America’s Future | Tools of Tyrants | In Focus June 13,2024
This is the twenty-fifth entry in our In Focus series identifying and exposing the tools that modern-day tyrants are using to thwart the will of We The People for power and control. To access previous articles, please click here.
The “public school” system — better thought of as the “government school” system — is so well established as an institution of modern society that few take time to consider whether schooling is a legitimate function of government. By any measure, modern government schools have been a terrible failure for decades. Perhaps these government schools cannot succeed simply because our Creator never gave responsibility for the education of children to civil government.
Applying First Principles
The Bible teaches that children belong to parents, not to the state. “Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward.” Psalm 127:3. Parents, not bureaucrats, are directed to “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Proverbs 22:6. Fathers are charged with special responsibility: “And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Ephesians 6:4.
One of the few verses that directly discusses those hired who teach children demonstrates that the tutor is directly accountable to the father — not a Principal or a school board. It reads: “That the heir, as long as he is a child … is under tutors and governors until the time appointed of the father.” Galatians 4:1-2. Herbert W. Titus, founding Dean of Regent Law School rejected the government’s role, asserting: “Education is an unalienable right of the people and, consequently, it is a duty owed to the Creator, not the state.”
Schools Indoctrinate, While Failing to Educate
Parents of children in America’s government schools have become more and more desperate as government schools continue to produce abysmal academic results, teach immoral behavior, and produce woke activists.
In 2019, the United States spent more on education per pupil than all but two other nations worldwide, at $15,800 per student. Yet Forbes magazine reports that “[o]nly 36% of fourth graders are proficient at grade-level math.” Children in America’s cities especially are predominantly trapped, held hostage in failing government institutions. In the spring of 2023, a shocking study revealed that “none of the students at 40% of Baltimore’s public high schools tested proficient on the state math exam given this past spring — with a staggering three-quarters earning the lowest possible score.” In 2015, tested against students worldwide in math, science, and reading, government school students in America placed behind such countries as Portugal, Slovenia, and Vietnam.
It’s not just an academic disaster. Parents have watched in horror as the schools they believed were there to help parents educate their children have instead ruthlessly pitted their children against them. Last year, in John & Jane Parents 1 v. Montgomery County Board of Education, 78 F.4th 622 (4th Cir. 2023), the Fourth Circuit rejected parents’ challenge to a school policy forbidding teachers to tell parents if their child wished to undergo a “gender transition.” A few days ago, the First Circuit Court of Appeals said it was okay for a Massachusetts middle school to prohibit a student from wearing a t-shirt stating the scientific fact that “There are only two genders” under a dress code policy banning clothing “targeting” groups based on “gender identity.” At the same time, the school encourages LGBTQ+ Pride shirts.
Tyrants Prioritize Control of Children
Tyrants understand clearly the importance of capturing the minds of the next generation. Communists understand this principle particularly well. In a 1919 book, “The ABC of Communism,” two Bolshevik writers argued:
One of the most important tasks of the proletarian state is to liberate children from the reactionary influence of their parents…. We must not rest content with the expulsion of religious propaganda from the school. We must see to it that the school assumes the offensive against religious propaganda in the home, so that from the very outset the children’s mind shall be rendered immune to all those religious fairy tales which grown-ups continue to regard as truth. [Emphasis added.]
Fascism (state socialism) adopted the same play book as communism (international socialism). Hitler stated in 1933, “When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I say calmly, ‘Your child belongs to us already. What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community’” (emphasis added). In 1935, Hitler asserted: “He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future.”
The Decline of Education in America
Teachers’ unions tell us that we need to pay them more and more to educate the young. However, long before government schools, most Americans were highly literate. “‘The Federalist Papers, which are seldom read or understood today even in our universities … were written for and read by the common man. Literacy rates were as high or higher than they are today.’ Incredibly, ‘A study conducted in 1800 by DuPont de Nemours revealed that only four in a thousand Americans were unable to read and write legibly.’”
Government schools have actually made matters worse. The education establishment’s dumbing-down of educational standards and insistence on wrong-headed educational methods, like the failed “whole language” approach to reading, have also played a significant role in education’s demise, but at least it seems phonics is making a comeback. We know how to teach children to read, but those who push the modern equivalent of “Dick and Jane” readers prefer new techniques that don’t work.
The Destroyers: Mann and Dewey
The two men credited as “founding fathers” of the American government school system are Horace Mann (1796-1859) and John Dewey (1859–1952). Both were explicit in their intention to use government schooling as a way to divorce American children from their history — especially their Christian heritage.
“Mann and his cohorts believed fervently in the power of big government…. He regularly used lofty rhetoric about the benevolent, paternalistic role of government that would become the all-too-familiar siren song of the 20th century’s most ruthless totalitarians.” The modern push for the schools to pit children against their parents began with Mann. With notable candor, Mann wrote, “We who are engaged in the sacred cause of education are entitled to look upon all parents as having given hostages to our cause.” (Emphasis added.)
Mann’s efforts were furthered by John Dewey. Dewey was an avowed atheist and a signer of the first Humanist Manifesto. “Dewey worked fiendishly to continue the severing of American and Western education’s Christian roots…. By the time Dewey and his disciples worked their magic, the scheme would culminate in a nation in which the overwhelming majority of high-school seniors violently reject the biblical worldview, and in which most young people describe themselves as socialist.” Dewey traveled to Soviet Russia, and “was especially pleased with its so-called education system, celebrating the way it was instilling a ‘collectivistic mentality’ in Soviet children….”
Like the Bolsheviks, Dewey was passionate about severing American schoolchildren from Christianity. Humanism, he believed, should replace Christianity as the dominant religion. The Humanist Manifesto he signed touted explicitly anti-Christian religious dogmas:
Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created…. Humanism asserts that the nature of the universe depicted by modern science makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values…. We are convinced that the time has passed for theism…. In the place of the old attitudes involved in worship and prayer … [i]t follows that there will be no uniquely religious emotions and attitudes of the kind hitherto associated with belief in the supernatural…. [Emphasis added.]
In 1933, Dewey wrote in Teacher Magazine, “There is no God and there is no soul. Hence, there are no needs for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, the immutable truth is also dead and buried. There is no room for fixed, natural law or moral absolutes” (Emphasis added).
Humanism vs. Christianity
Dewey’s friend and fellow Humanist Manifesto signatory Charles F. Potter wrote in 1933, “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?” (Emphasis added)
In 1983, John J. Dunphy wrote in Humanist Magazine, “The battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith: A religion of humanity — utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to carry humanist values into wherever they teach. The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new — the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism.” (Emphasis added)
The U.S. Supreme Court
From the time that the Supreme Court banned God from the school house, its decline has been rapid. Within a span of two decades, the Supreme Court removed prayer, Bible reading, and displays of the Ten Commandments from schools with its decisions in Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962), Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963), and Stone v. Graham, 449 U.S. 39 (1980). But despite high-sounding language from the Supreme Court, these decisions did not create religious “neutrality.” You cannot be neutral about God — “He that is not with me is against me.” Matthew 12:30. The same godless presuppositions of the Soviet education system provide the foundation of American government schools.
Parents Battle against Schools Boards
When government schools were shut down due to COVID, many parents became more aware of what their children were being taught in school, as well as other education options: millions moved their kids to private and home schools, and states improved school-choice funding programs.
Other parents fought to fix the public schools, and the combined withdrawals and reform efforts led the educational establishment and Democrat politicians to dig in on the government schools’ war against parents and their values. Joe Biden last year claimed that “Our nation’s children are all our children.” In 2021, Virginia parents fighting to be involved in their children’s education became central to Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin’s victory over Terry McAuliffe after McAuliffe said “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”
Echoing that view, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education Miguel Cardona stated, “Teachers know what is best for their kids because they are with them every day. We must trust teachers.” Cardona also solicited a letter from the National School Boards Association which called on the FBI to investigate concerned parents as “domestic terrorists.” Attorney General Merrick Garland happily directed the FBI to do so. When Florida and Texas considered protecting parents’ rights in schools legislation, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten declared, “This is the way in which wars start.”
The Futility of “Improving” Government Schools
Enormous energy has been devoted to “taking over” school boards, but even when this has happened, little is accomplished. To continue to receive federal and state funding, schools must obey all types of dictates that Christians find distasteful at best. Christian lawyer Kerry L. Morgan’s book Real Choice Real Freedom In American Education (Univ. Press of Am.: 1997) takes the view that these schools cannot be saved. Former Chairman of the California State Assembly’s Education Committee Steve Baldwin has done more work in taking over school boards, but says none have truly changed education. His recent article “Why Running for School Boards May be a Waste of Time,” is a must read for anyone considering devoting energy to take on the beast of government schools. The Christian website Public School Exit provides a host of resources to help parents who want to rescue their children from government schools.
For 150 years, government schools have declared themselves the vanguard of the destruction of Christianity. While it is possible that there are a few schools in conservative areas that are not a threat to children, Department of Education mandates are making it impossible for them to operate under local control. Parents (and grandparents) must make the sacrifices necessary to give their children an education that supports faith, family, and freedom, and, sadly, that cannot be found in government schools.
Editor’s Note: To read the articles in this series, please click here.