What the church had been for medieval man, the public school must now become for democratic and rational man. God would be replaced by the concept of the Public Good, sin and guilt by the more positive virtues of Victorian morality ....

— Horace Mann, “The Father of Public Education”

So-called public education has become such a staple of life in the United States and other Western industrialized nations that it is now a sacrosanct institution. The transition from the small one-room school of yesteryear, often taught by a teacher privately hired by the parents of the children being educated (for an example of how this worked, read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving), to today’s gargantuan education factories is as big a societal change as the well-chronicled Industrial Revolution.

Many people have always rejected so-called public education (the reason for the qualifying adjective will be explained shortly) and opted for private schooling for their children. Their reasons generally fell into one of two categories: 1) To seek academically superior education from private preparatory academies that would help ensure their children’s entry into the colleges of their choice, or 2) to obtain education that reinforced the parent’s religious views, in church-affiliated schools. Though the network of parochial schools established by Catholic parishes represented the largest number of these religious schools, many others exist, including the very large Seventh-day Adventist educational system, schools established by mainstream Protestant denominations such as the Lutherans, and the many nondenominational schools designated simply as “Christian schools.” (Non-Christian religions have also established schools that teach in the context of their faith.)

Up until 45 years ago, however, our government-run schools still retained a nominally healthy respect for the Judeo-Christian culture in which they operated. This writer attended both public and parochial elementary schools up until 1959, and at that time, each school day started with the Pledge of Allegiance and a reading from the Bible by a student. During my third-grade school year, the teacher invited a Jewish boy to bring a menorah into class and explain its use in the celebration of Chanukah.

But much changed with the landmark 1963 Supreme Court decision Abington Township School District v. Schempp (which was consolidated with Murray v. Curlett) that decided 8-1 in favor of the respondent, Edward Schempp, and declared school-sponsored Bible reading in public schools in the United States to be unconstitutional. Though removing prayer from the schools was not the only thing wrong with entrusting the education of our children to agencies of government, it greatly accelerated the downward slide from an education based upon certain Judeo-Christian values to an education that has become completely secular.

As for most conservatives’ preference for describing schools supported by tax money as “government,” rather than “public,” a little background is necessary. The British usage of the terms “public” and “private” is probably more faithful to the original meaning of these designations for schools than that used in America. As Wikpedia explains:

The earliest known reference to a "public school" dates from 1364 when the Bishop of Winchester wrote concerning "the public school" at Kingston, which was then part of the diocese of Winchester.

This English usage of the word "public" contrasts with the expectations of many English speakers from around the world. Outside the British Isles people usually refer to fee-paying schools as private schools or independent schools; many would assume that the word "public" should imply public financial support. Indeed, in many countries "public school" is the commonplace name for any government-maintained school where instruction is provided free of charge and attendance may be compulsory up to certain age. In England such a maintained school would commonly be called a state school, a local authority school, or a foundation or community school.

While, certainly, American English differs from that used in Britain, there is more to this than trans-Atlantic differences in semantics. While it is true that our government schools are supported by the public (in the form of often-onerous property taxes), public influence over critical matters such as curriculum and the overall academic environment (including the acknowledgement of a Supreme Being) has become almost negligible. Such control has been taken away from the “public” (namely parents) and handed over to various levels of government — first municipal, and then (due to “aid” to education by them) state and federal.

A personal anecdote will illustrate an important point. Midway through first grade, my family moved and — because the Catholic school in our new town was filled to capacity — my mother told me I would be going to a public school for the first time. I was aghast and protested to my mother: “But I’m not public, I’m Catholic!”

My first-grade logic had figured that all religions must end with “-lic”! But there was more to that youthful misunderstanding than meets the eye. If the environment in our government schools were merely neutral regarding our culture’s religious heritage, the problem might be circumvented by parents’ providing for their children’s religious education in Sunday school, catechism class, Hebrew school, etc. However, our government schools, far from being neutral about religion, have embraced a sort of neo-pagan religion of their own, often described as secular humanism.

The prolific writer of books about education (NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education, Is Public Education Necessary?) Samuel L. Blumenfeld has traced the origins of secular humanism in U.S. education to the year 1805 at Harvard University. Prior to 1805, Harvard had been a bastion of orthodox Calvinism, but in that year a liberal theologian named Henry Ware was elected as Harvard’s Hollis Professor of Divinity, whereupon, maintains Blumenfeld, the "takeover of Harvard in 1805 by the Unitarians is probably the most important intellectual event in American history — at least from the standpoint of education." Following the takeover, Harvard "became the Unitarian Vatican, so to speak, dispensing a religious and secular liberalism that was to have profound and enduring effects on the evolution of American cultural, moral and social values." Blumenfeld believes Harvard’s influence on education spawned “the secular humanist world view that now dominates American culture.”

In Is Public Education Necessary?, Blumenfeld recorded the story of leading 19th century socialists such as Robert Owen, who became involved in the infant public school movement to advance their own agenda. He also exposes the career of Horace Mann, long highly acclaimed by advocates of government schools as “the father of American public education.” Of Mann, Blumenfeld wrote: "If Mann was the father of anything, it was of centralized, state-controlled public education, governed by a state bureaucracy, and financed by taxes on property."

Horace Mann had visited Prussia and used its state-controlled educational system as his prototype in building a network of compulsory primary and secondary government schools. Among aspects of the Prussian system imported to America were: a uniform curriculum through state-controlled texts, compulsory attendance (enforced by truant officers), government financial support through taxation, and teachers trained by the state.

In his book Separating School and State, Sheldon Richman observed of the Prussian education system: "Europe's first national system of education was set up by King Frederick William I of Prussia in 1717. His son, Frederick the Great, following in his father's footsteps, said, 'The prince is to the nation he governs what the head is to the man; it is his duty to see, think, and act for the whole community.'" Following Prussia's defeat at the hands of Napoleon in 1806, notes Richman, Frederick William III tightened the grip of the Prussian system even further: "He instituted certification of teachers and abolished semi-religious private schools.... Children aged 7 to 14 years had to attend school. Parents could be fined or have their children taken away if the children did not attend. Private schools could exist only as long as they kept to the standards of the government's schools."

This was the educational system that Horace Mann was so intrigued with! Mann also founded a series of state-supported teachers colleges, which had an inordinate degree of influence in training teachers in indoctrinating their students to become model “citizens of the state.” Blumenfeld observed: "once a nation's teachers colleges become the primary vehicle through which the philosophy of statism is advanced, this philosophy will soon infect every other quarter of society...."

Many parents are still in the habit of evaluating their local school districts based solely upon certain scores achieved on standardized tests. Lured by higher-than-national-average standardized test scores touted by some communities, they pay over-inflated prices for houses in such school districts, then pay over-inflated property taxes to support these schools! In return, they can send their children to schools where they get a good education in science and math (but home-schooled and private-schooled kids get the same), but are also indoctrinated in the virtues of big government, the socialist welfare state, internationalism and the wonder of the United Nations, plus twelve years of sex education to boot!

Many “highly ranked” suburban school districts have become much more than a place for education in the basic academic curricula, however, The large number of extra-curricular activities virtually ensures that most students will be separated from their families (and their families’ values) virtually every waking hour, as a rotating team of teachers and coaches replaces parents!

Where have we seen this phenomenon before?

We can see a similar philosophy at work in an article entitled “The Educational Principles of the New Germany,” published in 1936 in Frauen-Warte, a Nazi-controlled German magazine for women, which stated:

It is clear that the German youth must be resolved to defend their fatherland with their lives. Their bodies must be steeled, made hard and strong, so that the youth may become capable soldiers who are healthy, strong, trained, energetic and able to bear hardships. Gymnastics, games, sports, hiking, swimming, and military exercises must all be learned by the youth. Our youth should not sit in stuffy rooms and develop crooked backs and weak eyes. Alongside the basic and truly important education of the mind, they should develop healthy bodies by being outdoors. The idea of the healthy and strong German should not be mere empty talk.

Members of the Hitler Youth were kept apart from their parents as much as possible, engaged in long weekend hiking trips, gymnastics, and political propaganda meetings. The reasoning behind these programs was articulated by Hitler, himself, in a May 1, 1937 address:

The youth of today is ever the people of tomorrow. For this reason we have set before ourselves the task of inoculating our youth with the spirit of this community of the people at a very early age, at an age when human beings are still unperverted and therefore unspoiled… This Reich stands, and it is building itself up for the future, upon its youth. And this new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing.

The danger with government schools, however, is not that they are controlled by Nazis (or Republicans or Democrats), but that they are controlled by government. Placing the education of our children in the hands of government is always a dangerous action, and the Nazi experience is but the most extreme and vivid example of what can happen. State control of education was a problem in Germany even before the Nazis took control, and was a factor that undoubtedly paved the way for totalitarianism in that nation.

In 1917, German educational theorist Franz de Hovre observed: "The prime fundamental of German education is that it is based on a national principle.... [It is] education to the State, education for the State, education by the State. The Volksschule is a direct result of a national principle aimed at national unity. The State is the supreme end in view." (Emphasis added.)

In today’s culture, driven by the ACLU and liberal-activist judges, we hear much about “separation of church and state.” The notion is a misguided one, based on deliberate distortion of a statement once made by President Thomas Jefferson, addressing the Danbury Baptists in 1802. When Jefferson referred to the First Amendment as "building a wall of separation between Church and State," he meant that the Danbury Baptists had nothing to fear from the new federal government, because the First Amendment was a "wall" protecting the church from the state — not vice versa.

However, we need to fear the state’s involvement in (and control of) education as much as its involvement in religion. Decisions regarding the practice of religion and the education of children are both prerogatives that belong exclusively to the family. To involve government in either area is to destroy the family and to replace it with the statist philosophy common to all totalitarian regimes.

 

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