Warnings about modern statist education:

There are many good public schools and public school teachers out there. But many schools and teachers have made it clear they are on a mission to steer children away from the conservative and Christian values and beliefs of their parents.

Here are a number of important quotes on this. The first section offers words from those who have said that they intend to undo the learning of kids, and remould their minds into their own way of thinking – be they humanists, Marxists, secularists, and so on.

The second section offers quotes from those who are rightly concerned about that – mainly conservatives and Christians. They offer us vital warnings about the dangerous trends we now find in most Western school systems.

The activists are after our kids

John Dewey
“We make a religion of our education. . . . Faith in education signifies nothing less than belief in the possibility of deliberate direction of the formation of human disposition and intelligence.”

“Schools do have a role – and an important one – in production of social change.”

“You can’t make Socialists out of individualists—children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent.”

John J. Dunphy
“The battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith: A religion of humanity — utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to carry humanist values into wherever they teach. The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new — the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism.”

Adolph Hitler
“This new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing.”

Vladimir Lenin
“Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world.”

Chester M. Pierce
“Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances towards our founding fathers, towards his parents, towards a belief in a supernatural being…. It’s up to you, teachers, to make all of these sick children well – by creating the international children of the future.”

Charles F. Potter
“Education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism, and every 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 teachings?”

Richard Rorty
“I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Submit yourself to the State, and my philosophy will liberate you from submission to intermediate authorities like the Church and the family.”

Warnings against the secularist school agenda

David Aikman
“It is a remarkable historical fact that America’s major universities went from being repositories of knowledge and teaching deeply imbued with the Christian worldview in the middle of the nineteenth century, with few exceptions, to uniformly anti-religious and specifically anti-Christian institutions by the end of the twentieth century.”

Voddie Baucham Jr.
“We cannot continue to send our children to Caesar for their education and be surprised when they come home as Romans.”

William F. Buckley
“The most influential educators of our time—John Dewey, William Kilpatrick, George Counts, Harold Rugg, and the lot—are out to build a New Social Order. There is not enough room…for…religion. It clearly won’t do…to foster within some schools a respect for an absolute, intractable God, a divine intelligence who is utterly unconcerned with other people’s versions of truth…It won’t do to tolerate a competitor for the allegiance of man. The State prefers a secure monopoly for itself…Religion, then, must go…The fight is being won. Academic freedom is entrenched. Religion is outlawed in public schools. The New Social Order is larruping along.”

G. K. Chesterton
“The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school.”

Ann Coulter
“It’s well past time for Liberalism to be declared a religion and banned from public schools. No other religion has the right to propagandize children for 12 years, six hours a day.”

Patrick Deneen
“Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts — whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about — have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctible outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide. The end of history for our students signals the End of History for the West.”

A. A. Hodge
“The tendency is to hold that this system must be altogether secular. The atheistic doctrine is gaining currency, even among professed Christians and even among some bewildered Christian ministers, that an education provided by the common government should be entirely emptied of all religious character. . . . It is self-evident that on this scheme, if it is consistently and persistently carried out in all parts of the country, the United States’ system of national popular education will be the most efficient and wide instrument for the propagation of atheism which the world has ever seen.”

D. James Kennedy
“Don’t send an eight-year-old out to take on a forty-year-old humanist. I have never seen any people more unhappy than fathers or mothers who have come to me and said, ‘Where did we go wrong? We gave him everything, and now he’s turned his back completely on everything we believe.’ Yes, they gave him everything but a Christian education.”

Abraham Lincoln
“The philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation is the philosophy of government in the next.”

William Lind
“The totalitarian nature of Political Correctness is revealed nowhere more clearly than on college campuses, many of which at this point are small ivy-covered North Koreas…”

Martin Luther
“I am much afraid the school will prove to be the greatest gate of hell unless they diligently labour in explaining the Holy Scriptures engraving them in the hearts of our 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.”

J. Gresham Machen
“Place the lives of children in their formative years, despite the convictions of their parents, under the intimate control of experts appointed by the state, force them to attend schools where the higher aspirations of humanity are crushed out, and where the mind is filled with the materialism of the day, and it is difficult to see how even the remnants of liberty can subsist.”

“Our whole system of school and college education is so constituted as to keep religion and culture as far apart as possible and ignore the question of the relationship between them.”

“But while tyranny itself is nothing new, the technique of tyranny has been enormously improved in our day; the tyranny of the scientific expert is the most crushing tyranny of all. That tyranny is being exercised most effectively in the field of education. A monopolistic system of education controlled by the State is far more efficient in crushing our liberty than the cruder weapons of fire and sword. Against this monopoly of education by the State the Christian school brings a salutary protest; it contends for the right of parents to bring up their children in accordance with the dictates of their conscience and not in the manner prescribed by the State.”

“Character-building, as practiced in our public schools, may well prove to be character-destruction.”

“I can see little consistency in a type of Christian activity which preaches the gospel on street corners and at the ends of the earth, but neglects the children of the covenant by abandoning them to a cold and unbelieving secularism.”

John Piper
“Education is not evangelization. In other words, we shouldn’t justify where we send our kids because we think they should be evangelists when they’re not. God does not intend for Christian children to be taught by unbelievers and to be surrounded most of the day by intense, worldly peer pressure. That’s not what childhood is for. It’s for being shaped and molded by wise, loving Christian adults.”

Dennis Prager
“Just as the purpose of Christian seminaries is to produce committed Christians, the primary purpose of most Western universities is, consciously or not, to produce committed secular leftists. The major difference between them is that Christian seminaries declare their purpose, and Western universities do not.”

 J. J. Rushdoony
“Education is increasingly used in order to teach statism and to mold the minds of children. The motto of progressive educators, ‘We do not teach subjects; we teach children,’ is very apt. Their purpose is not the communication of knowledge to children but to re-shape children to their ideas of democracy. The schools thus are instruments of social regeneration.”

“To control the future requires the control of education and of the child. Hence, for Christians to tolerate statist education, or to allow their children to be trained thereby, means to renounce power in society, to renounce their children, and to deny Christ’s Lordship over all of life.”

“I am as sure as I am of the fact of Christ’s reign that a comprehensive and centralized system of national education, separated from religion, as is now commonly proposed, will prove the most appalling enginery for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief, and of anti-social nihilistic ethics, individual, social, and political, which this sin-rent world has ever seen.”

“Education today is under the influence of this relativistic philosophy and expressive of it. Whether in its Marxist, existentialist, pragmatic, instrumentalist, progressivistic, or other forms, modern education is hostile to knowledge and in flight from knowledge. Its negative function is to indoctrinate its subjects with a radical cynicism concerning the family, patriotism, religion, philosophy, theology, and all things else. The student must be divorced from meaning and knowledge and married to power, because, it is held, knowledge is power.”

Roger Scruton
“The university, instead of transmitting culture, exists to deconstruct it, to remove its ‘aura,’ and to leave the student, after four years of intellectual dissipation, with the view that anything goes and nothing matters…. In place of the old beliefs of a civilization based on godliness, judgment, and distinction, the new beliefs of a society based in equality and inclusion; they are told that the judgment of other lifestyles is a crime. If the purpose were merely to substitute one belief system for another, it would be open to rational debate. But the purpose is to substitute one community for another. When institutions are incurably corrupted, as the universities were corrupted under communism, we must begin again.”

Thomas Sowell
“Today’s educators believe it is their job to introduce children to sex when and in whatever manner they see fit, regardless of what the children’s parents might think. Raw movies of both heterosexuals and homosexuals in action are shown in elementary schools. Weaning children away from their parents’ influence in general is a high priority in many schools.”

“Education is not merely neglected in many of our schools today, but is replaced to a great extent by ideological indoctrination.”

“Whether blatant or subtle, brainwashing has become a major, time-consuming activity in American education at all levels.”

Charles Spurgeon
“To leave our youthful population in the hands of secular teachers, will be to sell them to the Ishmaelites.”

Paul Washer
“Your children will go to public school … and they will be trained for somewhere around 15,000 hours in ungodly secular thought. And then they’ll go to Sunday school and they’ll color a picture of Noah’s ark. And you think that’s going to stand against the lies that they are being told?”

Douglas Wilson
“You cannot send all the Christian kids off to be educated in a school system that is riddled with rank unbelief, shot through with relativism, and diseased with perverse sexual fantasies, and then wonder at the results you get. And why are you not allowed to wonder about it? Because God is not mocked.”

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