Godless Education
Apparently a large majority of American parents believe that the exclusion of God from the public schools is not very important and has had little effect on how and what Johnny learns. Otherwise, they would not have so easily acquiesced to the takeover of the schools by the atheists. In other words, for many parents God is a meaningless, ineffective, but comforting concept that need not interfere with anything as important as education.
On June 25th, 1962, Justice Hugo Black wrote for the majority in Engel v. Vitale which removed prayer from schools, however, not one previous case was cited in this ruling as is typically the case. Why was no other case cited? Because, there were none which would support its decision. For 170 years following the ratification of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, no Court had ever struck down any prayer, in any form, in any location. While the Court invoked no judicial precedent to sustain its decision, it did employ some strategic psychological rhetoric. Recall the Court’s comment that: “…these principles were so universally recognized…”. But, these principles were not recognized by most Americans, and this decision caused an uproar, and Congressional hearings! Even though the Founding fathers plainly stated that religion and morality were to be part of our society and government, the Court was not particularly interested in the Founders’ views on this subject; in fact, it openly acknowledged its contempt for America’s heritage when it remarked:
[T]hat [New York] prayer seems relatively insignificant when compared to the governmental encroachments upon religion which were commonplace 200 years ago.
The Warren Court decided to ignore the Founding Fathers intent and the Constitution and substitute the “Separation of Church and State” for the First Amendment.
Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina said, “I should like to ask whether we would be far wrong in saying that in this decision the Supreme Court has held that God is unconstitutional and for that reason the public school must be segregated against Him?”
John Bennett, dean of Union Theological Seminary wrote the following: “If the Court in the name of religious liberty tries to keep a lid on religious expression and teaching both in the public schools and also in connection with experiments that involve cooperation with public schools, it will drive all religious communities to the establishment of parochial schools, much against the will of many, and to the great detriment of public schools and probably of the quality of education.” At the time there were just a handful of Protestant Schools in the country, today they number in the thousands.
Martin Luther, on the subject of schooling, wrote:
I am afraid that schools will prove to be the 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.
A year after the Supreme Court ruled prayer in school unconstitutional, the Bible reading was ruled unconstitutional in the Abington Township School District v. Schempp decision. At issue was a Pennsylvania policy which stated:
Each school… shall be opened by the reading, without comment, of a chapter in the Holy Bible. . .. Participation in the opening exercises . . is voluntary. The student reading the verses from the Bible may select the passages and read from any version he chooses.[49]
Like the New York prayer, this seemed to be a relatively innocuous activity. It was voluntary; it was student-led; no sectarian instruction or comments were permitted. Yet today’s civil libertarians portray this as a coercion case — so much so, they claim, that Edward Schempp thought himself forced to file suit to relieve his children from the coercion. However, the facts of the case disprove this assertion:
Roger and Donna [two of the Schempp children] testified that they had never protested to their teachers or other persons of authority in the school system concerning the practices of which they now complain [in this lawsuit]. In fact, on occasion, Donna herself had volunteered to read the Bible.[51] (emphasis added)
Furthermore, so non-coercive was the policy that while other children were reading the Bible, one of the Schempp children had been permitted to read the Koran.[52] The facts in the case clearly establish that there was no coercion. (However, when this case finally reached the Supreme Court, these facts, presented in the District Court, were ignored.)
Another argument raised then (and still raised today) is that the school setting is no place for religious activities; if such activities are to occur it should be at home-or in a private school. What is the first lesson students learn in secular schools? God, religion, and morality are not very important. “If they were, surely our educational experts would see to it that we learned what we need to know.” Kids aren’t stupid. They realize the implications of not making the Bible our foundational school textbook.
We can begin to see that it is not just that arguments against Christianity in public schools are fallacious. There are compelling social reasons for making Christianity the foundation of everything that is taught in school, and the Framers of the Constitution understood these reasons.
- The Founding Fathers correctly believed that “religion, morality and knowledge” should be taught in public schools.
- They believed that morality could not be taught without religion, and that without morality, our nation would crumble.
- The U.S. Supreme Court (1844) declared that morality could not be taught in government-operated schools without the New Testament.
- Our entire system of government was based on religion and morality
- Or as the Founders often spoke of them, “piety and virtue.”
There is not a single Signer of the Constitution who would have agreed that the Constitution he was signing was intended to give the federal government the power to order municipal schools to remove The Ten Commandments and the Bible. The Founders’ opinion of the Bible, and of its use in schools, was clear:
The great enemy of the salvation of man, in my opinion, never invented a more effectual means of extirpating [extinguishing] Christianity from the world than by persuading mankind that it was improper to read the Bible at schools.[54] [T]he Bible, when not read in schools, is seldom read in any subsequent period of life. . . . [It] should be read in our schools in preference to all other books from its containing the greatest portion of that kind of knowledge which is calculated to produce private and public temporal happiness. – BENJAMIN RUSH, SIGNER OF THE DECLARATION1
Nowhere can it be demonstrated that the Founders desired to secularize official society and “create a complete separation of the spheres of religious activity and civil authority.” The Abington decision represented a further step in the devolution of the First Amendment by rewriting the intent of those who created the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Schools are now owned by the very forces of moral evil that they were supposed to fight against. The war to get God out of schools began long before the 1960’s. Dr. A.A. Hodge, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, warned the Presbyterian church in 1890: “I am as sure as I am 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.”
Orestes Augustus Brownson (1803-76), defector of communism and convert to Christianity would later expose the evil plan to exclude religion from schools in favor of scientism:
“The great object is to get rid of Christianity, and to convert our churches into halls of science. The plan is not to make open attacks upon religion… but to a system of state schools, from which all religion will be excluded… and to which all parents are to be compelled by law to send their children. [The] complete plan is to take the children from their parents at the age of twelve or eighteen months, and to have them raised, fed, clothed, and trained in these schools at the public expense; but at any rate, [they are] to have godless schools for all the children of the country… the plan has been successfully pursued… and the whole action of the country on the subject has taken the direction we sought to give it…”
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, whether falsified to blame the Jews or otherwise, were certainly accurate in how history has played out. In them, the plan is layed out that:
“… we shall erase from the memory of men all facts of previous centuries which are undesirable to us … we shall abolish every kind of freedom of instruction… and raise [youth] in principles and theories which we know to be false…”
Voltaire echoed the plan: “Primary and higher-class education of a lay and Infidel character was to be established getting God out of schools, …”
Italian Marxist philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci wrote in 1915: “Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity … In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society …” and would later write:“In the New Order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society … “
In 1930, CF Potter further testified to the agenda to create a Godless education system when he declared: “Education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism, and every American public school is a school of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday schools, meeting for an hour once a week, teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?”
In 1932, William Z Foster wrote:
“A US Department of Education; implementation of a scientific materialist philosophy; studies, being cleansed of religious, patriotic and other features of the bourgeois ideology; students taught on the basis of Marxian dialectical materialism, internationalism and general ethics of a new socialist society; present obsolete methods of teaching will be superseded by a scientific pedagogy. The whole basis and organization of capitalist science will be revolutionized. Science will become materialistic, hence truly scientific. God will be banished from the laboratories as well as from the schools.”
John Dewey (signer of the Humanist Manifesto) said:
“There is no God and no soul. Hence, there are no needs for props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable truth is also dead and buried. There is no room for fixed, natural law or permanent absolutes …. Teaching children to read is a great perversion and a high literacy rate breeds destructive individualism … the child does not go to school to develop individual talents but rather are prepared as “units” in an organic society …. The change in the moral school atmosphere … are not mere accidents, they are the necessities of the larger social evolution.”
In 1951, Dr. Willard Givens, at the 72nd annual meeting of the NEA in Washington, D.C., gave a speech titled ‘Education for a New America’ in which he stated:
“We are convinced that we stand today at the verge of a great culture… But to achieve these things many drastic changes must be made. A dying laissez-faire (individual freedom; opposition to governmental interference) must be completely destroyed, and all of us, including the owners, must be subjected to a large degree of social control.”
Senator William Jenner, The Congressional Record (1952):
“I want to make one thing clear, this war against our constitution is not being fought way off in Madagascar or in Mandalay. It is being fought here – in our schools, our colleges, our churches, our women’s clubs. It is being fought with our money, channeled through the State Department. It is being fought twenty-four hours a day – while we remain asleep. How many of you Senators know what the UN is doing to change the teaching of the children in your own home town? The UN is at work there, every day and night, changing the teachers, changing the teaching materials, changing the very words and tones – changing all the essential ideas which we imagine our schools are teaching to our young folks. How in the name of Heaven are we to sit here, approve these programs, appropriate our own people’s money – for such outrageous ‘orientation’ of our own children, and of the men and women who teach our children, in this Nation’s schools?”
In Quackery in The Public Schools by Albert Lynd (1953), he exposes John Dewey, the Modern Father of Modern Education, as an agent for a Godless education:
“Many of Dewey’s educational disciples may be coy or confused, but the master himself is clear enough in his writings about the implications of his philosophy. It excludes God, the soul, and all the props of traditional religion. It excludes the possibility of immutable truth, of fixed natural law, of permanent moral principles… Whether you like it or not, the education bureaucracy has relieved you of all basic decisions about the aims and methods of the schooling in your town. The professors at the center of the system, who have been elected by nobody, control the qualifications of your teachers by fixing them in terms of their own course offerings.”
Further quotes on removing God from education include:
“The kindergarten … has a significant part to play in the child’s education. Not only can it correct many of the errors of home training… it can prepare the child … for membership in the world society … As long as the child breathes the poisoned air of nationalism, education in world-mindedness can produce only precarious results … it is most frequently in the family that the children are infected with nationalism.” ~UNESCO propaganda, Towards World Understanding Vol. 5 (1949)
“Every child who believes in God is mentally ill.” ~Dr. Paul F Brandwein (1912-94), leading US child psychologist who also instructed teachers on how to recognize mental disability in school children: The Social Sciences (1970)
“Our efforts as educators must not be directed to restoring the past order of morality but to participating in creating a new one … when it is shed there will be a new moral order to take its place … a counterculture that will burst through to the surface … Perhaps one can establish cells of a counterculture in the classroom… such units would then … contribute to the disintegration of existing institutions .… educational institutions may be the most effective source of counterculture units – perhaps the only possible source… Children are to learn to make judgments that will turn them against the prevailing state of indoctrination and manipulated opinion … creating a counterculture that will enable people to reject the present culture and maintain that rejection and resistance even in the face of suppression… Formal education, carried on subversively, can be in the forefront of building a new moral order … It provides some measure of the physical and social isolation necessary for the incubation process.” ~Roberta Ash, article entitled “Durkheim’s Moral Education Reconsidered” published in School Review (1971)
“Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances toward our Founding Fathers, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity… It’s up to you teachers to make all of these sick children well by creating the international children of the future.” ~Dr. Chester M. Pierce, Professor of Education and Psychiatry, Medicine and Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, address to the Association for Childhood Education International in Denver (1972)
“… dramatic changes in the way we will raise our children in the year 2000 are indicated, particularly in terms of schooling… We will need to recognize that the so-called ‘basic skills,’ which currently represent nearly the total effort in elementary schools, will be taught in one-quarter of the present school day … When this happens – and it’s near – the teacher can rise to his true calling. More than a dispenser of information, the teacher will be a conveyor of values, a philosopher … We will be agents of change.” ~Catherine Barrett, President of the National Education Association, The Saturday Review of Education (1973)
“I am convinced that the battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their roles as the proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity that recognizes and respects the spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being. These teachers must embody the same selfless dedication as the most rabid fundamentalist preachers, for they will be ministers of another sort, utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever they teach, regardless of the educational level – preschool, day care, or large state university. The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new – the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of Humanism, resplendent in its promise of a world in which the never-realized Christian ideal of love thy neighbor will finally be achieved.” ~John Dunphy, Humanist Magazine (1983)
“Fundamental, Bible-believing people do not have the right to indoctrinate their children in their religious beliefs because we, the state, are preparing them for the year 2000, when America will be part of a one-world global society and their children will not fit in.” ~Peter Hoagland, Nebraska State Senator and Humanist, speaking on US radio to Everett Sileven (1983).
And many more quotes on the undermining of the education system can be found HERE
The simple truth is that the spiritual health of the nation requires an educational system that acknowledges the existence of Almighty God and the power He exerted over the founders of this nation. George Washington said in his Inaugural Address:
It would be peculiarly improper to omit in this first official act my fervent supplications to that Almighty Being who rules over the universe, who presides in the councils of nations, and whose providential aids can supply every human defect, that His benediction may consecrate to the liberties and happiness of the people of the United States…. No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the Invisible Hand which conducts the affairs of men more than those of the United States. Every step by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agency; and in the important revolution just accomplished in the system of their united government the tranquil deliberations and voluntary consent of so many distinct communities from which the event has resulted can not be compared with the means by which most governments have been established without some return of pious gratitude, along with an humble anticipation of the future blessings which the past seem to presage.
John Adams, second President of the United States, said at his inauguration in 1797:
May that Being who is supreme over all, the Patron of Order, the Fountain of Justice, and the Protector in all ages of the world of virtuous liberty, continue His blessing upon this nation and its Government and give it all possible success and duration consistent with the ends of His providence.
Thomas Jefferson, in his second inaugural address, asked for God’s blessings. He said:
I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life; who has covered our infancy with His providence and our riper years with His wisdom and power, and to whose goodness I ask you to join in supplications with me that He will so enlighten the minds of your servants, guide their councils, and prosper their measures that whatsoever they do shall result in your good, and shall secure to you the peace, friendship, and approbation of all nations.
James Madison, in his inaugural address in 1809, referred to “that Almighty Being whose power regulates the destiny of nations, whose blessings have been so conspicuously dispensed to this rising Republic, and to whom we are bound to address our devout gratitude for the past, as well as our fervent supplication and best hopes for the future.”
Andrew Jackson, in his inaugural address, acknowledged his “firm reliance on the goodness of that Power whose providence mercifully protected our national infancy, and has since upheld our liberties in various vicissitudes, encourages me to offer up my ardent supplications that He will continue to make our beloved country the object of His divine care and gracious benediction.”
Probably the most fervent acknowledgment of God’s role in the American experience was made by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his first inaugural address in 1953:
My friends, before I begin the expression of those thoughts that I deem appropriate to this moment, would you permit me the privilege of uttering a little private prayer of my own. And I ask that you bow your heads:
Almighty God, as we stand here at this moment my future associates in the executive branch of government join me in beseeching that Thou will make full and complete our dedication to the service of the people in this throng, and their fellow citizens everywhere.
Give us, we pray, the power to discern clearly right from wrong, and allow all our words and actions to be governed thereby, and by the laws of this land. Especially we pray that our concern shall be for all the people regardless of race, or calling.
May cooperation be permitted and be the mutual aim of those who, under the concepts of our Constitution, hold to differing political faiths; so that all may work for the good of our beloved country and Thy glory. Amen.
Can any of these professions of faith in God by our presidents be read in the public schools? It would be interesting to see if some teacher of American history might actually read these words in an American public classroom. School prayer has been banned. But can President Eisenhower’s prayer be recited in a public classroom?
Removing the spiritual component from the public school classroom has created a vacuum that is now filled with anti-biblical, anti-God doctrines that lead to student hatred of the school. That’s why the massacres, vandalism, and disrespect of teachers have been aimed at the very schools that deny the existence of God. Many students blame the schools for their learning problems, their illiteracy, their lack of success, their moral confusion, their emotional pain. They consider the school to be an enemy, and that’s why they target it with their destructive behavior. A godless school can only be seen by the student as a temple of evil. He must absorb its teachings even though he senses its evil. A young mind knows when it is being morally poisoned and that is why he or she acts up in the classroom. How does one resist evil when it is being taught as good?
Children are born with a strong spiritual sense. That is why they believe in God. That is why they believe in the supernatural. That is why they believe in Santa Claus. That is why they love fairy tales and Bible stories. But when they enter the public school at the preschool or kindergarten level, sophisticated methods are used to undermine their spiritual beliefs. By the time they are in the primary grades they have learned about evolution and that they are animals, no different from cats and dogs. In elementary school they learn that morals are relative and that there is no God to punish them for their sins, and by middle school they are convinced that life has no purpose other than to experience pleasure.
The idea that tampering with and destroying a child’s spiritual sense have no consequences is why educators cannot understand or control the negative, self-destructive behavior of children. Their recourse is to send such disturbed children to secular behavioral psychologists and psychiatrists who also deny the existence of God. Thus the child is trapped in a web of disbelief and atheism and given drugs that are supposed to change the child’s behavior. The result for some children is suicide.
Fortunately, there still are in America private schools and parochial schools where a child’s spiritual needs are nourished by a strong belief in the Bible. Most homeschoolers are devout Christians who educate their children to rely on God’s providence for their future happiness. They become well-educated, productive, emotionally healthy citizens with the knowledge that God has given them a purpose in life. Without this army of young believers, our country would not be able to sustain itself at the high technical level it has achieved.
The spiritually crippled young Americans who emerge from the public schools become the drug-addicted young men, the unwed mothers, the delinquents, the functionally illiterate youths who become the nation’s social problems. They were led by their educators into the blind alley of social dysfunction. Some of them are eventually saved by finding God. But many of them remain dependent on government programs for the rest of their lives as members of the underclass.
Thus, the idea that destroying a child’s belief in God has no evil consequences is what keeps this nation from looking at its public schools without blinders. Self-deception is the surest road to social ruin, and that’s what the godless public schools are into.
According to an article on CNSNews.com, “William Jeynes, a professor at California State College in Long Beach and a senior fellow at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, N.J., spoke at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. on Aug. 13, 2014 about putting the Bible and prayer back into U.S. public schools. (Penny Starr/CNSNews.com)
Since 1963, Jeynes said there have been five negative developments in the nation’s public schools:
- Academic achievement has plummeted, including SAT scores.
- Increased rate of out-of-wedlock births
- Increase in illegal drug use
- Increase in juvenile crime
- Deterioration of school behavior
“’So we need to realize that these actions do have consequences,’ said Jeynes, professor at California State College in Long Beach and senior fellow at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, N.J., ‘When we remove that moral fiber — that moral emphasis – this is what can result.’”
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