Christians and Public Education

Martin Luther wrote almost 500 years ago, "I am much afraid that schools will prove to be great gates of Hell unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures, engraving them in the hearts of youth. I advise no one to place his child where the Scriptures do not reign paramount. Every institution in which men are not increasingly occupied with the Word of God must become corrupt." Clearly the Scriptures do not reign paramount in today's public educational system and, true to Luther's prediction, the institution has indeed suffered corruption from its earlier intentions.  

Dr. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Theological Seminary and host of the nationally syndicated radio program The Al Mohler Program, revealed the secularizing influence on contemporary public education in an article, "Needed: An Exit Strategy." I would only expand on his foundation to reinforce the veracity of his claims. 

F. W. Parker, the so-called father of progressive education and inspiration for John Dewey (an educational reformer), told the 1895 convention of the National Education Association (NEA) that "the child is not in school for knowledge. He is there to live, and put his life, nurtured in the school, into the community." According to Parker, the family home and religious faith must give way to a "grander vision" for society that is cast by the state. Recent initiatives promoting acceptance of homosexual conduct, historical revisionism, multiculturalism, and the like reveal the antireligious and anti-Western nature of this "vision." 

Allan Carlson, Ph.D., professor of history at Hillsdale College and director of the Family in America Studies Center writes, "From the very beginning, public school advocates aimed at undermining and displacing the family as the center of children's lives. The most important claim for public education was [and continues to be] that only a compulsory system of this sort could unify a scattered and diverse people: the parochial ideas of families obviously stood in the way."

This is the fundamental and often overlooked problem with the modern public education system; it is its goal of supplanting the family as the principal influence and primary means for preparing the nation's children to be "good citizens." Where do we get this idea that upon age six (at the latest) we should send our children away for six to seven hours a day to be trained by others? The fact is, prior to government-funded schools Americans, generally speaking, were better educated. My concern with public education centers principally on its role in elevating the state's authority above that of the family. 

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