Category: Government Schools

“Said Daniel Webster…‘In what age, by what sect, where, when, by whom, has religious truth been excluded from the education of youth? Nowhere never. Everywhere, and at all times, it has been and is regarded as essential. It is of the essence, the vitality of useful instruction’”

Robert L. Dabney (1820-1898)
“State Free Schools” and “Secularized Education” in Discussions Vol.4,
Ross House Books and Sprinkle Publications, 1979 [1897], pg. (219).

By now people well know my opposition to Government schools. Of course my opposition is only a reflection of my reading and observations. In what follows in this post I am combining my reading of Dabney with the observations of Bobbi Leigh Swagger, a person who is closely connected to Government schools and what goes on there. Knowing about Government schools is part of Bobbi Leigh’s vocation and career. Hopefully, the result of the combination of the abstract (my reading) with the concrete (real life accounts from Bobbi Leigh) will make a bigger impact on Christians to the end of getting their children out of Government schools if at all possible.

“We propose now…that tuition in Christianity is essential to all education which is worth the name…we mean in the fullest sense that Christianity must be a present element of all the training at all times, or else it is not true and valuable education…The human spirit is a monad, a single, unit, spiritual substance, having facilities and susceptibilities for different modifications, but no parts. Hence, when it is educated it is educated as a unit…it is impossible to separate the ethical and intellectual functions…knowledge is really valuable only as it is in order to right actions… The nature of responsibility is such that there can be no neutrality…‘He that is not with his God is against him.’ He who does not positively comply with the ever-present obligation does ipso facto violate it, and contract positive sinfulness. Hence as there cannot be in any soul a non-Christian state which is not anti-Christian, it follows that any training which attempts to be non-Christian is therefore anti-Christian. God is the rightful, supreme master and owner of all reasonable creatures, and their nearest and highest duties are to him. Hence to train a soul away from him is a robbery of God, which he cannot justify in any person or agency whatsoever” (220,221).

Robert L. Dabney (1820-1898)
“State Free Schools” and “Secularized Education” in Discussions Vol.4,
Ross House Books and Sprinkle Publications, 1979 [1897], pg. (220, 221).

“There can be, therefore, no true education without moral culture, and no true moral culture without Christianity” (222). R. L. Dabney

1. Just found out that a school in one of the former Cotton States just took down the walls of the bathroom stalls in the school because the kids were fornicating in the bathrooms. Oh, by the way this was a Middle School.

Bobbi Leigh Swagger

(I’m still working on understanding how it is that a child who would fornicate in a bathroom stall would suddenly find some scruples and modesty about fornicating without a stall.)

“Education is the nurture and development of the whole man for his proper end. The end must be conceived aright in order to understand the process” (230).

Is “a really secularized education either possible or admissible?…No people of any age, religion, or civilization, before ours, has ever thought so…Pagan, Papist, Mohammedan, Greek, Protestant, have all hitherto rejected any other education than one grounded in religion, as absurd and wicked” (230,231).

R. L. Dabney

“In one school district in which I operate they recently sent kids home with a test that said:

True or False: Christopher Columbus came to America and boiled the natives alive to make soap.”

Bobbi Leigh Swagger

“True education is, in a sense, a spiritual process, the nurture of a soul…Every line of true knowledge must find its completeness in its convergency to God, even as every beam of daylight leads the eye to the sun. If religion be excluded from our study, every process of thought will be arrested before it reaches its proper goal…[What if an unbeliever claims to be merely] teaching some purely secular course, without any such maiming of his subjects or prejudicing of Christianity? If his teaching is more than a temporary dealing with some corner of education, the fact will be found to be that it is tacitly anti-Christian; overt assaults are not made; but there is a studied avoidance which is in effect hostile. There can be no neutral position between two extremes, where there is no middle ground, but ‘a great gulf fixed’…The training which does not base duty on Christianity is, for us, practically immoral.”

R. L. Dabney (232-236)

In the Lone Star state I recently spoke with a parent who told me that her 9th grade daughter came home on Friday telling her mom that the teacher told them that Pocahontas married John Smith.

The child brought her own book about Pocahontas back to the school on Monday to show her that only in a Disney movie did Pocahontas fall in love with John Smith. The teacher said,

“I asked around, and none of the history teachers here agree with your version. They all think she married John Smith, so you must be wrong.”

Bobbi Leigh Swagger

The Christian creed of responsibility: “According to this, obligation to God covers all of every man’s being and actions. Even if the act be correct in outward form, which is done without any reference to his will, he will judge it a shortcoming. ‘The plowing of the wicked, is sin’ [Prov.21:4]…Our Savior has declared that there is no moral neutrality… The comparison of these truths will make it perfectly plain that a non-Christian training is literally an anti-Christian training” (238).

R. L. Dabney

In Connecticut I interviewed a Mother who told me her child was being summoned to the Dr. today for a psychological evaluation because her son had been cutting himself in 5th grade, stressed out over their new standardized tests.

Bobbi Leigh Swagger

(By the way folks … 5th grade means we are talking about a 9 or 10 year old.)

The “direction of the education of children…[is] properly a domestic and parental function…[God] looks to parents, in whom the family is founded, as the responsible agents of this result…He has also in the fifth Commandment connected the child proximately…with the parents, which, of course, confers on them the adequate and the prior authority…It thus appears that naturally the parent’s authority over their children could not have come by deputation from either State or visible Church…[But] the dispensation of Divine Providence in the course of nature shows where the power and duty of educating are deposited…No parent can fail to resent, with a righteous indignation, the intrusion of any authority between his conscience and convictions and the soul of his child. If the father conscientiously believes that his own creed is true and righteous and obligatory before God, then he must intuitively regard the intrusion of any other power between him and his minor child, to cause the rejection of that creed, as a usurpation…If this usurpation is made by the visible church, it is felt to be in the direction of popery, if by the magistrate, in the direction of despotism” (243,244).

R. L. Dabney

What “Protestant concedes therefrom that his religious rights were either conferred, or can be rightfully taken away, by civil authority?…The State or Church has no more right to invade the parental sphere than the parent to invade theirs…Did our republican fathers hold that any people have ever the right to subvert the moral order of society ordained by God?…So far is it from being true that the civil authority is entitled to shape a people to suit itself; the opposite is true, the people should shape the civil authority.” (245,246).

R. L. Dabney

In another case in the nutmeg state a Mom pulled child out after she showed up at the child’s school to get the child for a doctor’s appt…she had a doctor’s note/summons in her hand and they wouldn’t let her have her kid. Period.

Bobbie Leigh Swagger

Concluding with Dabney,

The State has no right to oppose the theological beliefs of Christians, but they do oppose these beliefs when they educate souls as they do, “because a non-Christian training is an anti-Christian training” (238).

“Since all truths converge towards God, he who is not to name God…can only construct a truncated figure…And no person nor organism has a right to seem to say to a responsible, immortal soul, ‘In this large and intelligent and even ethical segment of your doings you are entitled to be godless’” (239,240).

“In fact the Church does not and cannot repair the mischief which her more powerful, rich, and ubiquitous rival, the secularized State, is doing in thus giving, under the guise of a non-Christian, an anti-Christian training” (241).

Closing observations

1.) Keep in mind that R2K insists that there is no such thing as Christian Education.

2.) Obviously, not all Government schooled children will all have equally bad horror stories about their time in Government schools. Some accounts will be less bad than other accounts but all will be bad. Even in my own time we were taught the occult and given death studies. We also did the whole communist re-education thing in writing biographies.

3.) Even if Government schooled children have a comparative “good” schooling experience nothing can take away the fact that your children are being educated into a Worldview where God is hated and is seen as irrelevant.

“Now if the biblical revelation is ultimate for thought, outlook, and practice, we must readily see the implications for education… In a word, education must be Christian… [This] means that the subject matter of the classroom must derive its interpreting principles from the Christian revelation” (368,369).

“How indispensable to education from the earliest years, even before the child arrives at school age, is the word of Gen.1:1…No question is more urgent than that of whence… Whence the universe in which we live? Correlative is the doctrine of God’s providence… [Thus] unless the school fosters the fear of the Lord as the beginning of knowledge and of wisdom, the influence of the home and of the church, even when it is to a high degree exemplary, tends to be negated, and it is common knowledge and experience that in many cases the school has undermined what home and church have sought to establish and develop” (369).

“Education, apart from any conception of man as to his distinguishing identity, purpose, and destiny, is inconceivable…If education is to be Christian, it must be based upon and conducted in terms of the Christian view of man. If not, it is not Christian, and if not Christian it is alien and opposed to Christian interests…If boys and girls…are in the image of God, if that is their identity, their chief end cannot be anything less than to glorify God and to enjoy him. And education that is destitute of this objective, or has allowed it to suffer eclipse has lost its direction” (370,371).

“Christianity gives us a world view; it enunciates principles which underlie all our thinking if we are Christian; it prescribes the governing conceptions in terms of which we are to interpret reality. Christianity is not something tacked on to our world view; it is itself a world view. And the central features of our Christian faith are conditioned by, and in turn condition, that world view” (372).

The sum is: “The whole range and content of education must be God-centered; that is, God must be the unifying principle and the interpreting principle of the whole curriculum” (374).

John Murray (1898-1975)
“Christian Education,” in Collected Writings of John Murray, Vol.1, Banner of Truth, 1976, pgs.367-374.

“In the political and social discussions of the day, God’s law has ceased to be regarded as a factor that deserves to be reckoned with at all…[But] of one thing we can be sure—a nation that tramples thus upon the law of God…is headed for destruction” (140,141).

A “very ancient principle in the field of education…has been one of the chief enemies of human liberty for several thousand years—the principle, namely, that education is an affair essentially of the State, that education must be standardized for the welfare of the whole people and put under the control of government, that personal idiosyncrasies should be avoided…It is a very ancient thing—this notion that the children belong to the State, that their education must be provided for by the State in a way that makes for the State’s welfare. But that principle, I think you will find if you examine human history, is inimical at every step to liberty” (87,88).

“I hope therefore…that we may return to the principle of freedom for individual parents in the education of their children in accordance with their conscience…But let us be perfectly clear about one thing—if liberty is not maintained with regard to education, there is no use trying to maintain it in any other sphere. If you give the bureaucrats the children, you might just as well give them everything else…No, we do not want a Federal Department of Education and we do not want, in any form whatever, the slavery that a Federal Department of Education would bring” (98).

“Uniformity in education under central control it seems to me is the worst fate into which any country can fall…parents have a right to educate children as they please…education is essentially not a matter of the State at all” (100-102).

We “are dealing with the most important part of human life when we are dealing with education” (114).

J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937)
Education, Christianity, and the State
Edited by John Robbins, The Trinity Foundation, Jefferson, Maryland, 1987.

Note, with the very last quote in this batch that Machen has said the Education is the most important part of human life. This is not a statement that is inconsistent with Christianity as the R2K boys might say. The R2K boys, given their beliefs about the dichotomous nature of reality, should be appalled that any Christian Theologian would say that, we “are dealing with the most important part of human life when we are dealing with education,” since for the R2K boys education belongs not to the grace realm (which would be their “most important”) but to the common realm.

This reveals, again, that Machen was R2K the way that Jeffery Dahmer was a chef.

Machen could say what he said because he realized, unlike the R2K boys, that education is primarily a religious enterprise. Machen understood that Education was definitely not a so called “common realm” concern. The education of children is driven by religious considerations and presuppositions and any Christian who says otherwise, may well be saved, but nevertheless remains a damn fool who shouldn’t be listened to on much of anything no matter how many degrees he has behind his names.

Also, we should zoom in on Machen’s statement here about the dangers of Christians giving over their children to the State for schooling. Machen realized that should we give up our children to the State then it will do little good to hold on to our guns, income, or anything else vis-a-vis the State. If the pagan State is the tutor and the “en locus parentis” of our children for upwards to 8 hours a day then Christians will not normatively keep our children for our undoubted catholic Christian faith. If you give your children to the State to be saturated, soaked, and marinated in a pagan worldview, via the government schools you can not expect the children to become anything but reflections of the religious pagan education in which they were saturated, soaked, and marinated. This is especially so when one adds to the the prison time government school influence upon God’s covenant seed the impact of a pagan culture.

When we baptize our children part of what parents hear in the Baptismal charge is that Baptism is not to be used as a superstition. Yet, when we baptize our children and then send them to Government schools what else can the practice of Baptism have been by the parents, but a superstition that was supposed to be a talisman to ward off the evil that comes from government school education?

Dr. J. Gresham Machen was a prophet who being now dead, still speaks.

(As) “a matter of fact the religion of the Christian man embraces the whole of his life…everything that he does he should now do as a child of God…[The] bearing of truth, the meaning of truth, the purpose of truth, even in the sphere of mathematics, seem entirely different to the Christian from that which they seem to the non-Christian; and that is why a truly Christian education is possible only when Christian conviction underlies not a part, but all, of the curriculum of the school. True learning and true piety go hand in hand, and Christianity embraces the whole of life…I can see little consistency in a type of Christian activity which preaches the gospel on the street corners and at the ends of the earth, but neglects the children of the covenant by abandoning them to a cold and unbelieving secularism” (81,82).

“Another line of attack upon liberty has appeared in the advocacy of a Federal department of education. Repeatedly this vicious proposal has been introduced in Congress.”

“Uniformity in education, it seems to me, is one of the worst calamities into which any people can fall…Uniformity of education under one central governmental department would be a very great calamity indeed.”

J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937)
Education, Christianity, and the State — 81, 82, 71, 73,74
Edited by John Robbins, The Trinity Foundation, Jefferson, Maryland, 1987.

Of course when a “Christianity” is embraced that insists that Christians should not take every thought captive to make them obedient to Christ, because many thoughts exist in a common square where it is not possible to take those thoughts as captive to Christ since they are “common thoughts,” then the consequence every time is, what Machen calls, a “neglecting of the children of the covenant by abandoning them to a cold and unbelieving secularism.” R2K, by its very definition, is a neglecting of all God’s people of the covenant by abandoning them to a cold and unbelieving secularism. In point of fact, R2K finds a cold and unbelieving secularism to be what is optimal for the common realm because all that is possible for the common realm is secularism.

Listen to Machen and abandon R2K.