It has taken a while for Christians to see public schools in America as an existential threat to their children’s Christian faith. I saw one comment about this topic on Twitter which was the inspiration for this post. The guy said sending your kids to a public school is like playing Russian roulette with the school system. In other words, you’ll be lucky if your kids make it out as Christians. If there is a bullet in the chamber, they on their way to become heathens. I sympathize with this perspective, and agree the public schools are an indoctrination machine into secularism. I will further argue the idea of “public” schools is unbiblical because education is the responsibility of the parents and not the state. The latter idea goes back to something I call the conservative progressivism of the 19th century, which was progressive ideas promoting conservative ends. The Marxists would take over the progressive movement in the latter half of the 20th century, and in the 21st century bring to public education the reality of the Marxification of education, in the title of a book by James Lindsey.
Our children went to public schools because we didn’t know any better. Our youngest was able to start going to a classical Christian school in the 5th grade, which was an educational red pill experience for me. At the same time our daughter was attending Hillsdale College and fell in love with classical education, minoring in it and making it her career. But never when our kids where in public schools would I have for a minute considered it Russian roulette. The reason is because my wife and I saw their education as completely our responsibility. Never did I think it was the school’s responsibility to educate my children. Yes, the schools would teach them the “three Rs,” but it was up to my wife and I to inculcate that knowledge into a Christian worldview. Interrogating them about what they were learning at school, and exploring the hidden assumptions, was a common practice in our home. What they learned there was continually critiqued from the perspective of our Christian faith. They were raised from their earliest days learning that Christianity is ultimate truth about the nature of reality, and everything else is not. I wrote a book showing how I did that called, The Persuasive Christian Parent: Building an Enduring Faith in You and Your Children. Each of our children as adults are committed Christians. That was the plan all along, regardless of where they went to school
Our job as Christian parents is to teach them not only what we believe, but why we believe it. The latter is apologetics, or defending the veracity of the faith, and that is how we need to raise our children in a secular age. This is why I was always lecturing, teaching, and persuading them about why Christianity is true and why it is the only worldview that makes sense of all of reality. In my favorite quote from the ever quotable C.S. Lewis:
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
It is only the biggest of big pictures, God in Christ in Scripture, that makes sense of anything and everything. Every particular has meaning because of the universal, the puzzle pieces of life now fit because God is the author of the picture of life.
I say this to declare that a public school has no power over our children if we as parents do our job. That being said, a public school is the last place on earth you want to send you children! The rest of this piece explains why.
The Primacy of the Family in Education
I came across some quotes about the family from President Theodore Roosevelt that in our day would be considered “controversial,” but in the early twentieth century were common:
It is in the life of the family upon which in the last analysis the whole welfare of the Nation rests . . . . The nation is nothing but the aggregate of the families within its borders—Everything in the American civilization and nation rests upon the home—The family relation is the most fundamental, the most important of all relations.
His traditional conception of the family including the roles of men and women as husbands and wives would be positively shocking to our secular cultural elites, woke or not. R.J. Rushdoony states what Roosevelt observed as axiomatic for Christian Western civilization:
The family is, sociologically and religiously, the basic institution, man’s first and truest government, school, state, and church. Man’s basic emotional and psychic needs are met in terms of the family.
This was an inarguable statement of fact until the twentieth century and the rise of secularism, and with that rise the state slowly began to usurp the prerogatives of the family in education. J. Gresham Machen writing in 1925 argued it had already happened:
The most important Christian educational institution is not the pulpit or the school, as important as these institutions are; it is the Christian family. And that institution has to a very large extent ceased to do its work. . . . . The lamentable fact is that the Christian home, as an educational institution, has largely ceased to function.
Wherever as Christians we come down on the nature of education in America on which there will be disagreement, we must all agree with Machen, the education of children is the primary responsibility of the family. But Christian classical education was not yet on my radar.
Then in 2012 while my wife was working at the elementary school our youngest son attended, she was growing increasingly dismayed with what she was witnessing in public education. She insisted that he not attend our local public middle school; unfortunately, a private school was a pipe dream as far as I was concerned. There was no way we could afford it financially, and our other kids survived the public schools, faith intact, and so would he. It’s pathetic when surviving is the criteria by which I judged an education for our children, but we had no choice, I thought. Thankfully, my mother-in-law decided she would cover the tuition, and our son entered Covenant Classical School in Naperville, Illinois for the fifth grade. To say I was blown away by the education we encountered at this Christian classical school would be a massive understatement. But even with our son at a Christian classical school, in my mind the ideal along with home schooling, his education was still our responsibility.
Government and Education Need to Get a Divorce
America’s founders believed deeply in the importance of education, and to that end the Continental Congress in July 1787 passed The Northwest Ordinance in which they stated:
Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.
Religion to the Founders meant Christianity, and its morality and knowledge was necessary to good government and a happy populace. In other words, civilization depended on education. It didn’t follow, though, that encouragement meant government control of education given the Founders’ deep suspicion of human nature and government power. Yet, over time “public” education came to mean government education subsidized by taxpayers controlled by the government. In this sense, public education is an oxymoron. Machen put this presciently in 1934:
Every lover of human freedom ought to oppose with all his might the giving of federal aid to the schools of this country; for federal aid in the long run inevitably means federal control, and federal control means control by a centralized and irresponsible bureaucracy, and control by such a bureaucracy means the death of everything that might make this country great.
Who can argue with this after 90 years of hindsight. Rushdoony further makes our point, writing in 1961:
The public school is now unmistakably a state school, and its concept of education is inevitably statist. This is apparent in various ways. First of all, education has ceased to be a responsibility of the home and has become a responsibility of the state. . . . the state still claims sole right to determine the nature, extent, and time of education. Thus, a basic family right has been destroyed and the state’s control over the child asserted.
It cannot be both state and family, only either/or. And this is not just an argument for liberty over against government tyranny, but a fundamentally religious question. Secular neutrality is a myth, and American public schools are the establishment of a secular religion in the guise of religious neutrality. Joe Boot explains:
We can clearly see . . . that neither the structure within which we educate, nor the purpose for which we educate, nor the content by which we educate, can be neutral.
Doug Wilson states why this an indisputable fact:
Education is fundamentally religious. Consequently, there is no question about whether a morality will be imposed in that education, but rather which morality will be imposed. Christians and assorted traditionalists who want a secular school system to instill anything other than secular ethics are wanting something that has never happened and can never happen.
He further asserts that public or “common schools were going to be the means by which the entire progressive agenda was ushered in.” Progressive in the twenty-first century is nothing like the early progressives imagined, but in hindsight it’s easy to see how secular progressive education paved the way for a takeover of education by cultural Marxists.
Does this mean that what we know as public education needs to be “abolished,” to borrow from Marx? Yes! School choice may be a good stopgap measure to take away some of the monopoly power of the government, but it is only temporary. It follows from the biblical imperative of the familial responsibility of the educating children, that it must be completely private and divorced from government at any level. Government money always brings with it government influence. Education is a worldview enterprise, and in America parents should be free to decide in what worldview they want their children educated.
What that looks like and how we get there I don’t know. I only know this should be the objective of any Christian who understands the incompatibility of Christianity with any other worldview in the educating of children. In the meantime as we work toward this, I believe that charter classical schools are a critical means to challenging the secular progressive monopoly on education.
The Rise of Progressive Education in America
Having made the case for the complete familial responsibility of the education of children, let’s look at how modern education came to be so horribly modernly horrible.
Conservatives have been complaining about public education for a long time. In fact, a popular book called Why Johnny Can’t Read—And What You Can Do About It came out in 1955. Some people think the 1950s was the golden age of conservatism. It wasn’t. That decade continued the consequences of secular progressivism in American culture, even if the effects were masked by leftover conservative Christian cultural influence. Education was a fundamental part of the progressive vision of transforming America into a “modern” democracy based on “scientific” principles among other things, and progressives paved the way for what has become the Marxification of education in the 21st century.
Progressive education goes back well before there was a progressive movement in America to the influence of Horace Mann (1796-1859), considered the father of American public schools. As a reformer, he convinced Americans they should pay for public, or “common,” schools, and established the Massachusetts State Board of Education. According to Britannica, Mann “believed that, in a democratic society, education should be free and universal, nonsectarian, democratic in method, and reliant on well-trained professional teachers.” We can see immediately from a Christian perspective this is a non-starter, yet not only did it start, but in due course this perspective took over education in America. Nonsectarian eventually became in practice the progressive secular religion.
To reiterate, there can be no such thing as a “nonsectarian” education because education is fundamentally religious and always inculcates a worldview in the children being educated. Also, there is no such thing as free education. In practice, free always means someone else pays. There is no constitutional right in America to insist that other Americans pay for my children’s education, or that I pay for theirs. Yet by the twentieth century this became an unquestioned dogma, and if challenged, charges from the left erupted like a volcano, hot and fast.
Doug Wilson tells how these reformers were uniformly hostile to orthodox Christianity. Many were Unitarians, the number one Christian heresy of the day. As he points out, the local government schools were mostly run by Christians who had no idea the true intent of the reformers above them. If the communities were Evangelical, so were the schools, but the secular progressive die was cast. He writes of one nineteenth century Cassandra, R.L. Dabney (1820-1898), whose prophecies of the inevitable consequences proved true. Dabney wrote:
We have seen that their [the schools’] complete secularization is logically inevitable. Christians must prepare themselves then, for the following results: All prayer, catechisms, and Bibles will ultimately be driven out of the schools.
At the behest of radical atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the Supreme Court in 1962 basically outlawed prayer in public schools—nonsectarian indeed.
Arguably, the Olympic champion of progressive education was John Dewey (1859-1952) who was passionate about “democracy,” and education as the way to achieve it. Cultural transformation starts with education, and the torrent of secular, progressive ideas like a rushing river had a momentum by the late nineteenth century that would not be stopped. The basic outline of Dewey’s influence is found in the word progressive itself; it had to be different than whatever came before, and unfortunately it was. Prior to the progressive era, education in America was basically classical. Progressives believed “classical” was against “progress,” so it had to go. Here is a smattering of Dewey’s ideas:
- Education should promote the practical over the abstract.
- Experience was the great teacher, and the scientific method the primary source of knowledge.
- The idea of “public” should replace the “individual.”
- Traditional religion, i.e., Christianity, is an obstacle to true education and progress.
- Human nature is not fixed but can be changed via education.
- Traditional classrooms stifle a child’s curiosity, creativity, and excitement for learning.
- Discipline or correction is not a teacher’s duty, but rather to understand and follow a student’s interest and impulses.
- The utility of ideas is what makes them important.
- Education is not primarily about academics or morality, but societal change.
- Goals and standards are harmful to a child’s motivation.
- Pedagogy must be a discipline apart from subject matter and methodology over content.
Henry T. Edmondson summarizes Dewey’s influence well:
Thanks in no small part to Dewey, much of what characterizes contemporary education is a revolt against various expressions of authority: a revolt against a canon of learning, a revolt against tradition, a revolt against religious values, a revolt against moral standards, a revolt against logic—even a revolt against grammar and spelling.
And a mighty successful revolt it has been! But now there is a counter revolt happening as the poverty of progressive education and its Marxist progeny becomes impossible to ignore. I mentioned James Lindsey and his book, The Marxification of Education above. If you want to see how Marxism in the guise of woke infiltrated K-12 public schools, and many private schools as well, I would highly suggest reading his book.
As with the Enlightenment and it’s offshoot, secularism in the form of progressive education and now Marxification, i.e. woke, took a long time, hundreds of years, to get us here. It will take a long time to turn around, but it’s starting and gaining momentum. When I was growing up, home schooling and classical education didn’t exist, now it’s everywhere. Christians are waking up to the realization that we can’t entrust our kids to the secular, woke indoctrination factories of so called public education. It will be hard for many Christian families to break out of “free” public schools, but the church needs to take seriously the need for that to happen. I trust that will become a more prevalent topic of conversation in the years to come.
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