Schools looking for space could turn to churches

&ould places of worship ease the burden of schools looking to reopen while giving students space to social distance" It might not be such an outlandish suggestion.

:ith space at a premium and places of worship still empty amid concerns of coronavirus spread, some education experts are actively promoting the idea. In 1ew +aven, &onnecticut, church leaders have already offered to give up their space to students looking for a place to take online classes.

&oncern by those determined to keep church and state separate has meant that the use of “religious spaces” for education has shrunk over the last couple of centuries, resulting in secular school systems becoming the standard for most countries.

But having spent years studying the history of &hristian churches and their social outreach, I know there has never been a time in the history of &hristianity ± indeed the history of all major religions ± when religious space was not used for educational purposes.

Cathedral schools

In the (urope that emerged from the collapse of the 5oman (mpire in the fifth century, most formal education took place inside religious spaces. Training of boys to read scriptures was a task typically performed in churches by bishops and their assistants.

The first institutions of learning in the :estern &hristian tradition were cathedral schools. During the day, the back pews were filled with the best and brightest schoolboys being taught the intellectual skills needed by priests.

/ater, during the 1 th century, /ouis the 3ious, son of &harlemagne, gave structure to the classes by mandating that a “scholasticus” ± or master teacher ± be appointed at cathedral schools. By the 12th century, the practice began of establishing corps of priests who lived at the cathedral and spent their days teaching.

These priests ± called chapters of canons ± established endowed chairs for teachers of different types of speciali]ed knowledge. &hairs were filled by the most famous teachers or professors of the day, including the eminent philosophers Abelard and Albertus 0agnus as well as Albertus’ even more famous student Thomas Aquinas, the highly influential 13th-century theologian. &hapters of canons also appointed one of their members as a “dean” to supervise all the different courses of study ± a term still employed by universities.

The birth of universities

(ventually the most successful cathedral schools drew too many students to be taught inside the churches themselves. By the 13th century, cathedral schools gave way on one side to grammar schools, which taught /atin, and on the other to universities ± where students paid money to listen to the lectures of professors and received degrees based upon their displayed knowledge. The lecture halls in which these university students were taught became the forerunners of modern classroom buildings.

(ducation in early modern (urope increasingly left the pews behind as the focus expanded beyond teaching future clergy. The 3rotestant 5eformation in the 1 th century rejected the notion of a priesthood and demanded that everyone learn to read the Bible, preferably while they were young.

To enable this, schools dedicated to teaching boys and girls who would not enter the clergy were established, increasingly in buildings distinct from places of worship.

Because 3rotestants made the church a department of the state, such schools were maintained by the country’s ruler but staffed by the church. 6oon &atholics followed a similar practice of building church schools for teaching boys and girls not destined for a religious vocation. The -esuit religious order, founded in the 1 th century, dedicated itself to education and pioneered the building of residential campuses for their schools that were distinct and autonomous from local churches.

Toward public schools

During the (nlightenment era of the 18th century, governments went further and established new kinds of secular or nonreligious schools. These taught technical and scientific subjects, such as engineering and navigation or trained military officers in the technologies of war.

But it was the )rench 5evolution that sped up the movement toward secular schooling as the cultural norm. 5evolutionaries in )rance and other (uropean states argued that the nation deserved the loyalties previously claimed by the churches. As such, churches should be shut down to stop patriots from being distracted from a greater loyalty to the nation.

5evolutionaries failed in their efforts to deprive church schools of their status, however. /ater nationalists, in reflecting upon why revolutionaries had failed, concluded that the education offered in church schools, rich in centuries of practice, was simply too strong for secular schooling to challenge.

6o they pushed for redirection of state subsidies away from church schools to secular education. By the end of the 1 th century, such initiatives had resulted in the secular public school systems in operation today.

Church and state

&hurch schools did not disappear, however. In :estern societies, some parochial schools and private faithbased schools continued to flourish. And there is even precedent for schools using churches in times of crisis, such as to accommodate children evacuated from major cities in the 8.K. during :orld :ar II.

0eanwhile, outside of :estern societies, church schools became a major tool that &hristian missionaries used to evangeli]e indigenous peoples. (uropean colonial governments came to subsidi]e mission schools as cheap alternatives to building state school systems. In many African and Asian states today, church schools subsidi]ed by foreign missions still educate significant numbers of students.

The constitutions of most modern states maintain a strict separation between church and state. And there are rules in place in countries with secular school systems that protect the primacy of secular schooling over all other types of schooling.

&ourts have also moved to protect the rights of students with minority religious backgrounds from persecution no matter what schools they attend.

(ducation in the :est has been progressively outgrowing the church environment for centuries, yet education in religious settings continues to lead students back toward faith.

:hatever the impetus for using religious space for secular education, awareness of this capacity of religious space will likely remain a concern for promoters of the separation of church and state ± even in these unprecedented times of pandemic.