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Abandon Government Schools by Steven YatesLast week, Focus on the Family president James C. Dobson urged California parents to abandon the state's government school system. His words, from last Thursday's daily radio broadcast: "In the state of California, if I had a child there, I wouldn't put the youngster in a public school…. I think it's time to get our kids out. And I'm going to get hit for [saying] that." Dobson has long been critical of the California legislature's mandating teaching that homosexuality and bisexuality are normal, and that homosexuality and heterosexuality are morally equivalent. What is different is that up until now, Dobson had advocated reforming government schools. An article on the FOTF website concludes, "… if we mix prayers with works, if parents are actively and prayerfully involved in their children's education, the evidence shows that public schools can change." Maybe, in some cases; maybe not, in a lot of others. It is true that not all government schools are equally wretched. What new evidence shows is increasing sympathy among Christian activists for abandoning the government school system altogether, and not just in California but in all 50 states. Two leaders of the movement to remove Christian children from government schools are Marshall Fritz of the Alliance for the Separation of School and State and Rev. E. Ray Moore of Exodus Mandate. The Alliance website features an online Proclamation for the Separation of School and State that has collected over 15,000 signatures from all 50 states. The Proclamation calls for an end to government involvement in education. Rev. Moore has just completed a book-length manifesto entitled Let My Children Go, scheduled for publication in mid-May. Moore's book retains the title of a well-received video released back in 1999 by Jeremiah Films. One of the new book's unique features is its total repudiation of the phrase public school. The term public implies that these schools are owned by, serve and answer to the public. Rev. Moore argues that this is just plain false, and we should not allow those running them to maintain the masquerade. We should always use phrases such as government schools or state-sponsored schools, in contrast with private or Christian schools operating independently of government and answering those they serve, not government bureaucrats. Dr. D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries and T.C. Pinckney, Brig. Gen. USAF Ret., Second Vice President of the Southern Baptist Convention, have also expressed concern about the direction government schools have been taking. Dr. Kennedy has long been in the forefront of nationally recognized evangelical leaders who has consistently supported Christian schools or homeschooling as the only Biblical choice for Christians. Gen. Pinckney addressed the SBC's Executive Committee on September 18, 2001, in a speech that failed to receive the attention it merited due to the events of one week before. Entitled "We Are Losing Our Children," Pinckney's speech observed how "[r]esearch indicates that 70% of teens who are involved in a church youth group will stop attending church within two years of their high school graduation." We are losing our youth, he says, and singles out two main culprits: "first, our failure as Christian parents and churches, and, second, the intentional, persistent and highly effective effort by anti-theists to use public schools to lead children away from their parents and from the church." Both Pinckney in his speech and Moore in his book explore the history of the government school movement. Rev. Moore's book reviews the evidence that government schools were not part of the Framers' original vision for this country. There are, of course, no references to education in the Constitution, and no reason to think the Framers considered education a federal responsibility. Rev. Moore goes further, arguing that we are dealing with a "renegade school system," its roots not in any American or Christian tradition but in continental European collectivism and pagan state-worship. Horace Mann, leader of a group of Unitarians who had captured Harvard University by the mid-1830s, went to Prussia to study government schools there. In Prussian schools, as Pinckney puts it, "the state had complete control, parents had no influence, and children were entered at the earliest age." Mann and his cohorts approved! They designed a plan for a school system in Massachusetts that called for: (1) compulsory attendance for all students, (2) certification for all teachers in the form of a state teacher's college degree as certification (indicating that the teachers had been "taught what to teach"), and (3) full state funding. They proposed the plan to the Massachusetts legislature, and soon the government school movement was underway. Then positivism came along. Positivism is a philosophical system holding that science is the sole arbiter of truth. In the hands of 19th century French sociologist Auguste Comte, positivism proposed a kind of religion out of Humanity (capital H). Both Pinckney and Moore quote Comte: "The object of our philosophy is to direct the spiritual reorganization of the civilized world…. [W]e may begin at once to construct that system of morality under which the final regeneration of Humanity will proceed." Comte proposed a future in which Man stands on his own, redesigning his civilization along lines suggested by Science (capital S), without God-and also without individuality. While humanistic philosophies had of course existed before, this was when secular humanism really captured the Western intelligentsia's imagination. Secular humanism as Christian writers and educators use the term refers to a worldview. "Everyone has a worldview," explains Pinckney, "a perspective of the world around him…. Although there are many worldviews designated by many exotic or not so exotic terms, they all boil down to just two types: your worldview will be man-centered or God-centered." In the new worldview, government and man-centeredness go hand in hand, because those who want power all too easily see themselves as having "dethroned God," as Karl Marx put it. The new intelligentsia emerging-especially its political avant garde-wanted nothing to do with the idea of answering to an Authority higher than itself. We can only expect that a man-centered philosophy would be at home in government schools modeled on the same basic philosophical underpinnings that also eventually gave us Marxism-Leninism. In the 1870s, the Presbyterian theologian R.L. Dabney warned against the expanding government school movement, but the majority of Christians did not sense any danger-and at first, with the above action mostly limited to Europe, nothing seemed amiss. But during the 20th century, government schools became the primary instruments of social transformation. John Dewey's Progressive Education movement was secular and evolutionary; the idea of schools as laboratories for producing children of a certain type was built into his thinking. A pragmatist who saw truth as fluid and the world as constantly changing, he saw the purpose of education as not to communicate truth and the wisdom of our civilization to children but to "adjust" them to a "changing world." Progressive Education assumed there was no definite right and wrong, and that the individual can be subordinated to the collective. It eventually spawned fads such as the "look-say" method of teaching reading and the "new math." By the 1960s evidence was accumulating of a diminishing of children's reading and mathematical abilities, the former documented in books such as Rudolph Flesch's Why Johnny Can't Read. The response was more federal intervention and larger expenditures. We saw Outcome-Based Education that served mainly to expand the government-educational bureaucracy and make matters worse. We have also seen "national standards" movements of various stripes, usually supported by both major political parties, that have centralized government education further without reversing the across-the-board decline in student performance that has characterized the past half-century. Over the past eight years government schools have fallen prey to the School-To-Work movement, which is really just Outcome-Based Education taken further out. While programs differ from state to state, this movement, an outgrowth of both behind-the-scenes UN policy and the School-To-Work Opportunities Act which Bill Clinton signed into law in 1994, sometimes tries to track children into career categories in lower grades and occasionally even in kindergarten. At first glance, School-To-Work education sounds good. What is wrong with educating children for tomorrow's workplace? Plenty-if it abandons intellectual for vocational development and leads to still more federal control over education, as some critics have charged. A few weeks ago I had a chance conversation with an "educationist" attending a convention at Auburn University. She told me how high school seniors were spending hundreds of hours on work sites shadowing employees, obtaining job-skills mentoring, learning to "network" and engaging in "social services" activities (e.g., recycling garbage-to "think globally and act locally," I presume). It was common knowledge that they weren't spending enough time in the classroom. This explains a problem many employers have noticed-graduates whose literacy levels are so low they can barely fill out job applications. The problem is, government schools are not training students for jobs in some kind of worldview-neutral fashion, whatever that would amount to. There is hard evidence that they are producing certain kind of graduate-secular-minded, specialized and uninterested in "abstract" issues, obedient to authority, and willing to depend on government, in addition to being largely illiterate and innumerate. Dan Smithwick, of the Nehemiah Institute, developed what has become known as PEERS testing. PEERS testing measures a student's worldview in five areas: politics, economics, education, religion and social issues. In a study entitled "Teachers, Curriculum and Control" Smithwick assembled statistical evidence that government schools are leading children away from Christian beliefs and training them for a world dominated by a secular humanist outlook on life, with relativism its prevailing ethic. This should be considered when evaluating the School-To-Work movement. It explains Pinckney's observation that even college students raised in solidly Christian homes simply stop attending church before they graduate. They graduated from government high schools, and their earlier Christianity has been "educated" out of them. The situation is actually worse. Evidence has accumulated that government schools are dangerous places, especially for Christian children. The Columbine killings, in April of 1999, were the most shocking of a rash of violent attacks in government schools. In a few cases, gradeschoolers murdered other gradeschoolers! There was evidence that Christian children were becoming targets. Columbine is the prime example, but in at least one other case, the one that occurred in West Paducah, Kentucky in 1997, the shooter singled out a Christian prayer group. To some extent, the rise in homeschooling that had begun even before the Columbine killings is due to an increased sense that government schools are not safe. Some may point out that, statistically, deadly violence in schools actually fell off somewhat as the 1990s progressed. The response is that when I was in high school it did not occur at all. I am aware of no cases of children killing children in the 1960s and 1970s. None. As teenagers my generation worried about being caught skipping the last class of the day. Those who smoked marijuana worried about in being found in their lockers. No one considered himself to be in real physical danger from a deranged classmate. Even the worst bullies were nuisances, not deadly threats. There were no metal detectors on entrances-not even in big cities. Are these the fruits of education transformed to produce young secular humanists-a generation that has jettisoned not only God but also morality and respect for human life itself? Very possibly. It looks to be not the scientific paradise imagined by Comte and Dewey but a nightmare of children and teenagers who are either angry and hostile or simply indifferent-all one has to do is observe the tattoos, body-piercings, etc., listen to their favorite rock groups (who have names like Megadeth and Rage Against The Machine) or note the "whatevers," "not evens," "don't go theres" and casual obscenities that punctuate their everyday speech. Among the highest causes of death among today's youth is suicide. This is sad! We need to separate government and education. Pinckney, Moore, Fritz and Smithwick all see a sound, Scriptural basis for returning education to parents with assistance from the church (Deuteronomy 6:7-9, for example). A central section of Moore's Let My Children Go addresses pastors, urging them both to support the homeschooling movement and offer church buildings as locations were new private Christian schools could be set up. Some of his observations are commonsensical. Much of the space in these buildings is unused all five days every work week except during vacation Bible school in the summer. Churches could serve as excellent home bases for newly started private Christian schools. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with businesses being involved and supporting such endeavors with their resources-if they are interested in future employees who not merely have the skills to earn a living but also know how to live. Government education has run its course. Its guiding philosophy has been a disaster-philosophically, educationally and culturally. Dr. Dobson has long believed that government schools could be saved. His statement last week marks a departure. We owe him a debt for this alone. All Dr. Dobson would need to do is observe further that what is true of California is true of the other 49 states: there is, after all, not a state in our unraveling Union where the moral equivalence of homosexuality and heterosexuality has not become a standard view among politically correct educationists, or where agendas at least as troublesome are not becoming the norm. I would urge Christian parents to contact Dr. Dobson pointing this out. Moreover, I would think one does not have to be a Christian to realize that something terrible has happened to education in this country. Scanning the signees of Marshall Fritz's Proclamation the other evening, I saw several names of people I know not to be Christians. Non-Christians as well as Christians have a stake in what happens here. We could be approaching a turning point. Those who spent decades transforming this country into what it is now knew the power available to them through government schools. We have now lost many young people. If enough Christian parents turn to homeschooling or to private schools, a significant fraction of the next generation may have both the knowledge and the will to do what it takes to reverse the decline of this civilization. April 4, 2002
Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com |
