Why We Need Education Alternatives

I will make a bold statement right here that will tell you where I am heading:

Our education system was engineered to destroy us.

I don’t make the above statement lightly. I have been researching education for the last 32 years, reading more books and magazine articles than I can recount, and then gathering anecdotal information from my own family and families I have known. I think I can prove historically that the above statement is true.

Let’s begin waaaay back with the Greeks.

This is because it was the Greeks that our current system is based on, in particular, the Spartans.

If you paid attention in school (and most of us found that impossible), then you would remember that ancient Greece was split up into city-states. One of these states was Athens, and this is the one modern education elevates as the ideal. From the Golden Age of Greece we have persons such as Socrates and Plato. From the descriptions in our school texts, movies, books, and the like, we get the idea that Greeks were a society that valued the freedom of ideas and the individual. In our minds we see people dressed in togas sitting and talking with each other by cool fountains, each person happily pondering lofty ideas.

Funny, but we are rarely taught about that other part of ancient Greece that existed at the same time; Sparta.

Spartans were not free or easy or interested in feasting on lofty ideas. They were all about WAR. In fact, at their height their entire society existed as one, huge army training camp.

Note the following descriptions, both from History.com:

Sparta was a warrior society in ancient Greece that reached the height of its power after defeating rival city-state Athens in the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.). Spartan culture was centered on loyalty to the state and military service. At age 7, Spartan boys entered a rigorous state-sponsored education, military training and socialization program. Known as the Agoge, the system emphasized duty, discipline and endurance.

All healthy male Spartan citizens participated in the compulsory state-sponsored education system, the Agoge, which emphasized obedience, endurance, courage and self-control. Spartan men devoted their lives to military service, and lived communally well into adulthood. A Spartan was taught that loyalty to the state came before everything else, including one’s family.

The men were forced to live apart from their families. The sons were forced into compulsory education at the age of seven. The women were “free” to be educated and participate in various sports and training in warrior ways because the work was done by a permanent underclass of slaves. (Sound familiar?)

Even Athens thought the education of the Spartans was a good idea. Hear this from Plato:

Education is, if possible, to be, as the phrase goes, compulsory for every mother’s son, on the ground that the child is even more the property of the state than of his parents.

And this from Aristotle:

The citizen should be molded to suit the form of government under which he lives.

And,

Neither must we suppose that any one of the citizens belongs to himself, for they all belong to the state, and are each of them a part of the state, and the care of each part is inseparable from the care of the whole. In this particular as in some others the Lacedaemonians [Spartans] are to be praised, for they take the greatest pains about their children, and make education the business of the state.

So, Sparta had its day and whooped up on the silly, soft Athenians. You would think, with all the regimentation and orderliness of their society, they would have remained on top of the entire conglomeration of Greece.

But they didn’t. The dominance of Sparta only lasted 33 years.

Why? Because human beings are not machines or robots or chattel for the state. Besides a crushing blow from Thebans, the Helots, or brutalized slaves of the Spartans, had relatives, and these relatives came for their own and wiped the hellish Spartan culture off of the face of the earth.

Then, in the late 1700’s, Prussia resurrected the idea.

Frederick William I was the king. He was cruel, neurotic, and talented. Under his rule the Prussian Army went from 38,000 to 83,000 and was considered the best army in Europe.

He was obsessed with everything military and forced military values into the entire Prussian society, even going as far as abolishing luxury industries and replacing them with workshops for sewing military uniforms. He required unquestioning authority. One Prussian minister remarked, “to keep quiet is the first civic duty.”

Prussia was often referred to as the “Sparta of the north.”

Why is this important to American education? Because of the militarization of the Prussian society included the schools, and the neatness and efficiency of this militarization had a profound effect on the formulation of the school system in America.

The basic foundations of a generic Prussian primary education system were laid out by Frederick the Great with his Generallandschulreglement, a decree of 1763, authored by Johann Julius Hecker. Hecker had already before (in 1748) founded the first teacher’s seminary in Prussia…The Prussian system, after its modest beginnings, succeeded in reaching compulsory attendance, specific training for teachers, national testing for all students (of both genders), a prescribed national curriculum for each grade and mandatory kindergarten. Training of teachers was increasingly organized via private seminaries.

K12academics.com

The above description sounds so familiar to us, but it was revolutionary to America at the time.

In 1763, our American schools were pretty much hit-and-miss. There wasn’t any push to educate the masses to support the State. There was no “state,” except the little bit necessary to support the People. Some say this made us a backward country, but there is evidence to the contrary.

While the Prussians were tasking their people with compliance via compulsory education, Americans were encouraging education as a benefit of freedom.

No country on the face of the earth can boast of a larger proportion of inhabitants, versed in the rudiments of science, or fewer, who are not able to read and write their names, than the United States of America.

The Columbian Phenix and Boston Review, an American magazine, published in 1800

Half the women born around 1730 were illiterate; virtually all the women born around 1810 were literate.

Joel Perlmann (Bard College) and Dennis Shirley (Boston College)

A study conducted in 1800 by DuPont de Nemours revealed that only four in a thousand Americans were unable to read and write legibly.

fee.org

So you see, Americans decided to educate themselves and their children without the coercion, money, or organization of the government. And, wherever it was applied, it worked! (Of course, there were communities where ignorance was still the rule, but even the people in these communities were determined to apply and improve their conditions Of THEIR OWN ACCORD–no government necessary.)

Why don’t you know this?

Why don’t you know that The New England Primer was the most common school book in the colonies, and in this school book was included a shortened version of the Westminster Catechism. And do you know what the first portion of that catechism was?

Q: What is the chief end of man?

A: The Chief end of man is to glorify God and to enjoy Him for ever.

This is what all of the forefathers, even those who considered themselves “Deists,” learned to read with. This is why we enjoyed revivals, why we have the Constitution with its Bill of Rights. It was a people convinced they mattered to God that decided He also wanted them to live in freedom.

We learned to read and write because we were a God-fearing, free people, not because we wanted to become “good citizens” of the state.

But in Europe a philosophical revolution was slowly taking place. In the diseased minds of the aristocracy was brewing the idea that the Bible was not the ultimate document. As they reveled in debauchery, they saw that Christianity kept them from full expression of their animal desires (think the Marquis de Sade–look him up with caution, it is truly disgusting). They decided the only answer was to throw off the chains of religion and look to their own intellect to judge what was right, wrong, or even real.

This is nothing new–consider the patterns of devotion, then infidelity, then tragedy, then devotion, repeated over and over in the Old Testament.

Here we mention a few of these evil thinkers. Some may mention Christ, the church, even the Trinity, but all from the idea we humans, with our miniscule pea-brains, can take what God has revealed to use via His Word and examine it according to “truth.” I’m sure you could add to the list from your own education, but you probably didn’t realize they were anti-Christ:

• Des Cartes
• Kant
• Hegel

With this wave of “rationalism” came the view that people were no longer subject to the laws of God. They were also no longer imbued with intrinsic value by a benevolent Creator. Despots and tyrants would no longer have God to answer to since people were no more than mechanisms to be exploited in accordance with their whims.

This is when the ideas of Sparta were resurrected.

(Keep in mind this is a much condensed treatment of this subject. For a full run down you need to read two major modern thinkers: Francis Schaeffer and John Taylor Gatto.)

…it comes out of Prussian Germany, in a series of debates…that essentially said a mathematical, or mathematized predictable world is the best out of all possible things to hope for. The big people to read – if you’ve read Hegel himself, I think you’d know all you’d need to know. In order to control everybody, certain strategic courses were undertaken in forced schooling. There had never been, prior to Prussia in the early 19th century, been successful forced schooling in the history of the planet. And suddenly Prussia, in 1819, drew in all of the children, put them in a 2 stage system. The first stage was to trivialize the greatest learning time by filling it – I realize that this is going to get the backs up of some of your listeners – with balloons, songs, and funny games. But to keep the intellectual/moral part under the control of the teacher. Somewhere in the age of 12, the idea was to set everyone suddenly in competition with each other, and produce visible marks of rank everyone, so that no matter how secure you were in your understanding of something, there would always be people you could see who had been visibly recognized as your masters. And according to Hegel and a number of other thinkers, this constant “alienation”- that was the world they used which was translated directly to American schools – this alimentation would lead to the kind of society which could be placed under the direction of certified experts that the state, and the corporate world, found safe and productive! The net result of this, Jerry, was that Prussia, a dirt poor country, in 30 or 40 years, was one of the world leaders. The Prussian king decided the Canadian/American border, because he was the most prestigious monarch on earth! Hartsman, and every other founder of American schooling before we had compulsory schooling, went to Prussia and came back with glowing reports of what the Prussians had produced, that is to say a predictable society that could be run by the best minds.

John Taylor Gatto during an interview given in 1997

The idea was that people were chattel; products of conception to be divided among elitists for their own purposes. And EDUCATION was at the center of the entire idea.

A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859

Because of our insistence on freedom, America was a hard nut to break. The First and Second Great Awakenings put huge chinks in their chain. But the devil is a great counterfeiter, so he had people like Horace Mann take the opposite road, all under the guise of “helping” people he deemed to be too ignorant to know what was good for them (in my experience, the greatest evils done to mankind were those who were trying to do some “good” outside of God).

What the church has been for medieval man, the public school must become for democratic and rational man. God would be replaced by the concept of the public good.

Horace Mann

The do-gooders had their say, and Massachusetts, that very place the Pilgrims landed to establish freedom, became host to the first compulsory attendance law. They claimed it would keep young men from causing trouble (almost instantly delinquencies went way up). They said it would keep poor children from becoming illiterate (but now we see that today our poor are more illiterate than ever).

But one thing they did not tell the public at that time was that in order to have a state-controlled education system, it would have to become a secularized education system. We take this for granted today, but in the past this was a real concern. All sorts of things changed when we decided to have the state in control.

Christian truths and facts are so woven into the very warp and woof of the knowledge of Americans, and constitute so beneficial and essential a part of our civilization, that the secular teacher, who impartially avoids either the affirmation or denial of them, must reduce his teaching to the bare giving of those scanty rudiments, which are, as we have seen, not knowledge, but the mere signs of knowledge…

…the result of public education is to bring a larger number of children into primary schools, and reduce the illiteracy somewhat–which is a great delight to shallow philanthropists. But the number of youths well educated above the mere rudiments and especially those brought under daily Christian training is diminished.

So, the actual and consistent secularization of education should not be tolerated. But nearly all public men and public schools declare that the public schools are the glory of America. We have seen that their complete secularization is logically inevitable. Christians must prepare themselves then, for the following results: all prayers, catechisms, and Bibles will ultimately be driven out of the schools.

Various selections by Robert Lewis Dabney (1820–1898) in an essay on Secularized Education

There were some backwards places in our realm, especially on the frontiers. Lots of pioneers could barely sign their names, and ciphering was a challenge even for backwoods teachers. This is why two men, William McGuffey and Joseph Ray, set out to do something about it by writing books that could be used in any school situation to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic in almost any environment, both at home and in a country schoolhouse. Other publishers were taken with the same idea and hired numerous authors to do the same. The compulsory school movement continued, but it took time to envelope the entire nation.

By the turn of the 19th century, education in America showed itself to be a tremendous success, long before the implementation of national compulsory laws (which didn’t happen until 1918). There was scarcely a corner of our great nation where illiteracy was a concern.

But, according to the social(istic) engineers, there was too much freedom. This was a problem. If people are free, if they have strong faith, strong families, et al, then they are too hard to manage. If you can’t convince them where to live, what to buy, when to stay home, then how can you project your earnings? How can you create a docile populace who will silently accept any edict you hand down to them?

It was time for the complete secularization of education.

Enter: Progressive Education

Progressive Education was a part of the greater Progressive Movement. When we peel back the layers, we find some very troubling foundations.

The most troubling is the underlying theme of atheistic humanism. John Dewey, the greatest proponent of progressive education, was a signer of the Humanist Manifesto, and is rumored to be the author of it.

HUMANISM: “homo mensura”–man the measure. Man is the measure of all things (Protagoras).

The Progressives wanted children, as humans in the absence of a Creator, to be the measure of their own education. In this model, the idea was to let the child choose his own way, and then he will magically do and become, without any outside interference. This is based loosely on the romanticism of Jean-Jacque Rousseau, in particular his book Emile.

This worked for the social engineers, because it undid the ideas that gave us the most literate populace on earth. They did not want people confident enough to challenge their programs and edicts. They needed basic literacy for functionality, but not literacy for questioning. It also pit the younger generation against their elders and created rifts in the traditional family. Out of it appeared a new generation of youngsters who were “entitled” to freedoms and privileges and became “teens.”

(For more on this, make sure and read this chapter in the free online book, How the Specter of Communism is Ruling the World.)

Not long after this was another revolution for further destruction of freedom: Behaviorism.

The darling of behaviorists was B.F. Skinner. Educational theorists still revere this man, and my own children were forced to study him in college.

I actually have a book he wrote on my shelf entitled Beyond Freedom. I have perused it more than a few times to remind myself of just how destructive public schooling, and the entire specter of secular humanism, is. Within the pages of this tome are the actions and attitudes we see destroying our entire world this year. I have actually heard a recent president touting the ideas of this book in a speech to a large room full of admirers.

In a nutshell, Skinner purports that people are too stupid to direct their own lives, so we need to use stimuli to train them to make the right decisions, which will result in the desired behaviors. (Pavlov’s experiments with dogs are part of this book.)

And what are the primary avenues for this training?–Schooling and Media.

We’ve all been conditioned to accept these ideas, whether we realize it or not. Without thinking, we believe that education and training are the answers to all of society’s problems.

Have kids on drugs?

Educate them about the pitfalls.

Have a gang problem?

Education is their way out.

Depression and suicide?

Educate people about their options.

“Expecting” an AIDS or other epidemic?

Teach people about having “safe” encounters with each other and train them to obey edicts by authorities.

Consider this quote from Horace Mann, thought of as the father of modern schooling:

What the church has been for medieval man, the public school must become for democratic and rational man. God would be replaced by the concept of the public good.

Horace Mann

Oh, and it’s not only the content of the text books, it’s the entire system that is engineered to have the greatest impact on a child’s mind.

First of all, schools remove children from their parents during the most crucial years for forming family loyalties.

There is a reason children (and parents) suffer emotional separation anxiety when being surrendered to complete strangers at younger and younger ages.

BABIES WERE MEANT TO REMAIN WITH THEIR MOTHERS!

One-room schoolhouses did not start until a child was seven or eight years old, and then the school year was also short and sweet, making the home and the family the center of the culture.

Secondly, they remove siblings from one another.

In the one-room schoolhouse model children went to school with their brothers and sisters and were accustomed to getting along with students of all ages and abilities. In the modern model, children are isolated from their siblings and very often the environment takes natural sibling rivalry and magnifies it so that there is constant conflict at home.

Thirdly, they put children into groups of their peers.

There are so many destructive, hateful things that happen when we attempt to put humans into categories. When children are segregated with others of their own age, comparison begins to tear them apart. Are they as big, or small, or rich, or bright, as the others in their class? Will other kids like them? This holds them hostage to what others may think –ever hear of ethical, moral, and logical groups being called “fringe” groups? Where did this come from? Why are so many so easily influenced by this type of speech?

Fourth, they set up the system of separating the day into “periods” directed by bells.

This was started in a solitary high school in Nebraska, but then imported into schools for immigrants in New York City.

Seems the immigrants who had come to America for refuge from oppression in Europe smelled a rat. They claimed the educrats were trying to dumb them down, and they staged a violent reprisal which included destroying some schools.

Why don’t you know this? Why is it that you think schooling is just what it is, that it has always been this way?

Fifth, they changed the way information is presented.

It is part of the grand illusion. We put our children in schools to be “educated,” and we believe that tests prove education is taking place. So, instead of actually educating, all they have to do is have children answer test questions correctly, and the best way to do that is to teach them the answers!

No need for understanding. No need for interest. No need for value. All that counts is the SCORES.

(Oh, and make sure and emphasize and repeat, repeat, repeat the socialist/communist/shariah parts.)

So, we now have graduates who think that Abraham Lincoln was the first president who failed to liberate Africans and that the capital of the United States is New York City and that Stalin was a kind leader who led the Russians out of poverty. One high school student in my family thought the Fourth of July was created to celebrate fireworks!

Sixth, reward failure. Education is our savior, so the more problems we have, the more education we need. Problem is, it is the education that is creating the problems, which means more failure, which means more education, and it’s money that makes the whole thing work.

So we have compulsory education all over our country, and we continually pour mounds of money into the operation, especially when we see its failures (in 2016 it was a whopping 5.2% of the GDP).

All of this would be going on ad infinitum, but then…covid.

Are we awake yet?

They have us staying home, washing our hands, wearing masks. We do it because we are afraid. We believe what they tell us on the news because we have been taught the “experts” know more than we do. We do it because we want to be “good,” because we don’t want to seem “strange” or defiant.

We are compliant because of generations of “socialization” thanks to good old government schooling.

I do an experiment regularly–I walk around in public places without a mask. I walk through crowds that stare, some in disapproval, but bunches who wish they had the courage. And for such a silly thing–taking a piece of cloth off of your face so that people can see you smile. How sad.

It wouldn’t take much of an imagination to envision the ultimate ends of such a system. We already have novels and movies that give us the grim prediction.

Thankfully, there is still hope.

We serve a God who is in complete control. Consider this:

For His dominion is an everlasting dominion,
And His kingdom is from generation to generation.
All the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing;
He does according to His will in the army of heaven
And among the inhabitants of the earth.
No one can restrain His hand
Or say to Him, “What have You done?”

Daniel 4:34b-35

With this in mind, He uses everything for the good of His elect:

And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.

Romans 8:28

And this is what I see with the lockdowns. Believe me, I am not an advocate of lockdowns, and I think we should fight with everything we have against the slavery that is being foisted upon us.

However, God is never caught off guard. He also says this:

Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? 

The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying, 

Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.

He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision.

Psalm 2:1-4

With the lockdowns a whole bunch of people got a different look at “school.” All of a sudden, both what children were learning, and how they were learning gained our attention. So many people began to see just what tyranny schooling is, and how much their children are NOT learning.

This is a GOD thing.

What is the ONE thing that thwarts the devil’s plans for a nation? REVIVAL

Here are a few cause-and-effect examples (please allow me this oversimplification of a myriad of circumstances–this is a look at history from an extremely elevated vantage point):

1st Great Awakening–Our Independence from British tyranny

2nd Great Awakening–Freedom for Slaves

Jesus Movement/Charismatic Renewal–End of Cold War, Communism at bay for another generation, call for restoration of godliness in culture by multiple leaders

And I think you would be pleasantly surprised with just one contemporary example: Uganda.

When I was a youngster Uganda was often in the news. It was all about Idi Amin, otherwise known as “The Butcher of Uganda” because of his brutality. If I were to explain the details of why he earned this moniker, it would make you physically ill (over 300,000 killed and numerous others tortured under his rule). He elected himself “ruler for life.”

Thankfully, he was deposed in 1979 and fled to Saudi Arabia. Soon after Christians from America came to the aid of the Ugandan people. We personally know of a family that arrived and began to evangelize.

One of the young men who came to the Lord through the efforts of this family had some of the children Amin had orphaned, as young as two years old, follow him home from his work as an accountant in a factory. His heart moved with compassion, he took them in, and he and his wife eventually founded a home and then a school. In this place children were fed, clothed, and taught the love and truth of Christ.

Similar efforts were made all over the country. As the light of the Gospel spread, the entire nation was transformed.

Eventually, a number of pastors came together with a vision; to take hold of the government for the glory of God. The Holy Spirit gave them a strategy, and they began to implement it.

They were to contact an official, find out what his needs were, and pray as a group for them. Then, as the prayers were answered, they would lead this official to the Lord Jesus. Over and over this was tried with success.

Before long, a congress that had been full of infidels was full of Bible-believing Christians!

Then, in October of 2012, this happened:

At the National Jubilee Prayers in Namboole, President Yoweri Museveni made history when he openly repented his sins and the sins of Uganda, a move that has excited many religious leaders.

newvision.co.ug

Here is the prayer:

Father God in heaven, today we stand here as Ugandans, to thank you for Uganda. We are proud that we are Ugandans and Africans. We thank you for all your goodness to us. 
I stand here today to close the evil past and especially in the last 50 years of our national leadership history and at the threshold of a new dispensation in the life of this nation. I stand here on my own behalf and on behalf of my predecessors to repent. We ask for your forgiveness. 
We confess these sins, which have greatly hampered our national cohesion and delayed our political, social and economic transformation.
We confess sins of idolatry and witchcraft which are rampant in our land. We confess sins of shedding innocent blood, sins of political hypocrisy, dishonesty, intrigue and betrayal. 
Forgive us of sins of pride, tribalism and sectarianism; sins of laziness, indifference and irresponsibility; sins of corruption and bribery that have eroded our national resources; sins of sexual immorality, drunkenness and debauchery; sins of unforgiveness, bitterness, hatred and revenge; sins of injustice, oppression and exploitation; sins of rebellion, insubordination, strife and conflict. 
These sins and many others have characterised our past leadership, especially the last 50 years of our history. Lord forgive us and give us a new beginning. Give us a heart to love you, to fear you and to seek you. Take away from us all the above sins. 
We pray for national unity. Unite us as Ugandans and eliminate all forms of conflict, sectarianism and tribalism. Help us to see that we are all your children, children of the same Father. Help us to love and respect one another and to appreciate unity in diversity.
We pray for prosperity and transformation. Deliver us from ignorance, poverty and disease. As leaders, give us wisdom to help lead our people into political, social and economic transformation.
We want to dedicate this nation to you so that you will be our God and guide. We want Uganda to be known as a nation that fears God and as a nation whose foundations are firmly rooted in righteousness and justice to fulfil what the Bible says in Psalm 33:12: Blessed is the nation, whose God is the Lord. A people you have chosen as your own. 
I renounce all the evil foundations and covenants that were laid in idolatry and witchcraft. I renounce all the satanic influence on this nation. And I hereby covenant Uganda to you, to walk in your ways and experience all your blessings forever.
I pray for all these in the name of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

So, while I have (hopefully) established just how destructive conventional education has become, I want to leave you with a new vision.

We DO NOT have to surrender our children to their plans. Right now, the door is wide open for a myriad of options. We’re talking homeschooling, pod schools, co-ops, and on and on. You don’t even have to quit your job to take advantage of a number of these alternatives.

Remember when we started by explaining just how awful the Greek idea of education was? There is another model that we can implement that will treat children the way God intended. Consider the following graphic:

If you would like to hear of a sort of “auto pilot” type of homeschooling, if you click here I have a free guide for using cheap and free materials. You should also check out this lady:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mef9KSXw2y8

If you care about your children, if you care about your country, if you care about your world, TAKE YOUR KIDS OUT OF THE SYSTEM AS FAST AS YOU CAN!

And, if you absolutely have no other choice, at least do “after schooling.” There are many different ways to do this, all of which will cost you in time and energy, but all good things have their price.