By H. Seabrook

The story of Public Education and its miserable failures must correctly begin in Massachusetts, for it was here that the descendants of the Pilgrims and Puritans lost the Calvinistic faith of their noble fathers and pursued another religion, Unitarianism. This is a religion that has not God as its center but man, and Scripture is not its guide but the human mind with all the perverted filth it excretes.

The city of Boston was the first to enter public education (of a sort) by funding John Cotton’s Latin Grammar School in 1635. In 1647 Massachusetts passed the Old Deluder Act, so named for Satan’s purpose in keeping men from knowledge of the Scriptures. The Act reads, in part, “It is therefore ordered that every township in this jurisdiction, after the Lord hath increased them to fifty households, shall forthwith appoint one within their town to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and read, whose wages shall be paid either by the parents or masters of such children, or by the inhabitants in general.” That same year the proto-Progressive John Amos Comenius published The Great Didactic, in which he favored “the senses” over words in teaching. Some other dubious distinctions of the most liberal state: In 1818 the Boston Primary Schools undertook the task of teaching young children to read, which previously had been done by families; and in 1838 Massachusetts was the first state to train teachers. 

Pennsylvania was another hotbed of bureaucratic interference. In 1683 William Penn required that “the Governor and provincial Council shall erect and order all public schools, and encourage and reward the authors of useful sciences and laudable inventions.” Ben Franklin, in 1751, was instrumental in turning Pennsylvania schools away from Latin and Greek and toward practical trade skills, such as accounting. Public schools with state-salaried teachers were written into the state Constitution in 1776. The Free School Act of 1834 made public education “free” and allowed municipalities to levy taxes to pay for elementary schools.

National movements begin as radical ideas. Public education grew in the seedbed of Unitarian New England, but its purpose was born in the mind of Robert Owen, one of the fathers of modern socialism. Owen wrote in 1813: “It follows that every state, to be well governed, ought to direct its chief attention to the formation of character, and that the best governed state will be that which shall possess the best national system of education. According to Harold Blumenfeld: “...Robert Owen preached that the children had to be separated from their parents as early as possible so that their characters could be molded by their educators. Thus, child-parent alienation was a deliberate part of the Owen program, and apparently the Unitarians went along with it but under altered circumstances. Boston was not New Lanark [Owen’s experimental community]. Nor did the Unitarians advertise the source of their ideas.” This was because Owen delivered a speech in 1817 in which he openly stated that all religion was the source of human misery. Orestes Brownson, a Universalist clergyman and disciple of Owen, stated: “The purpose for the formation of [his Working Men’s Party] was to get control of the political power of the state, so as to be able to use it for establishing our system of schools…The great object was to get rid of Christianity, and to convert our churches into halls of science...The plan was not to make open attacks on religion...but to establish a system of state - we said 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…”

Horace Mann is known as “the father of the common schools” in New England and the country at large. In 1837, about the time the Unitarians took control of Harvard, Mann was appointed as First Secretary of the State Board of Education in Massachusetts. R.J. Rushdoony writes of Mann, “First and foremost, Mann was a Unitarian. New England Unitarianism was in the forefront of the battle for statist education. For Mann, Unitarianism was true Christianity, and, with humorless zeal, he fought for his holy faith…Mann labored, therefore, to free the schools from their basically Christian and independent nature in order to give them true direction, as he saw it, in terms of the state. His hostility against the Calvinism of his day was thus bitter and intense.” Mann’s belief in the ‘accelerating improvability of the race’ also indicates his belief in evolution, even before Darwin wrote The Origin of Species. A belief in evolution invariably leads to socialism. “Unitarianism on the whole prided itself in its socialism,” writes Rushdoony. “State controlled education was one of a number of causes Unitarianism championed: temperance, peace, and abolition, among other causes, also inflamed these humorless reformers. Their answer to all these problems, and many more, was statist action.” An 1851 article in The Massachusetts Teacher reveals an early mistrust of parents: “In too many instances the parents are unfit guardians of their own children…the children must be gathered up and forced into school.”

Public education did not exist in the South prior to Lincoln’s conquering it simply because the South was dominated by orthodox Christians, specifically Reformed Christians prior to the Second Great “Awakening.” The South knew that education was the duty of parents with assistance from the church. State government and the soon-to-be-federal government of the CSA had very limited powers. Government closest to home was the best government, and the family rooted in God’s holy Word was the source of all authority. As Philip Schaff said, “The fear of God is the basis of moral self-government, and self-government is the basis of true freedom.” When Lee invaded the North, and it appeared that the South might be victorious in repelling the foreign invaders, the US Congress passed the Morrill Act. As author John Chodes notes: “This was the closest Washington had ever come to direct aid to education. Its stated purpose was to fund colleges that teach agriculture and mechanic arts [A&M colleges], via federal money raised through federal land-grant sales. The true purpose was to bring the Northern perspective to the reconquered areas of the South, to teach the rebels’ children ‘respect for national authority’ - to break their rebellious spirit forever…The land-grants had hidden strings. Washington controlled curriculum. To insure a uniformly nationalized, anti-Southern slant, land and money could be taken from one state and given to another.” Though great men such as R.L. Dabney inveighed against this imperial propaganda, the North was very successful in “cleansing” the Southern mind of its will to be free and its “faulty” understanding of the Constitution. Nor was there silence from the North. Archibald Hodge wrote: “I am sure as I am of the fact of Christ’s reign that a comprehensive and centralized system of national education, separated from religion, as is now commonly proposed, will prove the most appalling engine for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief and anti-social nihilistic ethics…which this sin-rent world has ever seen.” Senator Justin Morrill, the author of the infamous Act, was unswayed by his critics: “The role of the National government is to mold the character of the American people.”

The first federal aid directed to education was for the Freedmen’s Bureau. After the War it was imperative that the “rebellious” South be re-educated. The Bureau was able to build 630 schoolhouses in 3 years from confiscation of property and oppressive taxation. Chodes observes how the Bureau ran its schools: “The three R’s took a backseat, destruction of the Democratic Party was the highest objective. New textbooks were created and all students taught from this perspective...The bureau’s mandate was only to teach blacks, but it was imperative to change the values of the Southern whites. There was less concern for their racism than for their ability to make war again. Thus, contrary to the law, classes were forcibly integrated, not to promote healthy race relations, but to have captive whites to brainwash into being loyal to authority.”

Frank Owsley writes of the second war on the South: “After the South had been conquered by war and humiliation and impoverished by peace, there appeared still to remain something which made the South different - something intangible, incomprehensible, in the realm of the spirit. That too must be invaded and destroyed; so there commenced a second war of conquest, the conquest of the Southern mind calculated to remake every Southern opinion, to impose the Northern way of life and thought upon the South, write ‘error’ across the pages of Southern history which were out of keeping with the Northern legend, and set the rising and unborn generations upon stools of everlasting repentance...The older generations, the hardened campaigners under Lee and Jackson, were too tough-minded to re-educate. They must be ignored...but the rising and future generations were to receive the proper education in Northern traditions…There was for the Southern child and youth, until the end of the nineteenth century, very little choice. They had to accept the Northern version of history with all its condemnations and carping criticisms of Southern institutions and life.”

By 1892 Joseph Mayer Rice helped to launch the Progressive movement by taking issue with memorization, learning drills, and strict discipline. The Progressives drew from the philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau, who, in his book Emile, preached that educators must “do nothing and let nothing be done,” and “keep the mind inactive as long as possible.” According to Rousseau, the self-proclaimed expert on education, who abandoned each of his five illegitimate children at a foundling hospital with a high mortality rate, “Reading is the greatest plague of childhood.” John Dewey opened his own “laboratory school” in 1894 and then advocated his experimental practices for the country as a whole. Dewey and his fellow Progressives took aim at the classical disciplines, such as Latin, Greek, mathematics, and literature. A speech by Clark University President G. Stanley Hall at the annual meeting of the National Education Association in 1901 is very revealing of the Progressive/atheist mindset: “Childhood, as it comes fresh from God, is not corrupt…There is nothing else so worthy of love, reverence and service as the body and soul of the growing child…We must overcome the fetishism of the alphabet, of the multiplication table, of grammars, of scales, and of bibliolatry.” Rousseau could not have said it better himself. No longer would children be given a liberal (broad) education, but now the “educators” would “sort the pupils and sort them by their evident or probable destinies,” as Harvard President Charles Eliot said in 1908. They would now strive for industrial education with progressive values. By 1918 the NEA was solidly in the progressive/industrial camp and began to stress concern for the health of the child, laying the foundation for what would become the self-esteem movement.

John Dewey, who was the most famous and effective of the Progressives, was as profoundly influenced by the philosophy of Hegel as was Karl Marx. To Dewey, reality is not fixed but an ever-changing thing. Truth is consequently impossible to pin down, for it can only be verified through consequences, and so “meaning” must be explored instead. What does life mean to you, what does it mean to me? Nothing is absolute, all is relative. Facts, therefore, must not be stressed over experience. What really matters for children is problem-solving, and they should “learn by doing.” The Three R’s must be abandoned for the democratic process, whatever that is. “Schools do have a role – and an important one – in production of social change,” he declared. Dewey regarded himself as the prophet of Democracy, the faith that would replace Christianity. He became the first president of the American Humanist Association and co-author of the first Humanist Manifesto. His philosophy was said to begin with man and end with man, and the characterization was pleasing to him. But his humanism is exactly why Dewey’s philosophy has been a demonstrable failure.

Education in America did not begin with man or for any material benefit it might have produced. Children were educated for the purpose of learning to read, and specifically learning to read the Scriptures. As the Northwest Ordinance, which was written by Thomas Jefferson, the supposed father of the separation of church and state, and was approved by Congress on July 13, 1787, reads: “Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall be forever encouraged.” The Progressives reacted against Latin and Greek precisely because they had no use for the Bible. They were moral relativists, and from the beginning they denied the Christian concepts of absolute truth and total depravity.

The educrats had grown bold when Oregon tried, and failed, in 1925 to force all children to attend public schools.  The Supreme Court ruled that “the child is not the mere creature of the state.” Yet by 1930 all states had compulsory attendance laws.

When Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler tried in 1929, at the same time that churches were being infected with Liberalism and “higher criticism” of the Bible, to return the University of Chicago to the classic literary works of Western civilization, they were met with this criticism by the Progressive William Heard Kilpatrick: “Dr. Hutchins stands near to Hitler. When you have a professed absolute, then you have to have some authority to give it content, and there the dictator comes in.” Of course, any logician worth his salt will be quick to recognize that Kilpatrick and his ilk advocated tearing down the standard of truth and arbitrarily erecting themselves in its place. As the Bible says quite clearly, “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other” (Matthew 6:24). Man will either accept revelation from God or nominate himself to be God, though he is powerless even to answer the questions posed to Job.

A by-product of state schools is “child care” as it exists today, which has been proven to promote aggressiveness in young children. Child care began with the nursery schools of the Depression era, which were created by FDR’s Works Progress Administration to employ jobless teachers.

Rudolf Flesch ignited the phonics wars in 1955 with the publication of Why Johnny Can’t Read. Phonics still persisted in most public schools until the whole-language method gained prominence in the 1980s. And the rest is a sad history of multiculturalism, which is yet one more form of moral equivalence, and violence of many types against God’s holy law. The result has been the cancerous destruction of generations of Americans by a plot more sinister than any foreign enemy could have conceived. As George Orwell wrote, “who controls the past controls the future.” Post-Puritan Boston was unable by its own devices to evade the Old Deluder after all.