You would never be able to convince most Christian families to send their children 6-9 hours a day to place that explicitly taught Hinduism or Islam or Buddhism. Yet, Christian families will send their children today to places where it is explicitly or implicitly taught that parents are stupid, that Christianity is oppressive, that alternate sexuality is a positive good, that diversity is ideal, that man is the measure of all truth, that redistribution of wealth is only fair, that a theory of science which takes more faith than believing in some animistic tale where some god was split in half to form the heavens and earth is true, that man is essentially good, and truth is arrived at by counting noses.
Try and convince people today that Government schools are the equivalent of the houses of the National Deity and even otherwise solid Christians will scoff at you and mock you. Go to a family reunion and mention the wickedness of government schooling and just watch the claws and fangs come out of people who supposedly love you.
People will typically respond that there are many “Christians serving in our Government schools.” While that may be true I refuse to concede that those Christians serving in our Government schools are Christians who are pursuing the life of the mind. No Christian who understands what it means to have a muscular Christian worldview could work in the Government school systems w/o working as a double agent trying to sabotage the system they were working in. We must keep in mind that great preponderance of Christians working in Government schools were educated in Christ Hating colleges and teacher colleges. As such they have imbibed a pagan worldview and have given it a coat of Christianity to sooth themselves.
Christians do you desire Reformation and awakening? Then you must educate yourselves and educate your children. You must begin to teach yourselves the basics of a Christian world and life view. Molech must be cut off at the knees.
Here are a flurry of quotes on government schooling. Hat Tip to Mark Chambers of putting these all in one place.
“Give me your 4 years olds, and in a generation I will build a socialist state.”
Vladimir Lenin
“He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future.”
Adolf Hitler
“I am convinced that the battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers that correctly perceive their role as proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity that recognizes and respects the spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being… The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and new. These teachers must embody the same selfless dedication as the most rabid fundamentalist preachers, for they will be ministers of another sort, utilizing the classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever subject they teach, regardless of the educational level – preschool day care or large state universities.”
John Dunphy on the purpose of humanist education.
“Education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism, and every American school is a school of humanism. What can a theistic Sunday school’s meeting for an hour once a week and teaching only a fraction of the children do to stem the tide of the five-day program of humanistic teaching?”
Charles F. Potter, “Humanism: A New Religion” 1930
“Every child entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well–by creating the international child of the future.”
Psychiatrist Chester M. Pierce, Addressing 1973 Childhood International Education Seminar
“The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues, and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else… Their purpose, in brief, is to make docile and patriotic citizens, to pile up majorities, and to make John Doe and Richard Doe as nearly alike, in their everyday reactions and ways of thinking, as possible.”
H. L. Mencken Raconteur & 20th Century Libertarian Man Of Letters
“Schooling is a form of adoption. You give your child away at his or her most plastic years to a group of strangers. You accept a promise, sometimes stated, but more often implied, that the state, through its agents, know better how to raise your children and educate them than you, your neighbors, your parents, your community, your local traditions and that your child will be better off so adopted. By the time the child returns to the family or has the option of doing that very few want to. Their parents are some form of friendly stranger to them. And why not – in the key hours of growing up strangers have raised the child.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ogCc8ObiwQ&feature=related
“Faith in the wonder working powers of education has proved to be one of the most durable components of liberal ideology … Yet the democratization of education has accomplished little to justify this faith. It has neither improved popular understanding of modern society, raised the quality of popular culture, nor reduced the gap between wealth and poverty, which remains as wide as ever. On the other hand, it has contributed to the decline of critical thought and the erosion of intellectual standards, forcing us to consider the possibility that mass education, as conservatives have argued all along, is intrinsically incompatible with the maintenance of educational quality….
Universal public education, instead of creating a community of self-governing citizens has contributed to the spread of intellectual torpor and political passivity.”
Christopher Lasch The Culture Of Narcissism – pg. 125, 130
“Contrary to what many Christians have been led to believe, there is no such thing as a ‘neutral’ education. All education is religious and conveys a worldview, and there is no more important decision that we make as parents than how we educate our children. Unfortunately, Christian parents allow an aggressively anti-Christian institution to form the minds of their children, and the fruit of that choice is bitter. The overwhelming majority of children from evangelical families leave the church within two years after they graduate from high school; only 9 percent of evangelical teens believe that there is any such thing as absolute moral truth; and, our children are being forcibly indoctrinated to believe that homosexual behavior is acceptable.”
Bruce Shortt The Harsh Truth About Public Schools
“…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
“The public school is a substitute institution for the Holy Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Church of the middle ages and is a thoroughly medieval concept. A single culture is demanded, and the public school must create it. Hence, every group believing in and seeking to control that new leviathan and grand monolith seeks control of the public school.”
R. J. Rushdoony Intellectual Schizophrenia – pg. 50
“The major offensive against Biblical faith began with the statist take-over of education and its conversion from a Biblical to a humanistic orientation. Modern statist education is intensely religious, but its religion is humanism, and its goal is the conversion of youth to the faith of the state and faith in the humanistic state.
The power of the state has been greatly enhanced by the take-over of education. The child was re-shaped in terms of statist premises and statist loyalties and expected to be a ready martyr for the state and its warfare. Nothing has contributed more to the rise of the state and its power than the statist school, and nothing is now more destructive to it. Whether in the Soviet Union or the Western world, the product of the state school is increasingly a lawless moral and political anarchist who is as hostile to his country as to God.”
R. J. Rushdoony
Chalcedon Report No. #92
April, 1973
“The hatred of excellence is very real. Everything that points to the world of the mind and to the discipline of an ultimate moral law is despised and hated. If good and evil are valid and basic categories of thought, then the idea of an elite is inescapable. The idea can be abused, a wrong kind elite fostered; but, despite this, the concept of excellence remains.
John Dewey, however, objected strongly to orthodox Christianity because of its commitment to the ideas of right and wrong, heaven and hell, the saved and the lost, and he objected to it on the grounds that it fostered the idea of a ’spiritual aristocracy.’ ‘I cannot understand,’ said Dewey, ‘how any realization of the democratic ideal as a vital moral and spiritual ideal in human affairs is possible without surrender of the conception of the basic division to which supernatural Christianity is committed.’ More than one generation has been reared on Dewey’s philosophy. Having denied the validity of standards above man, it looks for vitality from within and below man.”
R. J. Rushdoony Noble Savages – pg. 130
“Christianity must be a present element of all the training at all times, or else it is not a 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. The moral judgments and acts of the soul all involve an exercise of reason; so that it is impossible to separate the ethical and intellectual functions. The nature of responsibility is such that there can be no neutrality… between duty and sin. 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 robbery of God. He has not, indeed, committed to the State the duty of leading souls to him as its appropriate task. This is committed to the family and to His church. To educate the mind without purifying the heart is but `to place a sharp sword in the hand of a madman.’ Practically few do recognize and obey conscience except those who recognize the authority of the Bible. There can be, therefore, no true education without moral culture, and no true moral culture without Christianity.”
Robert L.Dabney Discussions Vol. IV (1870)
Public education is anti-Christ. It is the catechetical arm of godless government. It is an idolatrous institution, aggressively hostile to your faith. Its intention is to purge the knowledge of Christ and Christianity from the minds of your children and own them for the god called State. In lectures given prior to 1890 A. A. Hodge made the following predictions.
“A comprehensive and centralized system of national education, separated from religion, as is now commonly proposed, will prove the most appalling enginery for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief, and of anti-social nihilistic ethics, individual, social and political, which the sin-rent world has ever seen.”
That is exactly what has happened. With the exception of a few men like Hodge the pulpits of America have been filled with men who have repeatedly proven themselves to be incredibly ignorant and agonizingly dull. Obviously ignorant of the religious nature of all education and steeped in the godless idea of neutrality Minsters have failed to open the eyes of Christian parents to the dangers and has even defended the right to sacrifice their children on the educational altar of state. And after having sent their little ones to the enemy to be educated they are puzzled over why they are leaving the church. Such appalling stupidity. God help us.
Mark Chambers
Homeschooling Father of Three