How State Sponsored Education Brought Religion To Public Schools

"State sponsored schools were not part of the original make-up of this country. None of the Founders – all of whom were educated at home or privately – saw providing compulsory, state sponsored education as a proper function of the central government, which is why education is not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution.

"There were no government schools in any modern sense of that term until the 1840s, when Horace Mann ’s Unitarians started them up in Massachusetts as what were then known as common schools. Mann had been to Prussia where he learned of a far different view of the relationship between central government and its citizens than our own tradition which sees the individual as special both morally and economically.”

So says Steven Yates , founder and director of the Worldviews Project. The history of American public schooling is of great importance in light of the amount of time that a typical American student dedicates to state sponsored education.

A Decade Of "Education" Is Not Without Consequences

By the time a conventional American student graduates from a state sponsored high school, about 20% of that child’s waking hours in the last 12 years have been devoted to compulsory education. That’s a huge investment in consciousness. Upon which philosophical foundation then are American government schools built and toward what objective do they orient our children throughout all these formative years? Yates continues.

“Prussian schools considered children property of the state, and educated them accordingly. They were raised to be obedient to the state, their purpose being to advance the interests of the state. [ Robert Owen was] one of the Anglo-American world’s first influential socialists, who developed a similar philosophy of education. Owen believed that children should be separated from their parents as early as possible and raised by the state.

"He believed people were exclusively the products of their social environments, and that if nurtured properly by the state, could be molded into whatever was desired. A key to the thinking that went into forming the official ideology of state sponsored education was that human beings are innately good, not sinful, and that human nature could be perfected by the right kind of educational system.

"The ideology that eventually developed would hold that children could be molded into willing consumers of the products of big business and obedient servants of government. In short, the aims of state sponsored schools were to transform thinking, highly individualistic and very literate citizens into an unthinking, collectivized mass. The slow but steady decline in literacy of all kinds was a by-product.”

This was always the objective of elitists who favored the establishment of a potent central government in their pursuit of a Utopia on earth. One of these elitists was Orestes A. Brownston (1803 – 1876). As a Unitarian clergyman, he became a transcendentalist intimate in the knowledge of Owen’s perspectives and those of a host of Unitarian intellectuals. In his autobiography he writes of Owen’s goals in attempting to attain universal public education:

"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, although we might belabor the clergy and bring them into contempt where we could; 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…" (Orestes A. Brownson, The Works of Orestes A. Brownson, collected and arranged by Henry F. Brownson, New York, AMS Press Inc., 1966, Vol. XIX, pp. 442-43.)

More Than A Century And A Half Of Statist Indoctrination Is Not Without Consequences

Horace Mann thought along similar lines. He worked for the adoption of the Prussian education system in Massachusetts, which revolutionized the methodology of instruction in use at the common school system in that state and influenced those in other states. He wanted the influx of immigrant in the United States to be uniformly Americanized.

"Why did nineteenth century Christians go along with this scheme?" asks Yates, "One of the central reasons was that most were Protestants who hoped common schools would slow the spread of Catholicism in the new world.

"What mattered most about Horace Mann was that he wasn’t sympathetic to Catholicism! It mattered less that he and his Unitarian colleagues were preaching that man could perfect himself through his own efforts, and that compulsory education was a means to this end. So Protestant Christians, including many clergy, supported government schools thinking they could control them.

"Very slowly, Pandora’s Box opened. A creeping secularization began. A few theologians ( R. L. Dabney is an example) warned of the emerging dangers of state sponsored education. Dabney, who was no friend of Catholics, was surprisingly prescient.

"He warned that the danger was not Catholicism but secularism, and that if the common school movement continued unchecked, government schools would end up entirely secular institutions. Christianity – in whatever form – would eventually be driven from them.

"At the heart of the danger was the transference of responsibility for education from the home to the government, an inherently secular institution.

What Then Have We Now From School Sponsored Education?

According to Yates, "The official philosophy of state sponsored education gradually became a materialistic humanism, protected by statism. When the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), it made the federal courts arbiter of what the states could do regarding religion in government schools.

"This opened the door to the eventual court-ordered removal of officially-sponsored prayer (even, in some cases, prior to athletic events), by virtue of the Court’s new ' wall of separation ’ doctrine. This misreading of the Constitution holds that Establishment Clause in the First Amendment means the need to remove Christianity from all public institutions.

"Various forms of ethical subjectivism, relativism and nihilism become unavoidable. They took forms such as 'values clarification,' which urged children to talk openly about ‘their values’ but provided no direction. 'Everybody has their own morals,' teenagers learned to say (complete with grammar mistake).

"While the dialogue over moral theories may captivate career academics, the absence of definitive moral guidance in young people's lives has proven catastrophic. During the past half-century, with materialistic humanists more and more in control, we saw the rise of teen pregnancies, sexually transmitted infections, a cavalier and casual attitude toward sex (and at ever-younger ages), the break-up of families – and epidemics of cheating and other forms of academic dishonesty.

"In the last analysis, what needs to be said about humanist ethics as that they don’t work. Humanism's message, essentially, is: we are responsible for our own moral lives, and one should never be judgmental (and never mind the contradiction here). Humanistic approaches to morality, combined with opposition to 'judgmentalism,' leads to the idea that all ‘lifestyles’ are morally equal...

"The plummeting levels of literacy have been even more pronounced…government schools are graduating legions of seniors who cannot construct grammatical English sentences, do arithmetic beyond a rudimentary level, and have little or no knowledge of the history of this country or its Constitutional foundations.

"These results are hidden by grade inflation, recalculations of GPAs, and the dumbing down of standardized tests, often in accordance with the politically correct need to remove ‘cultural bias.’ This ought to concern everyone worried about the status of our liberties in what little is left of our Constitutional republic."

Why should any of this concern us? Anti-judgmentalism, a plump fruit of state sponsored, humanist education, is keeping us blind. We cannot distinguish the road to liberty from the road to bondage, because absolutes no longer exist in the mind of the pseudo-educated mass of government-indoctrinated citizens, except for whatever the State mandates of them to do like a god walking on earth.