
Admittedly, right until the 1830s, Quakers were skeptical about faculties. They affiliated them with clergy who primarily based their skills for ministry on instruction rather than a contacting. But as faculties became significantly less involved with clerical occupations, Pals embraced them. Indiana Quakers opened Pals Boarding School in Richmond in 1847, which in 1859 grew to become Earlham Higher education. By 1864, it was the initial faculty west of the Appalachians in which Darwin’s idea of evolution was taught. That helped lay a foundation which has manufactured this Quaker institution one of the nation’s leaders in the generation of researchers. That educational excellence draws pupils to Earlham from across the nation and all over the entire world. But Earlham also seeks to provide Indiana. In the past handful of years, it has entered into agreements to aid transfers from Ivy Tech. And it has just embarked in the Encourage software. Under it, we are supplying absolutely free tuition to Indiana learners whose family members are Pell and Condition of Indiana grant-eligible and get paid up to $60,000 per year.
We Indiana Quakers have our problems. Our figures are declining. But we do not are worthy of blame extra than any other religious team for Indiana’s instructional and financial deficiencies.
Tom Hamm is a professor of history and Quaker scholar in home at Earlham College in Richmond, Ind.
This write-up initially appeared on Richmond Palladium-Item: Hamm: What school column received erroneous about Quakers, Indiana, education