Back in the 1980s, I wrote a book entitled Is Public Education Necessary? In it I argued that the American people never clamored for a government education system. They were quite satisfied with the private academies that were doing an excellent job of educating their children. But what I discovered through my research was that the idea of a government education system had been foisted on the American people by a coalition of Owenite communists, Harvard Unitarians, and misguided evangelical Protestants.
The Owenite communists wanted to use the government schools as a means of preparing American youth to accept a communist way of life; the Unitarians wanted to use the government schools to promote secularism and wean America away from orthodox Calvinism; and the Protestants wanted to use the government schools as a means of converting Catholic immigrant children into Protestants.
So what did the Catholics do? They created their own parochial school system that taught children the academic basics as well as Catholic religious doctrine. Over the decades, Catholic schools have produced well-educated, patriotic young citizens of the United States.
Owenite communism, aka utopian socialism, was the brainchild of Robert Owen (1771–1858), an Englishman who fancied himself a messiah and was passionately anti-religion. According to Wikipedia, he believed that all religions were “based on the same ridiculous imagination, that make man a weak, imbecile animal, a furious bigot and fanatic, or a miserable hypocrite.” He was determined to change the world. He and his sons came to America in the 1820s and set up their experimental communist community at New Harmony, Indiana. After two years, it failed. Owen concluded that one had to be educated at an early age to accept a communist way of life, and so he and his sons shifted their efforts to promoting a government school system in America that would mold children into little communists.
Orestes Brownson, who had worked with the Owenites, later wrote about his experience after he had converted to Catholicism:
But the more immediate work was to get our system of schools adopted. To this end it was proposed to organize the whole Union secretly, very much on the plan of the Carbonari of Europe, of whom at that time I knew nothing. The members of this secret society were to avail themselves of all the means in their power, each in his own locality, to form public opinion in favor of education by the state at the public expense, and to get such men elected to the legislatures as would be likely to favor our purposes. How far the secret organization extended I do not know, but I do know that a considerable portion of the State of New York was organized, for I was myself one of the agents for organizing it.
So as early as the 1830s the communists were already working secretly in the United States to get government schools established for their purposes. Today, America’s godless public schools are promoting collectivism in their own schizoid manner, preparing young Americans to live in a socialist society.
The Harvard Unitarians no longer believed in salvation through Jesus Christ. They rejected the Calvinist doctrine of innate depravity and believed that man was capable of moral perfectibility through a good secular education run by government. Thus, Horace Mann, a Unitarian politician who became Secretary of Education, worked to establish a centralized, government-controlled education system in Massachusetts that became the model for the rest of America.
As for the evangelicals, although they decided to take part in the government-school experiment, they did so with reservations. In 1849, they issued a statement expressing their concerns. They wrote:
The benefits of this system, in offering instruction to all, are so many and so great that its religious deficiencies — especially since they can be otherwise supplied, do not seem to be a sufficient reason for abandoning it, and adopting in its place, a system of denominational parochial schools. …
If after a full and faithful experiment, it should at last be seen that fidelity to the religious interests of our children forbids a further patronage of the system, we can unite with Evangelical Christians in the establishment of private schools, in which more full doctrinal instruction may be possible.
The experiment has failed, but so have the evangelical Christians failed to get Christian parents to take their children out of the godless schools. But many Christian parents, unwilling to wait for Christian leaders to lead, took matters into their own hands and created the homeschool movement.
Of course, the Protestant-leaning government schools did a fairly decent job of educating American children until the atheist Progressives took over the public schools in the 1930s and turned them into seminaries to create little socialists. They changed the way reading is taught because the traditional method encouraged individualism, whereby a student could read anything he or she wanted and make up his own minds about things. The Progressives imposed a new method of instruction recommended by John Dewey: the whole-word method, which teaches children to read English as if it were Chinese, an ideographic system. That would get rid of high literacy and dumb down the kids sufficiently so that they could easily be molded to fit into the new socialist order.
By 1955, the new method of teaching was causing so many reading problems that Rudolf Flesch felt compelled to write his exposé, Why Johnny Can’t Read. In it he said: “The teaching of reading all over the United States, in all the schools and in all the textbooks is totally wrong and flies in the face of all logic and common sense.”
Although the book aroused a great deal of parental indignation, the progressive educators simply circled the wagons and kept doing what they had been doing. And that is why the reading problem still persists today.
In 1983, in order to provide parents with a simple, easy way of teaching their children to read in the traditional phonetic way, I wrote my reading program, Alpha-Phonics. It’s been used by thousands of homeschoolers who have successfully turned their children into avid readers. If any of you have children in the public schools who have been damaged by the way reading is taught in that school, get Alpha-Phonics and tutor your child at home.
But back to the question in the title of this article: Are Godless Government Schools Necessary? The answer is a resounding no. When you eliminate God from education, you substitute Darwin’s theory of evolution for the biblical account of creation. In the schools, however, evolution is not taught as a theory but as scientific truth. The children are taught that they are animals like all the other animals, and there is no religious code of morals based on the existence of the God of the Bible. With no biblical moral code, children are told that morality is relative, that ethics are situational, and that the Ten Commandments are a mythical, unscientific religious doctrine forbidden in the school.
Therefore, children are taught that the only morality in nature is natural selection. There is no moral code prohibiting premarital sex. And that is why kids are given condoms in government schools. They are told that a gay lifestyle is perfectly normal. Recreational sex for boys and girls is okay. If you get pregnant, abortion is always available. Boys need not worry about producing a child out of wedlock. Abortion will take care of the matter. If the teenage girl decides to give birth, she can always give the baby up for adoption or actually raise it herself with government support. Boys are not required to take responsibility for the lives they create. In other words, the teaching of evolution leads to moral chaos.
When schools approve of moral freedom, aka moral chaos, they have no idea what that can lead to in student behavior. For example, the two boys at Columbine High School who spent a year and a half planning to massacre their fellow students, came from very normal, secular middle-class families. Their parents were hard-working, law-abiding citizens who gave their children everything that today’s middle-class parents give teenagers: good meals, good clothes, cars, TV sets, computers, trips to Disney World, and an abundance of family love. So what turned these normal, intelligent boys into monstrous killers? Everyone forgets the fact that these boys spent 12 years in godless government schools that preach moral chaos based on evolution.
They had the usual doses of sex education, drug education, death education, values clarification, and other programs designed to de-Christianize the children and turn them into atheists, socialists, anarchists, nihilists, or Satanists. The epidemic of school shootings that has plagued America since God was removed from the schools is caused by students who believe in nothing. G. K. Chesterton once wrote: “People who believe in nothing will believe in anything.”
The point is that when you take God out of education, the consequences can be quite horrible. Godless government schools have become exceedingly dangerous places for any child. Children are at risk in four important ways in these schools.
First, they are at risk academically because of the way the basics are taught: whole-word reading programs; the new, new math; invented spelling; no penmanship. Such programs create reading failure and the inability to perform mental arithmetic.
Second, there is the spiritual risk. Eliminate God from education and you get a child who believes in nothing, separating him or her from the love of God.
The third risk is moral. Humanist morality is basically nihilistic because it is based on no authority. It leads to immoral behavior.
Fourth, there is the physical risk. Children have actually been killed in government schools. Recently, in Chardon, Ohio, a student killed three fellow students at the high school. The parents who sent their sons to that school did not expect them to be killed there. But godless government schools cannot prevent school killings.
So, what are parents to do? It will be impossible to get God back in the government schools. But once parents understand the lethal dangers of the godless schools, they can choose to either homeschool their children or enroll them in private schools.
Can we get rid of these godless government schools? Not as long as state and federal legislators keep voting to fund them and as long as homeowners are willing to pay the burdensome taxes that keep them open. The godless government school system is the recipient of the largest river of tax-funded cash flow in America, apart from national defense. Thus, the American people, whether they believe in God or not, are forced to support an education system that consciously destroys the morality of its students.
A government school system that teaches children that they are animals is not fit for a free society. And parents who support such education are the unhappy bearers of their children’s anti-social behavior. The parents of boys who murder their fellow students must spend the rest of their lives living with the sense of guilt that they, not the school, are somehow responsible for their children’s behavior. The millions of students who spend 12 years in these government schools and come out barely able to read consider themselves stupid or disabled. They don’t blame the schools that made them that way.
The Declaration of Independence states: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”But the godless government schools preach doctrines in contradiction with those expressed in the Declaration. Thus they are illegal, unconstitutional institutions. Taxpayers should not be forced to pay for atheist government schools that violate the principles of the nation’s founding.
Americans deserve schools that respect the individual student as a child of God, made in His image, capable of using the brains God gave to all of His children to lead productive, creative lives, in pursuit of their own happiness. Without the love and protection of God, children can easily get lost in the bewildering maze of the nihilistic moral chaos which plagues the godless schools. American children deserve better.
