Wherever Christianity has gone, learning and education has followed.

Wherever Christianity has gone, schools have sprung up in town squares in rural villages.

From grammar schools to universities, rigorous education is a Christian virtue.

You see it in the fourth century with Augustine.

Just read his Dydrona Christiana on Christian teaching,

a book about education.

Or in schools like the Vyverium of Italy,

established by Cassiadores in the sixth century,

a haven for learning, writing, Christian training, and the preservation of learning from the ancients.

Or schools like the cathedral schools of the early Middle Ages in Europe,

the epicenters of advanced education in the Western world, or schools like

the Puritan schools of the early American colonies who published the first textbook in the

Americas, the New England primary.

In fact, Puritans are one of the big movers behind the expansion of education in America

to include more than nobility and professional clergymen.

For the Reformed and Protestant Christian,

Universal education of children was an outworking of the doctrine of the priesthood

of all believers as it applied to normal human discipleship.

If we're all priests, boys and girls, men and women, clergy and lady, nobility and laborer,

then ought we not all be able to access to scriptures ourselves, to read and write and reason clearly?

Prior to this time, the vast majority of education had been an undertaking only for the clergy

or the nobility. And so to that end, Protestants in 17th century

...