Because WITHOUT Government ... no one would seek/be educated?
Regard$,
--MJ
"The evidence shows ... that the majority of
people in the first half of the nineteenth
century did become literate (in the technical
sense) largely by their own efforts. Moreover, if
the government played any role at all in this sphere it was one of saboteur!
"As long as the first few years of the nineteenth
century it was a subject for government complaint
that the ordinary people had become literate. For
the government feared that too many people were
developing the "wrong" uses of literacy by
belonging to secret "corresponding societies" and
by reading seditious pamphlets. Far from
subsidising literacy, the early
nineteenth-century English governments placed
severe taxes on paper in order to discourage the
exercise of the public's reading and writing
abilities." -- E.G. West, Education and the State, 1965
At 12:21 PM 7/24/2013, you wrote:
Resisting the public education system in America
is not just a good idea; it is a duty.
---
and leave the masses uneducated?
Acts 5:29 ... Exodus 20
---
religious myth to ignore.
On Wednesday, July 24, 2013 6:35:29 AM UTC-5, MJ wrote:
The Messianic Character of American Education 50 Years Later
By Allen Mendenhall
July 24, 2013
R.J. Rushdoony published
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1879998068/ref=as_li_ss_til?tag=lewrockwell&camp=213381&creative=390973&linkCode=as4&creativeASIN=1879998068&adid=01YZDMTGET6PFFRV8WE5&&ref-refURL=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lewrockwell.com%2F%3Fpost_type%3Darticle%26p%3D444095%26preview%3Dtrue>The
Messianic Character of American Education in
1963 as American troop levels were surging in
Vietnam, Americans were digging bomb shelters in
their backyards, hippies were experimenting with
recreational drugs and free love and generating
an antiauthoritarian counterculture, the Civil
Rights Movement was gaining momentum even
against state-sponsored opposition, President
Kennedy was assassinated, music and fashion were
changing, a second wave of feminism was
spreading after the publication of Betty
Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Great Society
programs were being proposed, and governments
everywhere were experimenting with new forms of
espionage and intelligence-gathering. Statism
was on the rise. It isn’t surprising that the
American educational system, both in terms of
standards and curriculum, was destabilized during this time.
“Education in this era,” Rushdoony claimed, “is
a messianic and utopian movement” for which the
state had “become the saving institution” and
the schools proclaimers of “a new gospel of
salvation.” Against the “superimposition of the
state … on every order of life and every sphere
of human activity,” Rushdoony sought to restore
education to its classical, religious
foundations. His book tracts the growth of
statist education from the nineteenth century
through the mid-twentieth century and profiles
several educators (too many to list) who represent pedagogical paradigm shifts.
A Presbyterian theologian, philosopher, author,
and grassroots organizer, Rushdoony was
influenced by apologist Cornelius Van Til and
opposed Statism, which he considered idolatry if
not a religion. He was at the forefront of the
Christian homeschool movement and challenged the
fashionable practices and ideals that elected
officials and public school administrators were
championing in government schools at the expense of biblical education.
“Education today,” Rushdoony said, “occupies an
equivocal position in contemporary life,
functioning both as a scapegoat for every
failure and as a catch-all for every hope and
expectation of society.” It is striking the
extent to which these words still describe the
current morass in public education.
The U.S. Congress passed the No Child Left
Behind Act in 2001 with bipartisan support and
thereby expanded the role of the federal
government in local education to unprecedented
levels. This Act imposed strict but arbitrary
guidelines on teachers, shifted decisions from
local school boards to the federal government,
mandated school accountability to the federal
government, and standardized student testing.
Such centralization of power exceeded anything
that Plato could have imagined for his fictional Republic.
And the federal government was not done.
Government subsidized failure in the economy
resulted in the American Reinvestment and
Recovery Act of 2009, which redistributed $100
billion (the figure differs from analyst to
analyst) from taxpayers to the public education
system to prevent teacher layoffs; increase
teacher salaries; fund Pell-Grants, special
education, and the Head Start Program; and
encourage the construction and repair of school
facilities. This Act was not benevolent or
charitable; it gave away money taken by force
and demanded, in return, the allegiance and
obedience of local schools and school boards.
Nor was the Act, as the White House maintains,
part of a “nationwide effort to create jobs and
transform our economy to compete in the 21st
century.” Instead it was a mechanism to ensure
the continued worship and viability of state
education; for the system works only if its
members remain happy and the illusion of
integrity and protection can be maintained.
As if that were not enough, President Obama, in
his State of the Union Address this year,
proposed “early learning” that would compel
parents to turn their children over to the
government at a younger age. Rather than
attending private preschools, churches,
synagogues, or daycares of their parents’
choosing, four year olds apparently will become
indoctrinated into Statism and all its accessory
ideologies (radical egalitarianism, nationalism,
central planning) in the public schools before
they can even read or write. The pretext for
“early learning” is that education must be
universal so that American children can excel
and compete in a global workforce; but a more
sinister and unstated purpose is, in Rushdoony’s
words, “the exaltation of the group, whether
humanity, democracy, the proletariat or the
folk,” which “has steadily become religious, and
the state school a religious institution.”
Rushdoony submits that the following assumptions undergird Statism:
1. That “the child is the child of the state or
the property of the state, which can therefore
interfere extensively with parental authority.”
2. That “[t]he state ‘priesthood’ of educators
are best able to rear the child and prepare him
for life, viewed as statist life.”
3. That “Statist education is alone ‘objective’
and hence true, the state having the impartiality and transcendence of a god.”
Accordingly, he says, statist education is an
“entrance into the true catholicity of the civil
religion of the modern state.” Established
ostensibly to teach our children, public schools
in America socialize and shape children to be
allegedly upstanding citizens in an allegedly
participatory democracy. They normalize the idea
that the State is the paternal authority to
which biological parents must turn for the
rearing and nurturing of their children.
As go the children, so goes society. Rushdoony
himself puts it this way: “If the child
educationally belongs to the state and to its
care or oversight, it is then a far lesser thing
to ask that property be likewise surrendered to
the state.” Why should we be surprised when the
state exercises its eminent domain powers if
that which is, or ought to be, most precious to
us our children has been voluntarily handed
over to the government? In other words, public
schools are merely one mechanism among many for
the State to supervise and discipline our
children into psychological obedience and
conformity so that it might insert itself into
other areas of life, including private
ownership. Children become adults and pass their
inculcated values onto their children; the cycle
continues, the State ever-increasing its power
over time, involving itself with matters once
thought to be outside the province of government.
“Since in the civil religion the state is god,
and there is no right beyond the state (or the
state’s concept of its goal and the goal for
humanity),” explains Rushdoony, “it follows that
right is what the state requires, and the normal
or healthy man that which the society requires
man to be.” The control of a few zealots can be
preserved only when and if a vast majority can
be trained into docile submission to compulsive
standards and regulations, persistently
instructed to accept certain ideas and habits as
unconditionally true, and versed in the rhetoric
of Statism and punished for any deviation
therewith. The State offers lavish incentives
and rewards (public loans, scholarships, grants,
public sector jobs, benefits) for proselytizing on behalf of its religion.
Acts 5:29 teaches that it is proper to disobey
State dictates that are contrary to God’s
instruction. The first two commandments listed
in Exodus 20 prohibit our present idolization of
the State as well as the iconography,
narratives, and rituals that seek to sanctify
and validate the religion of Statism. The
history of Western Civilization teaches that
Christians have, at various times and to various
degrees since the age of Christ, struggled
against oppressive State power. Resisting the
public education system in America is not just a good idea; it is a duty.
Not only proponents of Christian private schools
and homeschooling are aware of the increasing
messianic justifications for, and celebrations
of, state education. As early as 1909, Friedrich
Nietzsche, who despised Christianity,
acknowledged that government subsidized
education was meant to condition the masses into
following “the guiding star of the State!” That
so many politicians and teachers fail to
acknowledge this fact suggests they are either
willingly complicit or thoroughly indoctrinated.
Fifty years after publishing The Messianic
Character of American Education, Rushdoony
remains relevant and perhaps even more important
than he was then. His words endure as a
frightening reminder of what needs to be done:
“There is no escaping this dilemma of
[educational] socialization, with its subversion
of learning to the goals of the state, except by
the radical disestablishment of the schools, the
separation of school and state.” May the
disestablishment and separation begin.
<http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/07/allen-mendenhall/the-public-schools-are-a-nasty-religion/>http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/07/allen-mendenhall/the-public-schools-are-a-nasty-religion/
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