Blog: I Said There are no Secular Schools and that Public Schools Should be Banned…and the Atheist Leftists are Angry.

A little bit ago, I posted an article on here about how there are no secular schools. In that article, I pointed out that no school is truly free of religion or worldviews, and, in the case of public schools, they mainly subscribe to atheism or other forms of secular humanism. As such, in many ways they operate as something with which to mass convert the youth to atheism/secular humanism, and if we actually want this problem solved, then we should abolish the public school system, make private schools and homeschool more accessible, and allow more school choice.

Naturally, however, there are people who vehemently disagree with this position: atheist leftists (who also claim to be anti-fascist, but that’ll come up later.)

But what arguments do the Leftists have to defend the public school system? What airtight defenses do they have for it?

The first defense is, of course, that secularism isn’t a religion, nor is it connected to religion or spirituality. While that might be true in part, it is a worldview that makes many claims that are treated as fact that are in conflict with other worldviews and religions. For instance, secularists often take an atheistic stance on how the world works. However, the issue with this is that the claims made and treated as fact are really theories.

The most obvious example of this is evolutionary theory, which has been challenged in schools for decades. Evolutionary theory is just that – a theory – yet it is treated as fact in every level of academia, with hardly any room for disagreement. When Christians try to teach their theory about how the world was created and support it with evidence, they’re often shot down, threatened with their jobs, and accused of trying to force religion on students. We Christians are accused of indoctrinating students (and, thus, abusing them, according to some people) even though we’re doing just what the secularists are doing – presenting a theory and supporting it with evidence. We believe that creation is a fact just as secularists believe evolution is a fact. So why aren’t we allowed to teach it as a theory in academics? Why can’t we present both sides and let the students make up their own minds? Why is it abuse when we Christians present what we believe as fact as a theory in an academic context, but it’s not abuse when secularists do it and take it so far as to say that it is fact?

The second defense is that religion is essentially just a fairytale, and is not based in fact, so anyone who teaches from a religious point of view should be fired. The first issue with this argument is what do we define as a fairytale? I can just as easily say teaching from a secular worldview is teaching kids a fairytale about how we just randomly came from nothing, and thus, secular teachers should be fired. I could say that teaching that you can be the opposite gender is a fairytale, and anyone who teaches that should be fired. What definition are we working with here?

The second issue with this defense is, of course, the history of how the public school system even started. While we all know about John Dewey and Horace Mann as being some of the most influential figures in the making of our modern public education system, Protestant Christians did a great deal to build it as well. As the Christian Heritage Fellowship writes:

The foundation for public education, however, was first laid in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the years 1642, 1647, and 1648. The three legislative acts of these three years are known as the Massachusetts School Laws and was the first step toward compulsory government-directed public education in the United States. Not long after these three laws were enacted, similar laws were drafted in the other New England colonies. Following the lead of the New England colonies, most mid-Atlantic colonies enacted similar legislation, though in some Southern colonies nearly a century passed before publicly funded schools were established there. The first law regarding education in the New World was passed by evangelical Christians only twenty-two years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth.

Why did the Protestant settlers do this? It was because they wanted kids to be well versed, not just in studies like reading, writing, arithmetic, etc. but also in the Bible. They recognized that the ignorance of what the Bible teaches that could be found in the Old World (which was still predominately Catholic at the time) lead in part to various atrocities. They believed that teaching kids the Bible would prevent that. In doing so, Christians literally laid the groundwork for the school system we have today. Had those people who taught “fairytales” as fact never been allowed to teach, perhaps we would not have the system we have today, severely flawed though it is.

Speaking of how flawed the system has become, we get to our third defense: the idea that public schools are good because it shows the world as it is and prevents kids from being brainwashed by their parents, who might not know everything. However, while that sounds good, we should all be wondering what bias our children are taught to view the world through.

It is a well-established fact that everyone has a bias. Our parents have a bias. We have a bias. Our teachers have a bias. Sure, some biases might be rooted more in fact than others, but when one group controls the education and is in charge of teaching your kids their bias, then what happens? Well, more often than not, when your kids spend 8-10 hours a day in school, another several hours on homework, a couple hours on the phone, and maybe thirty minutes chatting with their parents per day, they’re going to adopt the school’s bias.

We have only to take a quick look at the origins of the public school system to see this. Going back to the Protestant origins of our education system, while well-intentioned, the Protestant teachers taught from a Calvinist-leaning viewpoint. While some of this could be chalked up to being what they had, a lot of this was done for a different reason. They sought to lead their Catholic students to Protestantism in the hopes that it would prevent the atrocities committed in the Old World from happening in America. In other words, their schools weren’t just there for learning, but for converting Catholic kids into Protestantism and even back then, it worked.

However, this system worked so well that it had dire consequences. Fast forward to the 20th century. Totalitarianism is on the rise, with communism taking over Russia and fascism becoming popular in Spain, Italy, and Germany. In every case, one of the first things to be taken over were the education systems. In Nazi Germany, for example, homeschooling was outlawed and parents were forced to send their kids to state-run or approved schools. There, their children were indoctrinated into Nazism, and, starting in 1939, all eligible children were required to join the Hitler Youth. Any parents who objected were heavily fined or thrown into prison.

Today, while parents still have school choice, we see disturbing parallels between the two examples I presented and our current system. The main worldview that our public schools teach from is secular, but it’s further mixed with Leftism. Schools have a particular interest to do this as the Teacher’s Union and the Democrat Party have a you-scratch-my-back-I-scratch-yours type of relationship. They donate to the Party (more than any other group), and the party passes laws to benefit them, and many of those laws are meant to restrict school choice, especially for homeschoolers. We have just to look at a recent law in Conneticut to see this.

Funny how the supposedly anti-fascist group wants to continue and strengthen something that while starting out with good intentions, has historically been used quite effectively to indoctrinate entire generations into supporting things that have been detrimental to society.

This leads to the fourth argument that public schools give an even playing field for everyone, and therefore, should remain the standard. If by even playing field, supporters of public education mean that it makes everyone equally dumb and controllable, then their defense is true.

It has been shown over the past several years that kids who go to public school are becoming dumber. One in four young adults in the U.S. are functionally illiterate yet are still graduating with a high school diploma. Half of the U.S. population cannot read at an 8th-grade level. About 45% of U.S. high school seniors lack basic math skills. Only 37% of high school students were proficient in science. Only 13% of 8th-graders were proficient in history and 22% were proficient in civics. Yet they’re being passed through the public school system, and graduating, something that teachers are increasingly raising the alarm about.

Meanwhile, private school students and homeschool students have consistently scored better on all points, with homeschoolers scoring above average on academic achievement tests regardless of their parent’s level of education or household income. To illustrate this difference, a friend of the family who is an English professor once said that he could tell immediately who went to public school and who was homeschooled or sent to private school because the public-school kids had no idea what parts of speech were. Meanwhile the homeschooled and private schooled kids understood the assignment and could name various parts of speech.

If you’re worried about society getting dumber, then you should be on the side of school choice and making private and homeschool options more acessible to parents. Not only would everyone have a better education, but it would make the playing field truly equal because there would be more competition. As it is, the private schooled and homeschooled have an advantage in many ways over the public schooled since we actually know how to read, write, do math, understand science, communicate, etc.

But, if you want an “equal playing field” for people at the expense of making society stupid and creating a group of people that can’t critically think and has no diversity of thought, then sure, go for public schools.

Until next time,

M.J.