Education: A Brief History and Cause of Decadency (Part 3)

Protestantism pushed for the parachurch education though with good intentions. Martin Luther wrote to the German princes in 1524, urging them to establish schools for every child paid for by the government. “The first compulsory attendance system was established in Wurttemberg in 1559 by the duke of Wurttemberg. Detailed attendance records were kept, and fines levied on the parents of truant. The Saxon and Wurttemberg systems became models for compulsory public schools in most of the Protestant German states and later in Prussia.”¹⁾ Samuel Blumenfeld, Is Public Education Necessary, Devin Adair, 1981, p. 11 “A decade later, when John Calvin became the head of the government in Geneva, Switzerland, he immediately established a state sponsored educational system.”²⁾ Tim LaHaye, The Battle for the Public Schools: Humanism’s Threat to our Children, Fleming H. Revell Company, 1983, p. 58 Dr. Gibbs rightly asserted: “God has given parents and churches, not government, the responsibility for teaching children.”³⁾ Dr. David Gibbs, Jr., with Jerry Newcombe, One Nation Under God: The Ten Things Every Christian Should Know About the Founding of America, Christian Law Association, 2005, p. 79 The Puritans understood this when they came to the America as they kept education within the local church for as long as primary and secondary schooling.

This new system began with the first Puritan church at Salem, organized in 1629 by the so-called “Salem Procedure.”… That was the sole criterion of governance: that a voter took going to church seriously and joined a congregation as evidence. It was an act of monumental localism…. Each separate congregation took on responsibility for solving its own problems-whether of education, economics, or doctrine-rather than submitting to the old authority of England or to the new aristocracy of expertise.⁴⁾ John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, New Society Publishers, 1992, p. 82-83

The Puritan colonies in 1647 commanded, “To the end that learning may not be buried in the graves of our forefathers… every township, after the Lord hath increased them to the number fifty householders, shall appoint one to teach all children to read and write; and where any town shall increase to the number of one hundred families, they shall set us a grammar school, the masters thereof being able to instruct youth so far as they may be fitted for the university.”⁵⁾ George Bancroft, History of the United States of America, From the Discovery of the Continent, D. Appelton and Company, 1859, 1890, Vol. 1, p. 316 These schools were in the local church with the children being taught by the pastor. Tim LaHaye explained, “…in many cities and villages throughout the country, ministers were the first teachers. They were usually among the few educated individuals in a community, and since they had to supplement their income anyway, it often fell their lot to become the teachers of the children Monday through Friday and the preachers at the church on Sunday.”⁶⁾ Tim LaHaye, The Battle for the Public Schools: Humanism’s Threat to our Children, Fleming H. Revell Company, 1983, p. 59 James Beller noted: “Christian people pioneered the educational system in America.”⁷⁾ James R. Beller, America In Crimson Red: The Baptist History of America, Prairie Fire Press, 2004, p. 448
Samuel Blumenfled identified that a Christian culture strongly opposed public schools. “Only in Boston did the public schools receive unflagging public support despite the competition from private academies, mainly because of a special situation in that city: the growth of the Unitarian movement which strongly favored public education.”⁸⁾ Samuel Blumenfeld, Is Public Education Necessary, Devin Adair, 1981, p. 28

Why would the Unitarians in Boston favor public education? For the same reason that Luther and Calvin approved government-controlled and sponsored education: so that classrooms could become conduits to the minds of their children, inculcating religious principles. The Unitarians were just copying a page from Calvin and Luther.
What makes that frightening for today’s education is the fact that Unitarianism in America was the mother of secular humanism, which stalks the public-school corridors today with absolute control.⁹⁾ Tim LaHaye, The Battle for the Public Schools: Humanism’s Threat to our Children, Fleming H. Revell Company, 1983, p.59-60

The error that arises is the inconsistency of thinking that higher education needs to be a parachurch institution. While these are frequently started with the right purposes, they become targeted for infiltration. Consider Harvard as an example which has been repeated over and over throughout history. “From 1638 until 1785, Hebrew was compulsory at Harvard, the oldest American institute for higher education, where ‘no scholar could be admitted for a degree unless he was able to translate the Hebrew original of the Bible into Latin.’”¹⁰⁾ Paul Richard Wilkinson, For Zion’s Sake: Christian Zionism and the Role of John Nelson Darby, WIPF & Stock Publishers, 2007, p. 231; citing Reuben Fink, ed., America and Palestine: The Attitude of Official America and of the American People toward the Rebuilding of Palestine as a Free and Democratic Jewish Commonwealth, Revised ed, Herald Square Press, Inc., 1945, p. 13 David Sorenson relates, “Harvard University was begun as Harvard College in 1636 to train pastors for the fledgling colony of Massachusetts…. In 1805, Harvard was taken over by Unitarians and by 1850, it was known as the Unitarian Vatican. The school by the end of the nineteenth century went on to eliminate Christianity as a favored position in the curriculum, liberal as it was. Harvard became a secular institution of higher learning.”¹¹⁾ David H. Sorenson, Broad Is the Way: Fundamentalists Merging into the Evangelical Mainstream, Norhtstar Ministries, 2013, p. 112 In 1720 Thomas Hollis established a professorship of theology at Harvard University by granting 80 pounds per year to the school with an additional 100 pounds to split between “ten scholars of good character” stipulating “four of whom should be Baptists, if any such there were.”¹²⁾ Isaac Backus, An Abridgement to the Church History of New England (1804; reprint ed., Boston:Harvard Universtiy, 1935), p. 128; as cited by James R. Beller, America In Crimson Red: The Baptist History of America, Prairie Fire Press, 2004, p. 445 James Beller related, “Even with this educational opportunity, the doctrine of Harvard were against the Baptists. So in those early years Baptists educated themselves.”¹³⁾ James R. Beller, America In Crimson Red: The Baptist History of America, Prairie Fire Press, 2004, p. 445 The English parliament passed The Schism Act in 1714 (supposedly repealed in 1718) that limited schoolmasters to teachers licensed by the Bishop of London.¹⁴⁾ James R. Beller, America In Crimson Red: The Baptist History of America, Prairie Fire Press, 2004, p. 181

All over the country, Separate churches were springing up. The Standing order scrambled to enforce a 1742 law in Connecticut forbidding churches from settling ministers who were not Yale or Harvard or foreign educated…. The Separate Congergationalists argued that the office of the Gospel ministry may be exercised by men who do not have a formal education. …Even Jonathan Edwards wrote opposing the idea of an uneducated preacher or pastor…. In fact, as Whitefield had pointed out, formal education may even be a hinder to the Gospel preacher.¹⁵⁾ James R. Beller, America In Crimson Red: The Baptist History of America, Prairie Fire Press, 2004, p. 126

Whitefield proved to be accurate as history revealed Harvard and Yale to have shortly after become corrupted with heresy and secularism. A preacher without formal education would have simply read the Bible, believed it, preached it, and trained the next generation in the same doctrine and method of training the next generation from the local church.
This is still the threat to schools outside of the control of the local church where a pastor takes his office of watching over the sheep seriously. “Sadly, not a few fundamentalist colleges or seminaries have been inculcated with, at least, a new-evangelical philosophy when faculty members pursued an advanced degree from an evangelical institution.”¹⁶⁾ David H. Sorenson, Broad Is the Way: Fundamentalists Merging into the Evangelical Mainstream, Norhtstar Ministries, 2013, p. 174-175 Ernest Pickering properly assessed, “Generally speaking, a person is the product of his education. He is a reflection of the school which he attended…. To perpetuate their principles, they [the New Evangelicals] needed to infiltrate the classrooms of Christian schools and thus influence the coming generation of leaders. This they were able to do with remarkable success.”¹⁷⁾ Ernest D. Pickering, The Tragedy of Compromise: The Origin and Impact of the New Evangelicalism, BJU Press, 1994, p. 30
The rise of public schools in America begins with:

…the incredible story of Robert Owen, an Englishman often labled “the father of modern socialism,” who established a socialist community in Scotland. Central to this atheist’s purpose was the establishment of an educational system to condition the minds of future generations for socialism…. In 1825 Owen transferred his efforts to New Harmony, Indiana, a communal experiment that failed within a couple of years. Owen explained that one ingredient for success was lacking: education as the prerequisite to the success of socialism. Thus the Owenites, joined by transcendentalists, Unitarians, Universalists, and other humanist forerunners, began to work insidiously for the takeover of public education.¹⁸⁾ Tim LaHaye, The Battle for the Public Schools: Humanism’s Threat to our Children, Fleming H. Revell Company, 1983, p. 61

One of Owens supporters is reported to have said in 1829, “the great object was to get rid of Christianity and to convert our Churches into halls of science. The plan was to establish…national schools from which all religion was to be excluded, in which nothing was to be taught but such knowledge as is verifiable by the senses, and to which all parents were to be compelled by law to send their children.”¹⁹⁾ Samuel Blumenthal, Is Public Education Necessary? Paradigm Co; 2nd edition, 1985, p. 95-95 This was slowly becoming acceptable since the Unitarians took over the colleges and the trained pastors were not feeding the sheep with truth so the people of the nation progressively lost conviction over their children’s education.
From this influence “the state of Massachusetts created the Board of Education and appointed Horace Mann as the first Secretary of the Board in 1837…”²⁰⁾ A. Ralph Epperson, The Unseen Hand, Publius Press, 1985, p. 385 Tim LaHaye noted that “Horace Mann is usually considered the father of public education.”²¹⁾ Tim LaHaye, The Battle for the Public Schools: Humanism’s Threat to our Children, Fleming H. Revell Company, 1983, p. 63 “Horace Mann moved from the Massachusetts Department of Education to become the first secretary of the Department of Education for the federal government.”²²⁾ Tim LaHaye, The Battle for the Public Schools: Humanism’s Threat to our Children, Fleming H. Revell Company, 1983, p. 67 Mann is reported to have wrote: “What the church has been for medieval man, the public school must become for democratic and rational man. God would be replaced by the concept of the public good.”²³⁾ Quoted by Phyllis Schlafly Report, in the Utah Independent, December 23, 1976 John Taylor Gatto mentioned how the compulsory public schools became forced upon the citizens last attempt to resistance. “Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the State of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted – sometimes with guns – by an estimated eighty percent of the Massachusetts population, the last outpost in Barnstable on Cape Cod not surrendering its children until the 1880s, when the area was seized by militia and children marched to school under guard.”²⁴⁾ John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, New Society Publishers, 1992, p. 25
These schools became full fledge humanist indoctrination institutions under John Dewey, the author of The Humanist Manifesto I.

John Dewey was an educational philosopher. His experimental philosophies of education were first tried to a model school at the University of Chicago before 1900. They were dismal failures. Children learned nothing. Undismayed, Dewey left Chicago in 1904 and went to Teachers College, Columbia University, where with the support of major “charitable foundations,” he became the dominant figure and the most influential man in American education.²⁵⁾ John A. Stormer, None Dare Call It Education, Liberty Bell Press, 1999, p. 44

Ralph Epperson revealed “Dewey apparently never taught the young student himself but concentrated on teaching the teachers. Today, twenty percent of all American school superintendents and forty percent of all teacher college heads have advanced degrees from Columbia where Dewey spent many years as the Department head.”²⁶⁾ A. Ralph Epperson, The Unseen Hand, Publius Press, 1985, p. 386 As Christians lost their convictions for the local church as God’s ordained instrument for educating the youth, every vestige of Christianity was utterly lost from education altogether. “It was early October 1960 when my Mother, Madalyn Murray (O’Hair), began her campaign deeply involving me to remove prayer and Bible reading from public schools. She had returned from France with my younger brother Garth, 6, and me, 14, after failing to gain citizenship in the Soviet Union through the Russian embassy in Paris. She despised the United States and its free enterprise system, and the Soviets must have sensed that, with such an attitude, she would do them more good back in the United States.”²⁷⁾ William J. Murray as told to James R. Adair, “My Life as an Atheist,” Escape From Darkness, compiled by James R. Adair and Ted Miller, Victor Books, 1982, p. 122