Education for Democracy

Education for Democracy is a work on religious education by Henry Frederick Cope (1870-1923), the American religious educator who served as General Secretary of the Religious Education Association from 1907 until his death. Cope was one of the leading American figures in the developing field of religious education during the Progressive era and produced substantial work on the integration of religious instruction with the broader democratic and social purposes that Progressive American thinkers were emphasizing.

The Religious Education Association had been founded in 1903 to bring together religious educators from across the various American Protestant denominations along with educators from Jewish religious schools and from the developing secular educational establishment. The association aimed at improving the quality of religious instruction in American Sunday schools, in religious day schools, and in the various other settings where religious education was conducted. The association published the Religious Education journal and held annual conferences that brought together leading figures in the field.

Cope’s Education for Democracy frames religious education as an essential contribution to the broader democratic project that Progressive American thinkers understood as the central national task of the period. The argument is that genuine democracy requires citizens with developed moral and ethical capacities, that the formation of these capacities is one of the central purposes of religious education, and that religious educators have a substantial public responsibility that extends beyond their work with individual children and congregations.

The Progressive framework runs through the book. John Dewey’s educational philosophy, which was reshaping American thinking about education across the same period, gets substantial influence in the book. Cope was sympathetic to Dewey’s emphasis on experience-based learning, on the social purposes of education, and on the integration of education with the broader work of democratic society. He extended these ideas into the religious education context where Dewey himself had little to say.

The book reflects mainstream early-twentieth-century American liberal Protestant assumptions. Cope was working in the moderate Protestant tradition that combined traditional Christian commitments with substantial openness to modern scholarship, social reform, and democratic political development.

The book is mostly of interest now to historians of American Progressive era religious education. It pairs with Cope’s other writings and with the broader Religious Education Association literature of the period.