“To commit our children to the care of irreligious people is to commit lambs to the superintendency of wolves.”
Timothy Dwight
President of Yale University (1795-1817)
Grandson of Jonathan Edwards
“…where the Holy Scriptures do not rule, there I advise no one to send his son. Everyone not unceasingly busy with the Word of God must become corrupt; that is why t…he people who are in the universities and who are trained there are the kind of people they are. For this no one is to blame with the training of the youth. For the universities ought to turn out only men who are experts in the Holy Scriptures, who can become bishops and priests, leaders in the fight against heretics, the devil and all the world. But where do you find this true? I greatly fear that the universities are wide gates of hell, if they do not diligently teach the Holy Scriptures and impress them on the youth.”
— Martin Luther
“Keep your children as much as may be from ill company, especially of ungodly playfellows. It is one of the greatest dangers for the undoing of children in the world; especially when they are sent to common schools: for there is scarce any of those schools so good, but hath many rude and ungodly ill-taught children in it.”
~Richard Baxter (1615-1691)
Puritan Minister / Theologian
Author — “The Reformed Pastor”
“If I demanded you give up your television to an anonymous, itinerant repairman who needed work you’d think I was crazy; if I came with a policeman who forced you to pay that repairman even after he broke your set, you would be outraged. Why are you so docile when you give up your child to a government agent called a teacher?”
John Taylor Gatto
The Underground History Of American Education
“The statist school is a citizen-producing factory designed to manufacture people whose every loyalty is eroded. No family ties bind the well-taught statist school product…. Thus, all competing institutions… or loyalties of family, faith, and heritage are eliminated. The result is a mass man; such a man is easily a rebel, a malcontent, or a drone, but he is not capable of anything but a statist answer to problems, because for him no other agency has any stature or viability. He is a factory product with standardized reactions and responses.”
R. J. Rushdoony
American Reformed Theologian
“We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.” ~ Horace Mann
“The purpose of state schooling is not intellectual training but the conditioning of children ‘to Obedience, Subordination, and collective life.’” ~ John Taylor Gatto
“We must focus on creating citizens for the good of society. Public schools promote civic rather than individual pursuits. Each child belongs to the state.” ~ William H. Seawell, Professor of Education at the University of Virginia, 1981
“Plans are underway to replace family, community and church with propaganda, mass-media and education. People are only little lumps of dough”. ~ John Dewey
“We want one class of persons to have a liberal education and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”
~ Woodrow Wilson at the address to the Federation of High School Teachers.
“”The aim of public education is not ‘to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. … Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim … is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States.'” -H.L. Mencken
“It is the teaching of the Bible and of sound Political ethics that the education of children belongs to the sphere of the family and is the duty of the parents. The theory that the children of the Commonwealth are the charge of the Commonwealth is a pagan one, derived from heathen Sparta and Plato’s heathen republic”
– Robert L. Dabney
Of course we must take slight issue with Dr. Dwight for it is literally impossible to commit the care of our children to irreligious people since all people are by definition hopelessly religious. So, whenever we commit the care of our children to strangers we are at the same time committing our children to the religious. Dr. Dwight’s point was the dangers of committing our children to those who embrace a pagan wolf religion. To commit our children to those who practice a pagan religion is to commit lambs to the superintendency of wolves. Yet, American Christian Parents do so every day — day after day, year after year — until their children, because their belief system has been shaped by the wolves, no longer belong to them and are strangers to God.
