Competing Philosophies II: The Philosophical Crisis In American Eduaction

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If Thomas Mann is the Father of American education, Noah Webster is the Father of American Scholarship. Webster's Blue Back Speller traught generations of Americans before Mann and his humanist ilk began their assault on learning, knowledge and morality. The humanist hegemony on education, although planned over a century ago by Mann and his followers, is a fairly recent phenomenon in actual practice. It wasn't until 1979 with the nationalization of the entire system through the US Department of Education was the hegemony complete. Perhaps the first salvo fired at universal literacy was the "see and say" method of teaching reading in the 1950's. Education has been going steadily downhill ever since.

To show how "dumbed down" the educational system has become, I found some 8th grade test questions from between 1910-1930 to compare with what is being taught today...


I'm fairly certain many adults couldn't pass this test today. The philosophy driving the pre-humanist onslaught on morals and literacy was based on two things- the Bible and the responsibility of parents, not bureaucrats and paid "scholars" to educate children. Adam Smith, who was the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University, cautioned about government interference in everyday life (education included- Smith believed it was the parents who should educate lest schools become centers of indoctrination, this was in 1753).

"Away, then, with quacks and organizers! Away with their rings, chains, hooks, and pincers! Away with their artificial systems! Away with the whims of governmental administrators, their socialized projects, their centralization, their tariffs, their government schools, their state religions, their free credit, their bank monopolies, their regulations, their restrictions, their equalization by taxation, and their pious moralizations!"

Before Smith, Martin Luther warned about public schools: "I am afraid that the schools will prove the very gates of hell, unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures and engraving them in the heart of youth." In 1888 historian Philip Schaff noted" It is impossible to draw the precise line between moral and religious education. Absolute indifference of the schools to morals is impossible; it must either be moral or immoral, religious or irreligious. An education that ignores religion altogether would raise a heartless and infidel generation of intellectual animals." Remove education from the mix and the public school system produces generations of "heartless and infidel... [non]intellectual animals." And we are witnessing the proof today- the public school system in America is little more than an immoral cesspool where moral relativism reigns supreme... if it feels good, then do it.

John Stuart Mill- who was homeschooled himself- was one of the most eloquent writers about liberty to date... about public education he wrote: "A general state education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government... it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body."

In 1923 J. Gresham Machen, professor at Westminster Theological Seminary wrote: "When one considers what the public schools of America in many places already are- their materialism, their discouragement of any sustained intellectual effort, their encouragement of the dangerous pseudo-scientific fads of experimental psychology- one can only be appalled by the thought of a commonwealth in which there is no escape from such a soul-killing system." No escape indeed! Adolph Hitler, before he outlawed homeschooling said: "Let me control the textbooks, and I will control Germany. The price for abjuring public education in Nazi Germany... "Recalcitrant parents were warned that their children would be taken away from them and put in orphanages or other homes unless they enrolled."

American public schools have turned away from education in favor of becoming indoctrination centers for pop-psychology and counter-cultural fads. The emphasis on homosexuality and transgenderism are just fads and dangerous ones at that. The problem is that once the fads pass, as they inevitably do, who's going to step up and take responsibility for the damage? No one is the answer. I'm not here trying to push religion, but look at the damage to our society that's been done since prayer was removed from public schools in the 1960's. In the last 50 years any vestige of morality has been removed- on purpose. This is all a part of the "great experiment," the long march of Cultural Marxism to destroy America. And replace it with what? They have no idea. Personally, I'd rather have children praying to a God that doesn't exist, than giving way to rampant sexuality and uncontrollable violence.