Religion, Morality and Knowledge, the Northwest Ordinance's School Clause

In the summer of 1787 Philadelphia was hot, the delegates were meeting in secret, and they were arguing their way toward a Constitution. Meanwhile, in New York, a Congress that had almost no money, almost no power and almost no quorum did the most consequential thing it ever did. It passed a law governing a vast territory northwest of the Ohio River, and it tucked into that law a sentence about schools that we are still arguing over.

I call it the school clause. It is a single sentence, it is exactly as old as the Constitution, and it tells us what the men who made the country thought a school was for. It was not for job placement. It was not for test scores. It was for the survival of a free people.

The document and its date

The Northwest Ordinance was adopted by the Congress of the Confederation on July 13, 1787. It set up a government for the territory north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi, the land that would become Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota. It provided for temporary rule by a governor and judges, a path to a territorial legislature when the free male population reached five thousand, and statehood when the population reached sixty thousand.

It also contained six "articles of compact," which the Ordinance declared would remain unalterable unless by common consent. These covered religious freedom; habeas corpus, jury trial and other protections; schools and good faith toward the Indians; the territory's permanent place in the Union; the creation of new states; and a ban on slavery. The articles were not ordinary statutes. They were terms of a bargain between the original states and the people who would settle the land. The First Congress, under the new Constitution, re-enacted the Ordinance on August 7, 1789, with minor changes to fit the new government.

Article 3 is where the school clause lives. Read it exactly:

Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.

That is the sentence. The rest of Article 3 goes on to the treatment of the Indians, with its promise that their lands and property would not be taken without their consent and that the utmost good faith would be observed toward them. The two halves of the article sit together, and the whole is about the duties of a government to the people it governs.

Reading the sentence closely

Let me take it apart the way a lawyer takes apart a contract.

"Religion, morality, and knowledge." Three things, in that order. The order matters. Religion comes first, morality second and knowledge third. A modern ear hears "knowledge" as the real purpose and the other two as decoration. The Confederation Congress heard it the other way around. A people who knew a great deal and had no morals would be a danger to themselves, and a people with morals and no religion, in the view of most of the men in that room, would not long keep the morals.

"Being necessary to good government." The reason given is political. It is not that schools help individual children get ahead. It is that good government cannot exist without a people formed in these three things. The claim is about self-government. A republic needs citizens who can read the law, weigh a candidate and govern their own passions.

"And the happiness of mankind." The word "happiness" is the Founding word, the one in the Declaration of Independence. It means something closer to flourishing than to pleasure.

"Schools and the means of education." Notice the second phrase. The Ordinance did not say "public schools." It said schools and the means of education, which in 1787 included academies, church schools, private tutors, libraries and the institutions that a community set up for itself. The language was broad on purpose.

"Shall forever be encouraged." Not "shall be established." Not "shall be run by the government." Encouraged. The verb is modest and I think deliberate. Congress could not afford to build schools, and it did not suppose that a distant legislature knew better than a settled community what its schools should look like. It chose to encourage them.

The land that paid for it

A sentence on a page is cheap. What gave the school clause teeth was a second law passed two years earlier, the Land Ordinance of 1785, adopted on May 20, 1785.

That Ordinance laid out a method for surveying and selling the western lands. The territory was to be divided into townships six miles square, and each township into thirty-six sections of one square mile, or 640 acres, each. The sections were numbered, and the Ordinance reserved certain ones for the national government. It also reserved lot sixteen of every township, in its words, for the maintenance of public schools within the said township.

Do the arithmetic. One section out of thirty-six is a little under three percent of a township, or about 640 of the 23,040 acres in the whole. The scheme was not a lavish grant. But it was repeated across every township from the Ohio to the Mississippi, and it created a permanent endowment in the land itself, in places where a community might otherwise have had nothing to spare for a schoolhouse. A town that wanted a school had land set aside to help pay for it before the first settler arrived.

The Ordinances worked together. The Land Ordinance of 1785 supplied the acreage. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 supplied the purpose. The first said where the money would come from, and the second said why it was worth spending.

What Congress did not do

Here is the part that matters most for the argument, and the part that most people skip. Congress did not run a single school in the Northwest Territory. It did not hire a teacher, choose a textbook or set a curriculum. It reserved the land, it declared the principle, and it left everything else to the people on the ground.

When Ohio entered the Union in 1803, the federal law that admitted it set up the arrangement for the school lands, and the township's section sixteen became a local asset, held for the benefit of the schools in that township. Indiana followed in 1816 and Illinois in 1818, Michigan in 1837 and Wisconsin in 1848. As the national domain moved west, later states received two sections per township, numbers sixteen and thirty-six, and still later states received even more. The pattern held. The land was federal in origin, and the schools were local in operation.

The results were uneven, and I would be giving you propaganda if I claimed otherwise. Some townships leased the school land on terms that were poor, some sold it cheaply, some saw it stolen or squandered by officials who did not understand what they held. Eventually the states stepped in as trustees to protect the funds, and the local control that began as the glory of the system sometimes became its weakness. A fair account has to include that. But it also has to include the main fact: the nation's first great effort to encourage schooling worked through grants and local self-rule, not federal operation.

The argument, in numbered premises

What do we learn from this, as a matter of principle? Let me state it as I would argue it.

1. A free government needs a formed people. The Confederation Congress said so in its own words, and the Founders repeated it. Washington's Farewell Address, in 1796, called religion and morality indispensable supports of political prosperity and urged the promotion of institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge, because public opinion governs.
2. The formation of that people is a moral task, not only a technical one. The Ordinance named religion and morality before knowledge. A school that teaches skills and no virtue produces competent people without any assurance of good ones.
3. The government's role is to encourage, and not to monopolize. The verb in Article 3 is "encouraged." Congress set aside land and stated a principle. It did not claim to be the schoolmaster.
4. Local communities, not distant authorities, are the natural builders. The land was reserved township by township precisely so that each township could build for itself.
5. Therefore the American tradition of schooling begins as a decentralized and morally serious enterprise, and the later centralization of education is a departure from that beginning, not a fulfillment of it.

I think premise five is the one a fair reader should test, because it is where I am making a claim and not merely reporting. The reader may point out that states took over school funding and management in the nineteenth century, that the common school movement produced real gains in literacy, and that the federal government has a role in civil rights enforcement in schools. I agree with every one of those facts. The question is whether the modern habit of looking to Washington for the solution to every school problem has any footing in the founding design. It does not. Article 3 offers no such authority.

The strongest objection

The objection I take most seriously is that the phrase "religion, morality, and knowledge" cannot be a model for a modern public school. We have the First Amendment, ratified in 1791, which forbids Congress to make a law respecting an establishment of religion. If the Confederation Congress believed that schools should promote religion, then the Constitution that followed must have changed that.

It is a fair point, and I will answer it in three steps.

First, the Ordinance and the First Amendment were products of the same generation. Many of the men who voted for one voted for the other, and the First Congress re-enacted the Ordinance, including Article 3, two years before the First Amendment was ratified. They did not think the two were in conflict. The First Amendment restrained Congress from establishing a national church. The Ordinance encouraged schools in a territory, and the schools it encouraged were run by communities, many of them with religious foundations.

Second, the Ordinance's first article guaranteed that no person behaving peaceably should be molested on account of his mode of worship or religious sentiments. The religious liberty and the religious seriousness of the Ordinance go together. A government that encourages the teaching of morality, and protects the right of every person to worship as he chooses, is not establishing a church.

Third, I do not need the Ordinance to settle modern disputes about prayer in school. I only need it to correct a mistaken history. The claim that American education was always meant to be wholly secular, centrally run and morally neutral does not fit the founding record. The question of how to apply the Establishment Clause is a separate one, and I take it up in No Law Respecting an Establishment Meant Something Specific in 1791.

What it means for families today

You might ask what a sentence from 1787 has to do with the school board meeting on Tuesday night. A great deal.

When someone says that education is a purely technical matter, to be handled by experts from a central office, point to Article 3. When someone says that schools must have nothing to do with moral formation, point to the order of the three words: religion, morality, knowledge. When someone says that Washington must decide what your child learns, point to the verb: encouraged.

I will also say that the Founders' own assumption was that schools would teach virtue. The McGuffey Readers, which taught generations of American children to read in the nineteenth century, were full of moral lessons and Scripture, and the people who used them did not see that as a corruption of education. It was education. I have written about them in The McGuffey Readers Taught Reading and Virtue to Millions of Americans. Likewise, the question of what schools should teach about right and wrong is not whether to teach morals, since every school does, but which ones, a point I make in Every School Teaches Morals, the Only Question Is Which Ones.

And the old principle that the power to educate belongs to the community, and not to a distant capital, is the one I would hand to any parent who wants to know who really runs a school district. The answer is in Who Actually Runs Your School District, Board, Superintendent or State. The Founders would find the American habit of electing local school boards entirely natural. It is the township, still doing the work the township was meant to do.

The case in brief

1. The Northwest Ordinance of July 13, 1787, tied schooling to self-government in Article 3: religion, morality and knowledge are necessary to good government, so schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.
2. The Land Ordinance of 1785 reserved lot sixteen of every township for public schools, supplying the endowment that the Ordinance of 1787 justified.
3. Congress encouraged and endowed schools, but did not run any, leaving the work to townships and later to the states.
4. The moral purpose was explicit, and it sat beside a guarantee of religious freedom, which means the two ideas were never seen as enemies.
5. Today's centralization of education has no footing in the founding design, which was local, moral and modest about federal power.

What you can do: read Article 3 of the Northwest Ordinance in full on a government archive's website, then find out when your own school board next meets and attend one meeting.