Wealth & Money Quote by William Jennings Bryan

Bryan’s sentence doesn’t argue for better teaching; it argues for ownership. By leading with “The parents have a right,” he frames the classroom as an extension of the household and the taxpayer as the boss. The teacher is reduced from educator to paid agent, and the public school becomes a service purchased with “their money.” That’s shrewd populism: turn a theological dispute into a consumer-rights claim, then treat dissent as theft.

The loaded verb “rob” does the heavy lifting. Faith isn’t presented as something a student wrestles with or earns; it’s property that can be stolen by a corrupt professional. Bryan’s real target is not merely atheism but the authority of modern expertise. The fear is less that children will stop believing than that they will start thinking independently from their parents’ moral ecosystem. The parade of labels - “skeptical, or infidels, or agnostics, or atheists” - collapses distinct positions into a single, contagious danger. “Skeptical” is the tell: he’s not only fighting a conclusion (atheism) but a method (doubt).

The context is the early 20th-century showdown over evolution, culminating in the Scopes “Monkey Trial,” where Bryan became the emblem of anti-evolution activism. The line reads like a preemptive strike against pluralism: if public institutions must reflect everyone, then no one gets to claim the school is “theirs.” Bryan’s rhetoric flips that logic, insisting public education should protect a particular community’s faith by policing what counts as acceptable knowledge. It’s a culture-war blueprint: define the school as a battlefield, cast teachers as infiltrators, and elevate parental fear into civic virtue.