The Anti-Catholic Origin of Public Education and Prohibition
Here is how they are described in The Progressive Era, a fascinating article from LewRockwell.com:

According to Samuel Blumenfeld (“Why the Schools Went Public”; Reason Magazine, March 1979), the public-school movement that swept Boston during the 1840s was led by Unitarians such as Horace Mann. While Mann and his followers pushed government education at the expense of private schools, they were able to form coalitions with Calvinists and the Christian Protestant pietists, who saw public schools as a way to “train” the children of Catholic immigrants who were pouring into the country from Ireland and southern Europe. Moreover, Unitarians and the pietists promoted laws to prohibit the making and sale of alcoholic beverages, again a coalition that was promoted, in part, as a wedge against Catholic immigrants, who came from cultures where alcohol consumption was a normal part of life.

The rest of the article is well worth a read, as it exposes both the myths of that "enlightened" era and its darker side, including eugenics, segregation, and war.