It is impossible to separate the current state of our culture and government from the spiritual and intellectual foundations upon which both are based. For conservative leaders and activists who have been sounding the warning for decades about the approaching tyranny of global Marxism/socialism, our national condition is appalling but not surprising.
The symptoms of how far we have been led down this road are many; however, it is critical that we take some responsibility for producing a nation of illiterates. As many have pointed out, the crucial first institutional steps to preparing a nation for either its destruction or servitude are weakening the churches and the schools.
Most Americans, including evangelical Christians, have turned the education of our children over to the government via schools shaped by secular humanists Horace Mann and John Dewey. Prior to the 1840s after Mann had become secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, children in this country truly received a "world class education." As Dr. Marshall Foster of the Mayflower Institute relates in his profound book, "The American Covenant":
At the time of the Declaration of Independence the quality of education had enabled the colonies to achieve a degree of literacy from 70 percent to literally 100 percent. This was not education restricted to the few. Modern scholarship reports "the prevalence of schooling and its accessibility to all segments of the population."
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He also relates how Mann, who is an icon to the educational establishment, and later John Dewey, who was also a signer of the Humanist Manifesto I, aggressively promoted an agenda that included:
- Forced taxation for state schools and compulsory attendance that removed the funding, control and children from the parents;
- De-emphasizing and removing biblical principles in education and character development, replacing it with humanistic philosophy;
- Standardized teacher training, textbooks and accreditation away from traditional philosophies as established by leaders like Noah Webster.
At the same time, Darwin's theory of evolution began gaining a foothold in the sciences and academia, further eroding any standards of adherence to the biblical worldview, which had produced the best education for the masses in the history of the world.
It is interesting to note that this was also parallel with European Enlightenment philosophies poisoning our seminaries by attacking centuries of accepted Christian doctrines – particularly in regards to the existence of God, the fallen, or sinful, nature of man and the deity of Jesus Christ.
The critical point to understand is that it is impossible to educate generation after generation of children in an educational system that is by design rejecting God, rewriting history, reinventing language, recreating free-market economics and in general fostering amoral anti-intellectualism – and expect the perpetuation of our freedoms and prosperity.
I fervently urge every father and mother to study the standards of education in the colonial era and what was expected of students; then overlay that to our modern standards of educational assessment. No Child Left Behind would have been better named No Child Let Ahead and is representative of the intentional taking of students' education regardless of ability, gifting or goals.
Why is this a concern to the churches? Unless pastors are criminally ignorant, the influence of the secular humanist Government Educational Complex on our children and families has radically offset anything we might be teaching on Sunday morning, Wednesday night, etc. In the research commissioned by prominent Christian apologist Ken Ham for his book "Already Gone" (co-authored with Britt Beemer), the "little" issue of the Genesis account of creation is the elephant in the room for every pastor who still takes his calling seriously.
"Because of the way in which they've been educated," Ham said, teens come to believe "that what they are taught in school is reality, but the church teaches stories and morality and relationship. Bible teaching is not real in the sense of real history," as reported in WND's article "Why are young people leaving the church?" Let's connect the dots.
If you teach children from pre-K (not including the hours of pro-evolution programming on children's television) to graduate school that it is scientific fact they are biological accidents, higher evolved animals, that there is no Creator or created order and finally no absolute truth – why would we be shocked when they behave like those animals?
Why are we surprised when we teach them to replace Jehovah Jireh, "God our Provider," with "Government is my shepherd, I shall not want" that most people accept the forced redistribution of property and the fruits of our labor by choosing leaders who promise to make the public trough larger and more accessible?
The church has been a silent ally to the March of Marxist Madness in our schools through the corruption of the pulpit by bad theology, power, wealth or stature that has muzzled the prophetic voice called by God to serve as a shepherd of the people.
We cannot ignore government schools any more than we can ignore the madmen in North Korea and Iran. We must hold it at bay with a strong defense – school reform efforts of all kinds – while pastors drastically raise the bar of demanding that Christian parents take personal responsibility for educating our children where their spirits, minds and souls will be grounded in their Creator, His truths and comprehensive academic excellence.