Some (too many) Christians advocate a form of factual neutrality, under which some subjects—science, geography, politics, mathematics—can be taught without regard to religion, since “facts speak for themselves.” This is most evident in education, where a self-conscious sacred-secular divide is maintained and supported by Christians. Ninety percent of Christian parents send their children to government schools. Since these parents believe that math is math and history is history, the religious stuff can be made up at church. But one hour of Sunday school and an hour at Youth Meeting each week, and perhaps a mission trip in the summer, can’t make up for five days a week, six hours each day, 10 months of the year, and 12+ years of a government-developed curriculum that is humanistic at its core.
Whoever Controls the Schools Rules the World
Whoever Controls the Schools Rules the World shows how education can be used as a vehicle for social change from Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler to secular humanism and radical Islam. Our worldview opponents understand that education is where the war of ideas is fought. If Christians are serious about securing the future for our children, they must understand the nature of the war we are fighting. If you have children, want children, or know someone who has children -- you need to get this book and read it before it becomes too late to save the generation to follow us from the ruins.
Buy NowHumanists recognize the importance of education in shaping worldview shifts and control; why don’t Christians? Charles Francis Potter, who founded the First Humanist Society of New York in 1929 and signed the first Humanist Manifesto in 1933, made no secret of the purpose of the American public schools:
Education is thus a most powerful ally of Humanism, and every American public school is a school of Humanism. What can the theistic Sunday-school, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?[1]
R. J. Rushdoony pointed out the Humanist design for education in his books Intellectual Schizophrenia (1961) and The Messianic Character of American Education (1963). According to Rushdoony, modern government education “is erosive and destructive of all culture except the monolithic state, which is then the ostensible creator and patron of culture. When it speaks of the whole child, it speaks of a passive creature who is to be molded by the statist education for the concept of the good life radically divorced from God and from transcendental standards.”[2] Rushdoony was not the first to understand the goal of statist education. Robert L. Dabney (1820–1898) saw it more than 125 years ago:
[T]he Jeffersonian doctrine of the absolute severance and independence of church and state, of the entire secularity of the State, and the absolutely equal rights, before the law, of religious truth and error, of paganism, atheism, and Christianity, has also established itself in all the States; and still the politicians, for electioneering ends, propagate this State education everywhere. By this curious circuit “Christian America” has gotten herself upon this thoroughly pagan ground; forcing the education of responsible, moral, and immortal beings, of which religion must ever be the essence, into the hands of a gigantic human agency, which resolves that it cannot and will not be religious at all. Surely, some great religious body will arise in America to lift its Christian protest against this monstrous result![3]
What would America be like today if the Church of Jesus Christ had heeded Dabney’s warnings and some “great religious body” had arisen to make the break from an educational system that was designed to be the indoctrination center for the State and its messianic motives? The usual Christian response is to reform the public schools, to get more parents involved, sue to get a moment of silence, prayers at sporting events and commencement exercises, release programs, and pass laws to teach the Bible as literature as they’ve done in Georgia.[4]
There will be pressure groups in some cities to teach the Koran. And why not? The new Mayor of New York took the oath of Office on the Koran. Then there’s the question of who and how the Bible will be taught. Will the Old Testament be taught as myth? Will someone teaching on the Olivet Discourse point out that Jesus was mistaken about His coming? There is the larger issue of funding. Public schools are taxpayer-funded. People who have no children are taxed to pay for the education of other children. You can hear my views on teaching the Bible in public schools here:
[1] Charles Francis Potter, Humanism: A New Religion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1930), 128. Quoted in David A. Noebel, J.F. Baldwin, and Kevin Bywater, Clergy in the Classroom: The Religion of Secular Humanism (Manitou Springs, CO: Summit Press, 1995), vi.
[2] R. J. Rushdoony, Intellectual Schizophrenia: Culture, Crisis and Education (Vellecito, CA: Ross House Books, [1961] 1998), 10.
[3] Robert L. Dabney, “The Attractions of Popery,” Discussions of Robert Lewis Dabney: Secular, ed. C. R. Vaughan, 4 vols. (Richmond, VA, Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 1890), 4:548.
[4] David Van Biema, “The Case for teaching the Bible,” Time (March 22, 2007): Link here.