America is now facing a crisis of educational insanity that is literally threatening the survival of the nation itself. Before the ‘mountain’ of education was overtaken by bureaucrats of the federal government, Americans grew up with a high-quality education. It was either delivered at home or at locally run community or private schools supported by parents, philanthropists, and churches.

I’ve drawn much of today’s Reclaiming Your Legacy episode from my friend, Alex Newman, editor-in-chief for the New American Magazine. He’s a leading advocate for private and home-based education, and he has written many publications, including one that deserves your consideration to get bulk copies to send to friends. It’s called Rescuing Our Children. You can download a free pdf copy, at this link… perfect for sharing with others about this vital issue:

https://thenewamerican.com/rescuing-our-children-special-report-pdf-download/

In 1955 Rudolph Flesch wrote his best-selling book, “Why Johnny Can’t Read.”  He said, “The teaching of reading — all over the United States, in all the schools, and in all the textbooks — is totally wrong and flies in the face of all logic and common sense.”  How could the abandonment of intensive phonics (teaching reading on the basis of sounds) in favor of the “whole word” method (as if each word was a whole symbol) not cause the deterioration in reading skills that followed?  

In 1981, Flesch wrote a sequel to his classic, entitled Why Johnny Still Can’t Read. President Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education wrote: “The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”

They explained it this way: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”

Since then, it’s gotten much, much worse. And a growing number of Americans have come to realize that far too many Johnnies not only do not know how to read — or write — with any degree of proficiency, but also are handicapped in terms of their ability to add and subtract, or even to apply their minds and think critically.

Where We Came From

For the first two centuries of America’s existence, almost everyone could read and ‘cipher’ (do basic math)… and they did it without ANY public schools, as they’re known in our time.  The institutionalized indoctrination centers of today were unthinkable to early Americans. Past generations of Americans had high value for the education of their children — much more than Americans of today. What was the difference? A lot! But rather than handing over their children to the state to be “educated” by the state, and for the goals of the state, almost all education then was handled by families, religious organizations, tutors, community-run and private schools. And it was done within a free and open market mentality, without top-down controls from a faraway bureaucracy.

Did you know that Philadelphia, by 1776, had become second, only to London, as the chief

city in the British Empire? Dr. Robert Peterson, in an excellent overview of colonial education published by the Foundation for Economic Education, explained that Quaker schools often allowed poor Quaker and non-Quaker children to attend without paying fees. “The Scottish Presbyterians, the Moravians, the Lutherans, and Anglicans all had their own schools. In addition to these church-related schools, private schoolmasters, [who were] entrepreneurs in their own right, established hundreds of schools. Historical records, which are by no means complete, reveal that over one hundred and twenty-five private schoolmasters advertised their services in Philadelphia newspapers between 1740 and 1776. Instruction was offered in Latin, Greek, mathematics, surveying, navigation, accounting, bookkeeping, science, English, and contemporary foreign languages.”

Early education, then, was typically a family affair. The widespread circulation of simple, but highly effective reading primers, such as the New England Primer and the Blue-Backed Speller helped a great deal.

From the solid foundation developed at home, young literate citizens could easily continue their own education if they desired, using libraries. These were typically funded and run by churches early on, and later, via membership fees and private donations. Early Americans could also join “mutual improvement societies” to further their own education.

It was an incredibly successful and effective non-system. In 1831, Frenchman Alexis de Toqueville, after traveling across America and studying it, commented on the education of the time in the northern regions.

“In New England, every citizen receives the elementary notions of human knowledge; he is moreover taught the doctrines and the evidences of his religion, the history of his country, and the leading features of its Constitution,” de Toqueville explained. “In the States of Connecticut and Massachusetts, it is extremely rare to find a man imperfectly acquainted with all these things, and a person wholly ignorant of them is a sort of phenomenon.”

Consider that the products of this laissez-faire education produced the freest and wealthiest society in human history.

Founding Father and prolific inventor Benjamin Franklin, widely regarded as a genius among geniuses, was taught to read by his father before going on to study writing and arithmetic at a private school. Thomas Jefferson, meanwhile, studied Latin and Greek under a tutor, and later attended a classical academy run by a reverend.

Among the leading lights of American history, many were educated primarily at home, including President George Washington, widely regarded as the father of America. President John Quincy Adams never attended a formal school until he went to Harvard, which was a fervently Christian university then, in his early teens. And except for one year of formal schooling, Abraham Lincoln received virtually all of his education in his home. James Madison was taught to read and write at home before going to spend a few years at a private academy and then college.

The Founding Fathers were certainly learned and accomplished men, but their educational backgrounds were by no means unique. Even among everyday Americans, literacy was widespread. Founding Father John Adams noted in 1765 that “a native of America who cannot read or write is as rare an appearance as a comet or an earthquake.”

According to National Education in the United States of America by DuPont Nemours, published in 1812, literacy was practically universal back then. He found that “Most young Americans … can read, write and cipher. Not more than four in a thousand are unable to write legibly – even neatly,”. Many other sources support his findings. And consider that today, government studies show almost half of Americans are either illiterate or so close to illiterate that they might as well be lumped in with them.

It wasn’t just basic reading skills that were universal before institutionalized government “schooling” took over.  Early Americans could think and comprehend, too. As The New American’s editor-in-Chief, Gary Benoit, explained in a 1997 piece, headlined “Before the Public Schools,” the Federalist Papers published in the late 1780s provide ample evidence of the high literacy and phenomenal education that was ubiquitous in those times. In fact, those newspaper columns about the newly drafted U.S. Constitution were aimed at the common American man — the farmer, the merchant, the laborer. Today, many college graduates struggle to understand those documents — and many would undoubtedly struggle even if the documents were presented in modernized English.

Aside from being a non-government education, the classical education of the Founders, and many of their contemporaries, was much different than what passes for schooling today. The three schools that trained more of America’s Founders than any others were Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Interestingly, though, all of them were actually founded to train ministers of the Gospel. The Bible was central to all the education provided at each of those universities.

With the Bible at the heart of schooling, early Americans understood the role of government to be a simple one: protect from evildoers the God-given rights to life, liberty, and property. And they understood the role of education as coming to know God and the scriptures, gaining knowledge about creation, learning what was needed for a productive life, and learning to live right by God. As John Milton famously put it, “The end of learning is to repair the ruin of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him.” Such views were dominant back then, when Americans were far more educated.

Government Becomes the “Educator”

Officially, the history of “government” laws about education began with the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1647. Their very first public act on education and schooling was called: the Old Deluder Satan Act.  The preamble to the law said…

“It being one chief project of the old deluder Satan to keep men from the knowledge of the Scripture …, to the end that learning may not be buried in the graves of our forefathers, in church and commonwealth, the Lord assisting our endeavors … it is therefore ordered … [to] appoint One, within their town, to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and read, whose wages shall be paid, either by the parents or masters of such children or by the inhabitants in general.”

The primary purpose of the Puritan era schools, was to ensure a knowledge of the Bible. But their schools were hardly the institutionalized government propaganda centers of today. Even in Boston in the late 1600s, there were only one or two “public” schools, and virtually all students starting there already knew how to read. Many knew more than just reading, having learned much from their families at home.

It’s worth noting that the Puritans in Massachusetts were an anomaly in America regarding government laws touching education. The experience of the other Colonies showed clearly that a law mandating reading instruction in larger towns wasn’t needed at all. In fact, Americans were so zealous for education, they didn’t need government to provide it for them in order to obtain it.

The first giant step away from traditional, classical, Christian education toward socialistic and humanistic indoctrination and the dumbing down of education… began under Horace Mann. In 1837, in Massachusetts, Horace Mann was appointed as the first-ever “Education Secretary” of an American state. And as a unitarian who rejected the Bible as the inspired and inerrant Word of God, Mann had big ideas about reforming the highly successful educational system that existed at the time.

Mann went to Prussia in 1843 and was very impressed with what came to be known as the Prussian Model. It was essentially the first systematic effort by a Western government to seize total control over education. Under that European model, government schooling became compulsory. Statism and unquestioning obedience to government was instilled in all children. Indeed, teachers were themselves trained by the state, ensuring that the teachers taught what the state wanted. And unlike in America, children were segregated based on age.

One of Mann’s key goals for the education system he imported from Prussia, was to “equalize the conditions of men.” This was a socialistic view, believing that everyone would be more equal if everyone received the same education. This approach, which manifests itself today in the form of Common Core, achieves mediocrity, not excellence. As much as politically possible in his day, Mann worked to ensure that religious instruction was purged from education, too. While it was done under the guise of combating sectarianism among the different Christian denominations, the real goal was to remove the Bible, which until that time had been an inseparable part of America society and its education. Mann was so passionate about institutionalized government schooling based on the Prussian model that he traveled across the country promoting it. By the mid-1800s, compulsory attendance laws and government schools were popping up across the northern United States. After Massachusetts, New York and Connecticut joined in the movement. By 1900, despite major resistance from some segments of the populations and many parents, dozens of states had imposed similar Prussian-style systems with compulsory attendance laws.

John Dewey Picks Up the Baton

After Mann came the notable humanist, John Dewey. An anti-Christian socialist, Dewey was fanatical in his zeal to reform humanity to fit his atheistic, collectivist vision. After visiting Lenin’s Soviet Russia, he returned to write openly of the mass-murdering regime, praising its creation of a “collectivist mentality” through education and propaganda.

He wrote: “The only form of enduring social organization that’s now possible is one in which the new forces of productivity are cooperatively controlled.”

“Organized social planning … is now the sole method of social action by which liberalism can realize its professed aims.” Dewey frequently pointed to an 1888 novel, Looking Backward, by Edward Bellamy. It envisioned a communist America with no private property in the year 2000. Bellamy’s radical vision, animated Dewey and his supporters in their quest to re-shape America by re-shaping its children by re-shaping their education.

Dewey’s radical beliefs are well defined in the 1933 Humanist Manifesto, whichhehelped develop. It’s a complete rejection of freedom and the Creator.  It’s also a rejection of the unalienable rights given to individuals by their Creator, as written in the Declaration of Independence.

“FIRST: Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.”  Dewey and his fellow signers of that document shamelessly denied the very first sentence of the Bible. It was a frontal assault on the very foundation of Christianity, Western civilization, America, morality, and individual liberty.

Forty years after Dewey’s original Humanist Manifesto, his comrades were even bolder. In Humanist Manifesto II, they openly called for one world government. “We deplore the division of humankind on nationalistic grounds,” the document declares. “We have reached a turning point in human history where the best option is to transcend the limits of national sovereignty and to move toward the building of a world community in which all sectors of the human family can participate. Thus, we look to the development of a system of world law and a world order based upon transnational federal government.”

The original Humanist Manifesto also attacked free enterprise. Arguing for collectivization of the means of production, they insisted,

“The humanists are firmly convinced that existing … profit-motivated society has shown itself to be inadequate and that a radical change in methods, controls, and motives must be instituted.  The goal of humanism is a free and universal society in which people voluntarily and intelligently cooperate for the common good.”

Curiously, Dewey and all his 30+ co-signers acknowledged their beliefs were essentially religious. Darwinian evolution was at the heart of their new religion. Without a Creator, there can be no God-given rights. And without God-given rights, there can be no objective reason for protecting individual rights at all, much less for limiting the power and scope of government.

Like so many socialists, Dewey saw education as the key to change society. In his book Democracy and Education, Dewey argued that education is “the process through which the needed transformation may be accomplished.” With millions from the Rockefeller dynasty, Dewey and his allies had all they needed.

However, they knew that if parents or teachers understood what was happening, they’d rebel. So, Dewey argued in his essay, The Primary Education Fetich (sic), that deception and stealth would be required. “Change must come gradually,” Dewey wrote. “To force it unduly would compromise its final success by favoring a violent reaction.”

In their ultimately successful plan to hijack and weaponize government schools, those lunatics used many strategies, to quietly take over the most important teaching colleges – especially the University of Chicago and Teachers College at Columbia University — so future educators were trained to do their bidding. Rockefeller’s funding paid for an “experimental school” to test and refine their ideas.

One of the most diabolical aspects of the Dewey scheme was the resurrection of the discredited “whole word” reading method first pioneered by Mann in the 1840s. Like ‘tares’ their reading primers were planted in schools throughout America, leading to a national illiteracy crisis that persists to this day, with “sight words” still mandated by “Common Core” starting in kindergarten. That’s a big part of why almost two-thirds of high-school seniors today are not even proficient in reading.

Ramping Up Federal Control: Common Core and ESSA

With the success of Dewey and his allies indoctrinating generations of Americans through public schools, it was time for the rogue federal government to formalize it all. In 1962, the Supreme Court unlawfully banned prayer in school. Prior to that, states like New York, had officially encouraged students to begin their school day with the simple prayer:

 “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our country. Amen.”

But the Supreme Court, apparently unwilling to read the plain text of the First Amendment, prohibiting Congress from establishing a religion or prohibiting the “free exercise thereof,” ruled prayer illegal. In 1963, Chief Justice Earl Warren led the increasingly bold high Court to ban Bible reading in school. Justice Potter Stewart was one member of the court who understood what was happening. As the only dissenting voice in the Abington v. Schempp case banning Bible reading, Stewart slammed the ruling, writing: “It led not to true neutrality with respect to religion, but to the establishment of a religion of secularism.”  And that’s exactly what it did. Dewey’s dictatorial humanist religion is now the official state religion…  mandated to be fed to all children in all government schools, at taxpayer expense. Let that sink in.

Data compiled by the Nehemiah Institute shows the overwhelming majority of public-school children from Christian homes will leave their church and end up with a secular worldview.

Two years after banning Bible reading in schools, the government ditched the Constitution’s constraints on its power as Congress formally began seizing control of public education. In 1965, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was passed, opening the floodgates of federal funding.

Less than 15 years later, Congress and Jimmy Carter unleashed the U.S. Department of Education on America. It didn’t take long for the feds to demand more control, so the Obama administration finally came out and openly nationalized education standards using Common Core. Now, education is being globalized, with the United Nations and the U.S. Department of Education leading the way.

Alex Newman, concludes his astute essay, writing that… by the time the federal government began openly hijacking control of education from the states and local communities, America had already undergone a fundamental transformation via education. Norman Dodd, who led an investigation by Congress’ Select Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations, explained that entities like the Rockefeller Foundation,

which funded Dewey and others, had orchestrated drastic changes that were so serious they constituted a “revolution.” However, this “could not have occurred peacefully, or with the consent of the majority, unless education in the U.S. had been prepared in advance to endorse it.”

In a few centuries, America went from being the best-educated society in all human history — a moral and intellectual superpower — to being a dumbed-down, ignorant, and increasingly immoral nation on the brink of destruction. But it was not by accident. In fact, it was all a deliberate plan, as Alex Newman and Dr. Blumenfeld showed in Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children. This incredible transformation was brought about by seizing control of education and weaponizing it. The only viable solution to this catastrophic problem is to deliberately neutralize that weapon by protecting America’s children from it and restoring true education.

We might not all see the possibility of restoring God-honoring education for the whole country. We might not even have the faith to believe we can honestly pray for that. But as I read my Bible with spiritual eyes, it’s clear that our God has a sizeable record of turning impossible situations around. The demonic enemies of righteousness and the kingdom of God may seem to have the upper hand in our world for now, but isn’t that just the very kind of environment in which God raised up David to slay Goliath and Esther to defeat the plans of evil Haman?

We’re not all called to be a Moses or a Daniel or a Nehemiah, but we are His workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them (Eph 2:10). And He has written all these accounts of His intervention in the lives of His called-out people of the past for our instruction that through perseverance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we can have hope (Ro. 15:4).

We can’t do everything there is to do, but I can do all things through Him Who strengthens me for what I’m called to do! (Phil. 4:13). Listening to His Holy Spirit for guidance, let’s not forget to use whatever abilities and resources He puts in our trust to enlighten others with His transforming word.

Visit ReclaimingYourLegacy.com to see all the notes and the links for today’s show, and while there, I invite you to help us as you’re able. It’s my blessing to share this message with you today, and I trust it equips you to bring light to others.  

Bonus Segment

Dr. Everett Piper wrote an article for the American Renewal Project (October 11, 2023) on how Higher education in the U.S. has lost its moral boundaries.  He said:

“It may be a surprise to the elites in the media, but American higher education, from its inception in the 1600s until the end of the 19th century, operated within the context of a Christian ethos. The guiding philosophy was to propagate knowledge and to prepare upright leadership within a Christian society.”

He spoke about the formal educational institutions as the “ACADEMY”… saying:

“The academy’s mission at that time was to promote moral development and civic responsibility. Theoretically and ideally, higher education was considered critical in maintaining our country’s moral order.”

Did you get that?  The mission of ‘higher education’ in previous generations was all about preserving MORAL ORDER in society.  He continued, saying:

“Seven of the eight Ivy League institutions were founded in like manner. Dartmouth’s purpose was to ‘Christianize’ the American Indian tribes, and its motto, even to this day, is Vox clamantis in deserto: ‘The voice of one crying in the wilderness’. The University of Pennsylvania’s motto was Leges Sine Moribus Vanae: ‘Laws without morals are useless’.”

There’s no doubt that the lofty goals of America’s Founders’ included Christian community, Biblical teaching, and moral education.  We all know where that came from. Proverbs 1:7 is worth repeating often in today’s ‘Christian communities.’ 

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction.”

Five centuries before Solomon wrote those words, what did Moses tell God’s people… those who survived the Exodus out of Egypt and 40 years of camping out in the desert, just before their 7-year mission to displace the irredeemably wicked Canaanites?

Quoting from Deut 6:2, Moses told the Israelites vital instructions needed for their very survival… “that you may fear the LORD your God, to keep all His statutes and His commandments which I command you, you and your son and your grandson, all the days of your life, and (so) that your days may be prolonged.”

Then comes the transgenerational assignment to parents in Deut. 6:5-9: “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart.”

We grew up memorizing certain important things “by heart,” right? That’s what it means to keep God’s words “in your heart.”

“You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up.”

As young parents we meditated on this passage much… and we thought of good ways to apply the next part…

“You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.

The Amplified Bible puts it this way: “And you shall bind them as a sign on your hand (forearm), and they shall be used as bands (frontals, frontlets) on your forehead.”

This is the Word of the Living God he’s talking about. His laws… His precepts… His principles… His wise insights… His directions for the everyday life use of your hands and your head.  It’s not hard to see the implications of that, is it? And then, Moses writes…

“You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”

Even as a young adult believer, before I was married, I discovered the refreshing strength of posting Scripture verses on the bathroom mirror and the walls of the house. Posting the promises of God is an especially encouraging practice when going through difficult times. But even seeing the Ten Commandments – and reading them – is a great reminder of what will keep us from the sin-filled distractions of a dark and confusing world.

Today’s generation can hardly imagine what it was like in schools of our nation’s past. Before the dawning of the “age of Aquarius” and the secular plundering of public education, American society once considered it normal to focus on the development of the inner man and personal integrity. Morality in culture was highly esteemed, along with an intense pursuit of Scriptural wisdom.  Early American educational prioritized those concepts.  At its core, education held the premise that virtue is absolutely essential to freedom.

We don’t inherit spiritual wisdom. It’s not written into our DNA. It must be acquired from people who value spiritual wisdom.

 “Prize her,” urged Solomon to his sons in Proverbs 4:8, “and she will exalt you. Indeed, if you embrace her, she will honor you.” Proverbs 8:15 informs us that exalting spiritual wisdom, along with its virtues of knowledge, shrewdness, discretion, counsel, and resourcefulness, equips “kings to reign and rulers to decree justice.”

Unfortunately, in modern America this is no longer the case. Our entire educational enterprise has, in the light of Scripture, “cast off all sensible restraint.”  Not only have moral boundaries been thrown to the wind, common sense, discussion of natural law, and even intellectual sanity seem to have disappeared from many typical academic classrooms.

The idea that biological boys would be allowed to compete against girls at state track and swimming events was utterly impossible a decade or two ago. Now, the federal Washington DC education bureaucrats boast in their liberation to mandate such madness. They publicly give pompous precedence to the sinister staples of cultural Marxism, including embittering America’s youth with Critical Race Theory, hailing homosexual and gender dysphoria, fomenting race division, and instilling into children hate of America and for each other.

If anyone takes a good look at the current condition of most public education in America, they’ll discover that the huge influence of the National Education Association (the NEA) is driven by an unbelievably malicious quest to implant savage values into the nation’s future by corrupting its youth. That process has been likened to the legendary strategy known as the “Trojan Horse” of ancient Greece. Now, a “Trojan horse” has come to mean any trick or hoax that causes a vulnerable unwary target to invite an enemy into a securely protected stronghold like your home or community. In computing, a trojan horse (or simply trojan) is a kind of malware that misleads users as to its true intent by disguising itself as a normal program.

It’s not hard for most morally centered adults to see the obvious result. The morally corrupted “spirit” of religious secularism took possession of the now idolatrous institution of “education” and brought with it “seven spirits more vile and wicked than itself” (Luke 11:26).  How else can you describe public education that defines sexual perversions, too disgusting for me to mention on this broadcast being taught to 13 and 14-year-olds as equal to saying ‘I like you?’

At what point is enough enough?

American people, as a society, are daily at a crossroads of deciding their future.  And it starts with each of us. Will we strive to apply God’s wisdom along with knowledge, discernment, and compassion… to every policy-making decision? That’s what will be required if we honestly expect to sustain freedom for our children and grandchildren. The opposition will always continue its intensity. Only those who learn from the failure of American Christians over the last 100 years can prevail. They shirked their responsibility and ignored Christ’s assignment found in Matthew 18:19-20, “Make disciples of all nations… teaching them to observe all that I commanded you.”

References

Higher education in the U.S. has lost its moral boundaries. By Dr. Everett Piper in American Renewal Project Newsletter OCTOBER 11, 2023 as published in: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2023/oct/14/what-happens-in-israel-will-not-stay-in-israel/

Using Public “Education,” Godless Elitists Transformed Americans’ Worldview by Alex Newman in  The New American  https://www.brighteon.com/47519dca-407a-47ae-aa5b-bd82efcf1358

The fundamental transformation taking place in the United States is the direct result of the radical changes in Americans’ worldview brought about by godless elitists using government schools, explained The New American magazine’s Alex Newman in this episode of Behind The Deep State. For centuries, Americans possessed a biblical worldview. In other words, they saw the world and life through the lens of the Bible. However, when communists such as John Dewey teamed up with super-capitalists like the Rockefeller dynasty to brainwash and dumb down Americans using government “education,” that all changed.

From Educational Excellence to Mediocrity by Alex Newman in Rescuing Our Children  from The New American Magazine ; download free pdf at: https://thenewamerican.com/rescuing-our-children-special-report-pdf-download/