How We Got Here
Chapter two of the book I am covering, Excused Absence, by Douglas Wilson, simply covers a brief history of government education. I will leave out a lot of the details because they are NUMEROUS. A quick Google search and you can see who the atheistic founders were and read about their motives behind our public education system. Or you can just read the book yourself. =) I briefly mentioned them in the previous post. I'll just say that our tax-funded schools actually began with a very Christian basis after a model of the "common school." Those were well known in the British Isles before the founding of America. But when they allowed tax-funded operation of those schools, the decline began.
There a few good passages from this chapter that I thought I would list here-
This passage is referring to the collapse of old order Christendom at the end of the nineteenth century....
"The 'natural man,' no matter where or when he lives, does not love the doctrines of grace, and he will slip the leash first chance he gets. The Christian worldview does not flatter man, and man in his rebellion loves to be flattered. Thus, when a Christian culture comes to the point where a large number of people are unregenerate, a collision is inevitable."
I love that passage! It rings very true.
This is a passage that just gives a little history:
"As R. L. Dabney clearly pointed out, the New England Puritans agreed to public schools only because there was at that time no separation between church and state as we have today, and the state was committed by law to teaching in the light of the Reformed faith. As Dabney put it:
'If Knox had seen a severance of Church and State (which he would have denounced as wicked and pagan) leading to a secular education, which trained the intellect without the conscience or heart, his heroic tongue would have given no uncertain sound.' "
But when they allowed tax-funding, regardless of the times, they let the government have a foothold and a say-so that they never should have been allowed to have. And as the government's moral compass was corrupted it led to a gradual and slow disintegration of the Christian common school that was dominant in early America. They really thought that the current state of affairs with the government's non-involvement would last and there would be very little problem with the current set up. They were wrong. Some saw it coming, long before the secularization occurred. Dabney again says this almost prophetic statement in the nineteenth century:
"Nearly all public men and preachers declare that the public schools are the glory of America. They are a finality, and in no event to be surrendered. We have seen that their complete secularization is logically inevitable. Christians must prepare themselves, then, for the following results: All prayers, catechisms, and Bible will ultimately be driven out of the schools."
He was right, indeed.
The chapter closes with this passage:
"The secular foundation was bound to prevail because ideas have consequences, which work themselves out over time. The rapidity with which the vestiges of the once-dominant Christian faith have been thrown out of the government schools within the last generation does not represent a massive and recent assault by the forces of secularization. Rather it indicates the patience of those forces. Secularists set the machinery of this particular takeover in place in the latter half of the last century, and they built the machine to operate slowly and imperceptibly.
The work has been done over the course of numerous generations. Just because we see the symbols of the old order tumbling rapidly, we should not conclude that everything was fine shortly before. The crash of a house may be spectacular and may seem very sudden, but no one was watching when the termites were quietly doing their work."
Hmmm, termites quietly destroying while no one watched and then "sudden" destruction. Good analogy and very true indeed!
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