Blanshard Over Vermont

Six years ago the Supreme Court tossed a judicial bomb into many a U.S. schoolroom when it decided that it was unconstitutional for James Terry McCollum and his classmates in Champaign, Ill. to be exposed to religious instruction on public-school property (TIME, March 22, 1948). But the individualists of Vermont would not let some Washington lawyers tell them how to educate their children; the state board of education issued a routine notice of the decision, and nobody paid much attention.

To one Vermonter-by-adoption, a church-state issue, however small, is like a hot scent to a coon hound. When Lawyer Paul Blanshard--whose bestselling American Freedom and Catholic Power launched him on a career of Catholic-needling--learned that the children in his own town of Thetford were getting a weekly half-hour of nonsectarian religious instruction in the classroom, he promptly went into action. Blanshard formally asked Education Commissioner A. John Holden Jr. to notify all Vermont's schools that "the teaching of religion in public schools as part of the regular schedule of instruction" was unlawful and must be stopped. Last week Vermont's board of education issued a stern warning to all school superintendents to keep God out of the curriculum. Communities that disobeyed, the board hinted, might lose their annual grants of state aid.

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