A Case for Abandoning Government Schools
CGLREALTY@aol.com
Aug 11, 2002
Let My Children Go:
A New Case for Abandoning Government Schools
by Steven Yates
E. Ray Moore, Jr., Let My Children Go
(Columbia, S.C.: Gilead Media, 2002). Pp. 352. $14.95.
On March 28 of this year, Rev. James Dobson, President of Focus on the Family, issued one of the strongest warnings to date
about government schools today. "In the state of California," he said, "and
in places that have moved with the direction that they've gone with the schools, if I had
a child there, I wouldn't put that youngster in public schools. They�re being
taught homosexual propaganda and these other politically correct, postmodern views. I
think it's time to get our kids out. We cannot sacrifice our kids on the altar of some
kind of public school's ideal." On July 8 he expanded on that
indictment. "What I was saying was that this godless and immoral curriculum and
influence in the public schools is gaining momentum across the nation in ways that were
unheard of just one year ago. It's as though the dam has now broken and activists
representing various causes, including homosexuality, are rushing through the breach in
ways that are shocking." He singled out Connecticut, California, Massachusetts,
Minnesota, New Jersey, Washington, Wisconsin, Vermont, Washington, D.C., and also targeted
Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Hawaii, and Alaska as promoting homosexuality in government
schools as a normal, alternative lifestyle choice. "It isn't just California that has
drifted into this dangerous stuff," he said. "This is where we are, especially
on both coasts, but to some degree throughout the nation."
Last year on this site I reported
in detail on the Exodus Mandate Project,
Rev. E. Ray Moore�s name for his working strategy aimed at persuading as many
Christian parents as possible to remove their children from what he frequently calls
Pharaoh�s school system, and either home school them or send them to private
Christian schools. Shortly after that interview Rev. Moore began discussing a book he had
started to write. He wanted to produce a Christian education manifesto setting out the
case against government schools and for Bible-based education in one concise package. He
was looking to provide a kind of tool that could be used to encourage pastors and other
denominational leaders to support both home schooling in their areas and the founding of
church-based Christian schools at their churches. Extremely busy with his Frontline
Ministries as well as building up Exodus Mandate�s nationwide network (and
given that we were living less than ten miles apart at the time), Rev. Moore eventually
came to me for assistance in editing the manuscript, assistance I was more than willing to
provide.
The book is now here. It is a tour-de-force that should be very accessible to the lay
reader, and it could not have come along at a better time.
Let My Children Go begins on familiar territory, distinguishing Christian from secular
humanist worldviews. The first chapter describes how Rev. Moore and his wife Gail sought
to provide a Christian education for their four children, how they became one of the
pioneering home schooling families in the country, and how their oldest son went on to
become Valedictorian and Regimental Commander at The Citadel, in Charleston, S.C. �
having been well ahead of other young people in his age bracket. Rev. Moore contrasts
these results with the dominant agendas in government schools over the past couple of
decades: Outcome Based Education, Goals 2000, and School-To-Work. These movements are not
just anti-Christian, he tells us. By assuming or promoting the idea that the only valid
goal of education is workforce training for the global economy, these movements are
virulently anti-academic and anti-intellectual as well.
Rev. Moore develops three lines of argument for abandoning government schools.
Interestingly, these lines of argument are mostly independent of one another, so one
should not have to be a convinced Christian to recognize their aggregate impact. The first
is mostly historical, the second is mainly economic, and the third is Scriptural and
theological. It is sometimes said that the vast majority of those in the home schooling
movement are Evangelical Christians. The actual figure is around 70 percent; to this
extent, Christians have indeed taken the lead. There is nothing stopping libertarians from
getting involved. To my mind, libertarians can learn from Christians on this issue; many
might even become Christians as a result of their involvement. There are reasons for
thinking that Christian and libertarian thought are compatible.
In the first line of argument, presented mainly in Chapter Two (colorfully entitled
"Get Behind Me, Horace Mann: The Rise and Fall of State-Sponsored Education), Rev.
Moore shows how state-sponsored schools, as he frequently calls them, were never a part of
the Framers� original vision. It is common to point out that the Constitution
never mentions education. The assumption of the time was that education would be private,
and any government involvement would be strictly local. It is important to realize that in
the early history of the United States, literacy was over 90 percent. The Federalist
Papers were published in the New York newspapers of the time, and read by an educated
public. Then state-sponsored education was imported from Europe �
specifically, Prussia � with the first true state-sponsored schools set up in
Massachusetts by Horace Mann and the Unitarians in the 1840s. Mann and his colleagues set
down three principles: (1) compulsory attendance; (2) teacher certification from a state
teachers college � showing that teachers have been taught what to teach; (3)
ownership and administration of schools by the state. Rev. Moore notes how 19th century
theologians such as R.L. Dabney warned against the new system. But almost no one sensed
danger. Then came John Dewey�s Progressive Education. Little by little,
state-sponsored schools became places intended to produce a certain type of human being:
compliant, group-focused, and above all, obedient to governmental authority �
as opposed to independent-minded, capable of individual critical discernment, and
skeptical of centralized authority (the mindset that characterized the pioneers in every
field who built this country). In short, state-sponsored schools slowly became hotbeds of
social engineering.
The second argument for abandoning state-sponsored schools appears mainly in Chapter Four.
It, as we said, focuses on economics, and employs the arguments of key figures of the
twentieth century Austrian school such as Ludwig Von Mises and Murray Rothbard. Our
country was founded on the idea of private property rights. Goods and services should be
delivered by the free market and not by the state. Rev. Moore shows how both home
schooling and private Christian schools would exemplify the operation of a free market in
education. Government schools, on the other hand, exemplify our country�s
drift toward socialism, and it is to be expected that Progressive Educators dispense
education for a socialist society. One of the most important points here is whether they
are starting up new, private schools or dispensing materials (e.g., curriculums) for home
schooling parents, those participating in a free market in education must deliver the
goods at what their customers consider a fair price or they will not be able to stay in
business. In a free market, if your customers are unhappy they will go elsewhere. This
will ensure a return to the quality education that government schools can no longer
deliver; it has already fostered an environment in which home schooled children are years
ahead of their government-schooled counterparts, having won national spelling bees and
other contests and being accepted into top-rated universities.
The third argument is theological and ought to impact on Christians especially: Rev. Moore
presents the Scriptural passages where God directly commands parents to take charge of
their children�s education. These include Deuteronomy 6:1-9, Psalms 127:3-5
and 78:5, Proverbs 22:6, Matthew 28:18-20, and others. As Rev. Moore expresses this,
"A major proposition of the Exodus Mandate Project is that God gave education to the
family with assistance from the church." The command is to the family �
more specifically, to parents � and not any governmental entity. Rev. Moore
sees a profound need to reach out to pastors and denominational leaders, seeking to
inspire them to take seriously the need to address educational issues. These range from
supporting home schooling groups in their congregations and communities to overseeing
start-up church-based schools affordable for those parents who cannot home school (which,
today, is probably the majority). To supplement this critical point, Rev. Moore draws on
the Nehemiah Institute�s
detailed documentation of how youth raised in Christian homes but attending
state-sponsored schools tend to abandon their faith and stop attending church after they
get to college. He cites the observation of Brig. Gen. T.C. Pinckney (USAF ret.), former
Second Vice President of the Southern Baptist Convention, in a speech before the SBC�s
Executive Committee last September: "We are losing our children. Research indicates
that 70 percent of teens who are involved in a church youth group will stop attending
church within two years of their high school graduation." Government schools change
their worldview at a fundamental level � and then university education makes
matters worse. The PEERS test developed by the Nehemiah Institute (PEERS stands for
Politics, Education, Economics, Religion, Social Issues) documents how a secularist
worldview comes to dominate teenagers� thinking and utterly overwhelms their
one-day exposure to Christian education (often limited to Sunday school). Let My Children
Go, in this case, is a tool for reversing this process. There is no need to fear that
schools set up to promote a Christian worldview will be anti-intellectual. The Bible
contains many passages endorsing the pursuit of knowledge (Hosea 4:6, Psalms 94:10,
Proverbs 1:5, 10:14, 15:7, 18:15, and so on). It is secular humanism that has turned
anti-intellectual, ranging from its acceptance of postmodernism to its promotion of
job-skills training in place of academics (the School-To-Work model).
From all this Rev. Moore infers that Christians need a new paradigm for education, one
that takes as its point of departure the realization that state-sponsored education is a
"renegade school system" that was fundamentally alien to American founding
principles and hostile to Christian belief from the start. So abandoning state-sponsored
education is the logical thing to do; it was never anything more than a snare for the
unwary.
One of the key chapters in Let My Children Go focuses on "Minefields on the Road to
the Promised Land." A large chapter (almost 40 pages), it presents the case Rev.
Moore had assembled against educational vouchers before the recent Zelman decision,
arguing that a voucher system would eventually rob private religious schools of their
autonomy and sabotage their distinct mission. As I argued recently, there is abundant
evidence that this is already happening. Rev. Moore also considers both charter schools
and accrediting agencies. All have the same problem: wherever you have government money,
you have a slowly encircling web of government controls � with the watchword
being "accountability." The separations clause in the First Amendment becomes a
secularist weapon against religious identity (something that would have horrified its
authors who wanted to prevent the establishment of a state-sponsored church, such as the
Church of England, not erase Christianity from public life).
Rev. Moore�s final target in this chapter is an unexpected one: character
education. Unexpected, because a substantial literature presents character education as an
alternative to relativism, situation ethics and values clarification. Moreover, many
character education supporters see themselves as Christians. Clearly there are character
educators who mean well. Character education spells trouble, however, because although it
may avoid the blatant relativism of values clarification it still attempts to place ethics
on a secular footing, relying on such work as that of Lawrence Kohlberg and his "six
stages" of moral development. Rev. Moore shows, with citations, that character
education in practice is unable to avoid reinstating current fashionable dogmas about
multiculturalism, universal tolerance, and so on � because these agendas
control the mainstream, and secular ethicists have no significant defenses against them.
The entire issue of reforming state-sponsored schools turns on a single question: can
reform work? The evidence is abundant and growing that it cannot. If we pay close
attention to the three lines of argumentation seen above, we see why. State-sponsored
schools not having been a part of the original vision for the country, their dismal
performance is not a deviation but a product of the secularist and statist agenda that has
driven (and funded) them from the start. A secularist mindset controls the institutions
through which any reform must be administered.
The better strategy, therefore, is a new Exodus from Pharaoh�s schools. There
is abundant evidence that government schools (1) have become laboratories of behavior
modification techniques, including the use of legal (because govern ment-approved)
mind-altering drugs such as Ritalin, (2) teach politically correct but historically false
views of history and government including groupthink which prepares them to live in a
socialist society, (3) promote tolerance of everything except Christianity, (4) are
therefore places where youth from Christian homes lose their faith, (5) have been the
scene of declining levels of literacy, the oft-referred-to dumbing down of the country, so
that graduates don�t understand economics and wouldn������������������������������������������¿½t know
socialism if they saw it; and (6) have become physically dangerous to both students and
teachers.
Each of these could be explored in great detail � some have been explored in
depth by other authors. Beverly Eakman, for example, explores the role behavior
modification has played in state-sponsored education in her The Cloning of the American
Mind. John Taylor Gatto documents how the basic philosophy of state-sponsored schools was
lavishly funded by power elites in huge tax-exempt foundations (especially the Rockefeller
Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation) and came to service their interests in The Underground History of American
Education. Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt weaves both threads together in her monumental
compendium The
Deliberate Dumbing Down of America.
These works are not superficial treatments. They are meticulously documented; both Eakman
and Iserbyt have worked in government and "know the ropes," so to speak. They
show that the point of state-sponsored education is to produce a "mass man" (and
"mass woman"), calling for mass workforce training for a global economy
micromanaged by a global government (otherwise known as the New World Order), respectful of a
"diversity" which in turn respects everyone except independent-minded, straight
white Christian males. There is thus no incentive to teach real history, for example �
or necessarily to teach history at all. Such subjects have been ratcheted down in
importance since School-To-Work education became the fad of the 1990s (its successor is
George W. Bush�s No Child Left Behind.) Children can then be induced to
accept politically correct ideas, having no means of evaluating them for themselves and
nothing to compare them with. They can be taught one form or another of ethical relativism
� or simply to accept what has become the prevailing secularist view of
education in modern life, that its only aim is training for a supposedly high paying job
� a job that might not be there if by some chance the U.S. economy continues
on its present course towards what could become a
new depression.
Finally, the evidence that state-sponsored schools are no longer physically safe is
abundantly supported by the rash of
school shootings that has occurred over the past ten or so years, the most dramatic
being the Columbine killings in April, 1999. In this case and in at least one other it is
clear that Christian students were deliberately targeted because of their Christianity.
That government schools aren�t considered physically safe even by the state
and local governments running them is demonstrated by the metal detectors on the doors,
the presence of security patrols in the halls, especially of inner-city government
schools, the regulations banning gang insignia, and since Columbine, new rules calling for
backpacks to be transparent. Even with all these regulations, weapons continue to find
their way into state-sponsored schools. Statisticians will argue that the number of
violent incidents actually declined during the 1990s. However, no one can dispute that of
those incidents that did occur, they increased in their intensity and level of violence,
and that they occurred among progressively younger age brackets � occasionally even
among elementary school children!
The argument is that Christians had better become cognizant of all this before it is too
late, remove their children from these schools and build up substantial alternatives in
the form of home schooling and private, Christian schools, church-based or otherwise. Rev.
Moore does not deal with every issue we face. Many Christians who would home school do not
have the time because of firm work obligations, and cannot send their children to private
religions schools because they cannot afford it. Those are the people who will find
vouchers very hard to resist. Even if that problem were solved, Rev. Moore is conscious of
what all of us supportive of or involved with this might eventually be up against.
Decisions to home school or to place one�s child in a private,
church-affiliated school do not mean that we are out of the woods, not by a long shot. If
anything, I fear Rev. Moore understates the danger. Home schooling is the largest and
fastest growing independent educational movement in the country. The total number of
children being home schooled in America is now greater than the number of children
in government schools in New Jersey. It is well on its way to becoming the biggest
threat the dominant educational institutions (and the power elites behind them) have ever
faced.
The point is, the home schooling movement in particular and the secular educational
establishment are on collision course. Let My Children Go thus presents a Biblical view of
the civil disobedience that might someday be necessary if Christians have to choose
between obedience to government and obedience to God. It is important to be clear: Rev.
Moore is no anarchist who would abolish government or encourage people to break the law.
The Bible makes a place for governmental authorities who are themselves subservient to
God�s law. But when these authorities abandon God�s law and set
themselves up in God�s place, Christians have to choose who to obey:
government or God. Thus, other things remaining equal, I foresee an eventual collision
between two opposed philosophies, the Christian one that places God in the center and the
secular humanist one that substitutes government for God. This is essentially the same
collision coming between the political and economic philosophies that stress independence
in this world and thus support decentralization in one form or another and those leading
to more and more centralization. In the former, the individual depends upon and places his
trust in God, not society or an employer or government. Government is limited to a few,
carefully delineated functions. The latter has set out to make human beings dependent on a
massive welfare system with a globalist orientation: global government and global
economics (which, despite all the hype about "global markets" is not a free
market system or anything close). This, naturally, calls for concentration of power in a
centralized, au thoritarian apparatus and an educational system controlled by those
capable of turning out "massified" people who can expected to be obedient to and
even worshipful of their rulers.
Rev. Moore�s book contains or implies all this, and much more. One of its
merits is that it is short; unlike Eakman, Gatto or Iserbyt, he did not set out to produce
an encyclopedic treatment but a call to arms. Let My Children Go should alert Christians
to the full range of dangers of the renegade school system. It calls on them to remove
their children from it. It call on pastors and denominational leaders to become informed
about the situation in government schools and act in ways that support alternatives,
including setting up schools in church facilities that are practically unused six days of
the week. Home schooling has become one of the more significant parallel institutions of
our time � parallel in having become a spontaneously developing alternative
to dominant institutions seen as corrupt, corrupting and irredeemably hostile to
Christians� interests � for that matter, to anyone who wishes to
live a life free from the clutches of centralized power. Exodus Mandate has begun to
receive national attention, as Rev. Moore has now done numerous radio interviews
explaining these ideas and received a favorable mentions in such forums as Christianity
Today, World
and The Washington Times.
A momentum is developing. As Rev. Moore says repeatedly, "God gave education to the
family with assistance from the church." The time has come, in the memorable phrase
given currency by both Sheldon
Richmon and Marshall Fritz, to
"separate school and state."
August 10, 2002
Steven Yates [send him mail] has a PhD in
philosophy and is a Margaret "Peg" Rowley Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises
Institute. He is the author of Civil Wrongs: What
Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (ICS Press, 1994), and numerous articles and
reviews. At any given time he is at work on any number of articles and book projects,
including a science fiction novel.
Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com