"There is abundant evidence that government schools (1) have become laboratories of behavior modification techniques, including the use of legal (because government-approved) mind-altering drugs such as Ritalin, (2) teach politically correct but historically false views of history and government including groupthink which prepares them to live in a socialist society, (3) promote tolerance of everything except Christianity, (4) are therefore places where youth from Christian homes lose their faith, (5) have been the scene of declining levels of literacy, the oft-referred-to dumbing down of the country, so that graduates don’t understand economics and wouldn’t know socialism if they saw it; and (6) have become physically dangerous to both students and teachers."

Let My Children Go:
A New Case for Abandoning Government Schools

by Steven Yates

E. Ray Moore, Jr., Let My Children Go (Columbia, S.C.: Gilead Media, 2002). Pp. 352. $14.95.

On March 28 of this year, Rev. James Dobson, President of Focus on the Family, issued one of the strongest warnings to date about government schools today. "In the state of California," he said, "and in places that have moved with the direction that they've gone with the schools, if I had a child there, I wouldn't put that youngster in public schools. They’re being taught homosexual propaganda and these other politically correct, postmodern views. I think it's time to get our kids out. We cannot sacrifice our kids on the altar of some kind of public school's ideal." On July 8 he expanded on that indictment. "What I was saying was that this godless and immoral curriculum and influence in the public schools is gaining momentum across the nation in ways that were unheard of just one year ago. It's as though the dam has now broken and activists representing various causes, including homosexuality, are rushing through the breach in ways that are shocking." He singled out Connecticut, California, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Washington, Wisconsin, Vermont, Washington, D.C., and also targeted Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Hawaii, and Alaska as promoting homosexuality in government schools as a normal, alternative lifestyle choice. "It isn't just California that has drifted into this dangerous stuff," he said. "This is where we are, especially on both coasts, but to some degree throughout the nation."

Rev. Moore infers that Christians need a new paradigm for education, one that takes as its point of departure the realization that state-sponsored education is a "renegade school system" that was fundamentally alien to American founding principles and hostile to Christian belief from the start. So abandoning state-sponsored education is the logical thing to do; it was never anything more than a snare for the unwary.

Exodus from Pharaoh’s schools.

There is abundant evidence that government schools (1) have become laboratories of behavior modification techniques, including the use of legal (because government-approved) mind-altering drugs such as Ritalin, (2) teach politically correct but historically false views of history and government including groupthink which prepares them to live in a socialist society, (3) promote tolerance of everything except Christianity, (4) are therefore places where youth from Christian homes lose their faith, (5) have been the scene of declining levels of literacy, the oft-referred-to dumbing down of the country, so that graduates don’t understand economics and wouldn’t know socialism if they saw it; and (6) have become physically dangerous to both students and teachers.

Each of these could be explored in great detail – some have been explored in depth by other authors. Beverly Eakman, for example, explores the role behavior modification has played in state-sponsored education in her The Cloning of the American Mind. John Taylor Gatto documents how the basic philosophy of state-sponsored schools was lavishly funded by power elites in huge tax-exempt foundations (especially the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation) and came to service their interests in The Underground History of American Education. Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt weaves both threads together in her monumental compendium The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America.

These works are not superficial treatments. They are meticulously documented; both Eakman and Iserbyt have worked in government and "know the ropes," so to speak. They show that the point of state-sponsored education is to produce a "mass man" (and "mass woman"), calling for mass workforce training for a global economy micromanaged by a global government (otherwise known as the New World Order), respectful of a "diversity" which in turn respects everyone except independent-minded, straight white Christian males. There is thus no incentive to teach real history, for example – or necessarily to teach history at all. Such subjects have been ratcheted down in importance since School-To-Work education became the fad of the 1990s (its successor is George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind.) Children can then be induced to accept politically correct ideas, having no means of evaluating them for themselves and nothing to compare them with. They can be taught one form or another of ethical relativism – or simply to accept what has become the prevailing secularist view of education in modern life, that its only aim is training for a supposedly high paying job – a job that might not be there if by some chance the U.S. economy continues on its present course towards what could become a new depression.

The argument is that Christians had better become cognizant of all this before it is too late, remove their children from these schools and build up substantial alternatives in the form of home schooling and private, Christian schools, church-based or otherwise. Rev. Moore does not deal with every issue we face. Many Christians who would home school do not have the time because of firm work obligations, and cannot send their children to private religions schools because they cannot afford it. Those are the people who will find vouchers very hard to resist. Even if that problem were solved, Rev. Moore is conscious of what all of us supportive of or involved with this might eventually be up against. Decisions to home school or to place one’s child in a private, church-affiliated school do not mean that we are out of the woods, not by a long shot. If anything, I fear Rev. Moore understates the danger. Home schooling is the largest and fastest growing independent educational movement in the country. The total number of children being home schooled in America is now greater than the number of children in government schools in New Jersey. It is well on its way to becoming the biggest threat the dominant educational institutions (and the power elites behind them) have ever faced.

The point is, the home schooling movement in particular and the secular educational establishment are on collision course. Let My Children Go thus presents a Biblical view of the civil disobedience that might someday be necessary if Christians have to choose between obedience to government and obedience to God. It is important to be clear: Rev. Moore is no anarchist who would abolish government or encourage people to break the law. The Bible makes a place for governmental authorities who are themselves subservient to God’s law. But when these authorities abandon God’s law and set themselves up in God’s place, Christians have to choose who to obey: government or God. Thus, other things remaining equal, I foresee an eventual collision between two opposed philosophies, the Christian one that places God in the center and the secular humanist one that substitutes government for God. This is essentially the same collision coming between the political and economic philosophies that stress independence in this world and thus support decentralization in one form or another and those leading to more and more centralization. In the former, the individual depends upon and places his trust in God, not society or an employer or government. Government is limited to a few, carefully delineated functions. The latter has set out to make human beings dependent on a massive welfare system with a globalist orientation: global government and global economics (which, despite all the hype about "global markets" is not a free market system or anything close). This, naturally, calls for concentration of power in a centralized, authoritarian apparatus and an educational system controlled by those capable of turning out "massified" people who can expected to be obedient to and even worshipful of their rulers.

Rev. Moore’s book contains or implies all this, and much more. One of its merits is that it is short; unlike Eakman, Gatto or Iserbyt, he did not set out to produce an encyclopedic treatment but a call to arms. Let My Children Go should alert Christians to the full range of dangers of the renegade school system. It calls on them to remove their children from it. It call on pastors and denominational leaders to become informed about the situation in government schools and act in ways that support alternatives, including setting up schools in church facilities that are practically unused six days of the week. Home schooling has become one of the more significant parallel institutions of our time – parallel in having become a spontaneously developing alternative to dominant institutions seen as corrupt, corrupting and irredeemably hostile to Christians’ interests – for that matter, to anyone who wishes to live a life free from the clutches of centralized power. Exodus Mandate has begun to receive national attention, as Rev. Moore has now done numerous radio interviews explaining these ideas and received a favorable mentions in such forums as Christianity Today, World and The Washington Times. A momentum is developing. As Rev. Moore says repeatedly, "God gave education to the family with assistance from the church." The time has come, in the memorable phrase given currency by both Sheldon Richmon and Marshall Fritz, to "separate school and state."

August 10, 2002

Steven Yates [send him mail] has a PhD in philosophy and is a Margaret "Peg" Rowley Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He is the author of Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (ICS Press, 1994), and numerous articles and reviews. At any given time he is at work on any number of articles and book projects, including a science fiction novel.

Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com

LET OUR CHILDREN GO.

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