Education S Lively Experiment In Rhode Island

Beginning with the legacy of Roger Williams, who in 1633 founded the first colony not restricted to people of one faith, The Lively Experiment chronicles how Americans have continually demolished traditional prejudices while at the same time erecting new walls between belief systems. The chapters gathered here reveal how Americans are sensitively attuned to irony and contradiction, to unanticipated eruptions of bigotry and unheralded acts of decency, and to the disruption caused by new movements and the reassurance supplied by old divisions. The authors examine the way ethnicity, race, and imperialism have been woven into the fabric of interreligious relations and highlight how currents of tolerance and intolerance have rippled in multiple directions. Nearly four hundred years after Roger Williams' Rhode Island colony, the "lively experiment" of religious tolerance remains a core tenet of the American way of life. This volume honors this boisterous tradition by offering the first comprehensive account of America’s vibrant and often tumultuous history of interreligious relations.

This book documents the inherently flawed nature of America's public school system as currently structured. Contemporary recommendations for correcting the system invariably treat symptoms rather than the inherent problem of government control over parental and religious rights. The book documents that: education is a religious endeavor and that freedom of religion is guaranteed in the United States, parents have an inalienable right to raise their children free from government constraints on education, civil government is to protect and not deprive citizens of their inalienable rights, the educational history of our country affirms that education has always had a religious function, recent interpretations of the First and Fourteenth Amendments are both misguided and opposite from their original meanings, federal control of education and education taxation is outside the legitimate authority of the U.S. Constitution, and government control of education at federal, state, and local levels is inherently tyrannical. Addressed in separate chapters, the above-mentioned issues, individually and collectively, build a compelling case for the disestablishment of government control and the return of parental control to education. To quote James Madison, government should relate to education in the same way as it does to religion-not to "intermeddle" with it.

By focusing on law, this book offers new insights into the history of religious liberty in colonial America.