Doomed To Repeat
by R.C. Sproul Jr.

The problem with a vague and misty sense of history is that it often serves as a shroud for myth. We have some vague idea of how things used to be, and how assorted institutions came about, but we're not even clear enough to know how to check our "facts." Take for instance this idea that the federal govemment got into the poverty business during the Great Depression because the church could not or would not meet the need. Everybody knows that, except it's not true. Families, churches and neighbors were pulling together just fine. The government got involved for political reasons, not humanitarian ones.

We have a tendency to believe essentially the same thing happened in the government education business. We imagine either teeming masses yearning to be smart, pounding on the doors of the Christian academy to no avail, or we imagine that teeming masses of parents just didn't care whether their children knew anything, and it took kindly old Uncle Sam to kick some sense into them with compulsory education laws. Neither is true. But both serve the same purpose, to persuade us that had there been no government schools, all manner of evil would have been loosed on the land.

From the Garden of Eden to the Reformation there were no government schools. To be sure there were tutors hired at the public expense to train young princes and perhaps a few of the higher bureaucrats' sons. But that was the extent of it. As Rome dominated western culture during the Middle Ages again schools existed only to create for the system a new generation of priests to manage things. Still, a few folks began to see that a little education went a long way, and more and more children learned their basic skills at their hearths. And because they did, and because of the work of one Mr. Guttenberg, a Reformation broke out. And with the light of the Reformation came the first hint of the darkness of government schools. Recognizing that it was ignorance which allowed Rome to maintain its death grip over the people, the Reformers wanted everyone to be able to read, and so established schools, systems of taxation to fund them, and compulsory attendance laws to fill them. In some places control was held by the church, in others by the state. But in both instances, the state paid the bill. That's the way it was with a lot of things. Because just as with us, the Reformers were born into a particular age, that brought with it a set of assumptions. One assumption was that you wanted the government as your ally, because they had some serious firepower.

And there began the school wars. A wise general sees the armaments of his enemy and is not satisfied merely to come up with a defense. How much better to steal the weapon, and turn it on its makers? And that is what the pagans set about to do. As renaissance replaced reformation in Germany, so the god of the state replaced the God of all things as the lawgiver at the local school.

Meanwhile, over in the new world, things were going swimmingly. There were very few government schools, and those that existed in the early years of our existence were principally secondary schools. The framers of the Constitution said nothing, recognizing that the feds had nothing to say on the issue. And few states had compulsory attendance laws. At the time of the Revolution, male literacy is estimated to have been between 70 and 100 percent in the colonies. Not too shabby for non- government work. But as in Germany, indeed as the Reformers recognized, the way to a child's heart is through his brain. And so the Progressives pushed harder and harder for more laws, more schools, more government money. Not because the parents wanted government education. Not because the church wanted it, but because the enemies of the church wanted it, to break the stranglehold parents and churches had on the training of children.

And break it they did, following the socialist principle of gradualism. First they encouraged a civic morality, and allowed a weak and vague god to back them up. Soon even that was no longer necessary, and he was expelled, along with any sense of morality. And so here we are, fighting to sneak that weak god back in, investing untold energy and resources to go back to the fifties.

One thing I've learned in the school of hard rocks that is my garden is that to get rid of weeds you have to pull up the roots. And to turn back in history only forty years is to invite a repetition of the last forty years. The solution is to go back to the Bible that tells us straightforwardly and without ambiguity that it is parents who are to train up children. We failed during the Reformation because we were allured by the power of the state. We failed after the War Between the States when we were allured by the promise of making safe Protestants of the Romish immigrants. And we continue to fail as we still are allured with the power of the sword, hoping to make the pagans good, and get a free education in the bargain to boot. We can't take back the government schools because as long as they are government schools they will always serve the god of the state. We shouldn't try because the God of the universe tells us to teach our own children, and to teach them well.

The more we lose the school wars, the more we win the education war. As the schools sink deeper and deeper into the corruption in which they were spawned, fewer and fewer Christians will be able to stomach it. The sooner conservatives lose the school wars, therefore, the sooner we will get back to the real task at hand, tending our own garden. And the sooner we do that, the sooner we will be a true light to a dark world.