CHRISTIANS
and
I
By S. Michael Craven
Public Education
AM FREQUENTLY asked for my thoughts on “public
education.” Granted, this is a dicey issue that can get you
into a lot of trouble very quickly. However, the question is
legitimate, given education’s enormous role in shaping our
children; thus, as Christians, we have no choice but to wres-
tle with the answers, even if we don’t like them.
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 para-
mount. Every institution in which men are not increasing-
ly 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 Theologi-
cal Seminary and host of the nationally syndicated radio
program The Al Mohler Program, revealed the secularizing
influence on contemporary public education back in 2005
in an article, “Needed: An Exit Strategy.” Suffice it to say,
in the nearly fourteen years hence, the situation has only
gotten worse.
A little history of public education should prove helpful.
F. W. Parker, the so-called father of progressive education
18
and inspiration for John Dewey (an educational reformer),
told the 1895 convention of the National Education Associ-
ation (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 president of the Howard Center for Family, Reli-
gion, and Society, 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 prima-
ry means for preparing the nation’s children to be “good citi-
zens.” 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