LETTER TO THE EDITOR: America needs new innovative education movement

To The Editor:

I have a theory that religious prophets start educational or social movements when governments fail at their job of teaching and governing. These new ethical/spiritual movements end up producing private church educational systems doing their best to recall and interpret the teachings of the prophet for contemporary times.

America has had her share of such old-light and new-light prophets, including folks like Roger Williams, Cotton Mather, Tenskwatawa, Ellen G. White, Joseph Smith, Charles Taze Russell, Mary Baker Eddy, Thomas Merton, Billy Sunday, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, and Billy Graham.

Secular education reformers may also step onto the scene promoting science and civics education, civil rights, or socioeconomic/welfare reform. America has produced many of these type prophets as well, including Horace Mann, William McGuffey, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Dewey, Sojourner Truth, Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Dorothy Day, Jane Addams, Rachel Carlson, and Martin Luther King.

Unfortunately, both the spiritual and secular education movements can become so stylized and contemporized that they lose touch with their individual growth and democracy-supporting missions.

If would seem America needs both types of innovative educational movements today, spiritual and secular, to straighten the country out. The government and existing churches, social activists and nonprofit organizations just aren’t cutting it.

Kimball Shinkoskey

Woods Cross, Utah