The Messianic Character of American Education, by Rousas John Rushdoony, Ross House Books, 1995
Page 4.
In the United States, it was very early believed that the new federal union constituted the new order of the ages, and the dollar bill today carries this proud description of that hope,novus ordo seclorum.
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Page 14.
Greek thought regarded the universe, not with the principle of discontinuity held to by biblical thought, but in terms of continuity. There was no radical distinction between Creator and creature, God and man, but rather a scale of being, with differing degrees of participation in being. Man?s autonomous reason was capable both understanding and participating in this scale of being.
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Page 15.
Aquinas maintained that the end of the universe must be the good of the intellect, which is truth.
This is very similar to Tim Keller?s view expressed eloquently in various books and sermons.
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Page 28.
Education is the cure-all for sin and for the weakness of nature.
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?Education is to inspire the love of truth, as the supremest good, and to clarify the vision of the intellect to discern it.?
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Page 30.
Methods were more important than subject matter, because the person, not the subject matter, was paramount, and the person was one endowed with rights and thus destined to receive rather than to produce.
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Page 31.
Sex education, counseling, psychological testing, psychiatric aid, all these things are added in the abiding conviction that knowledge is not only power but moral virtue.
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Page 51.
The teachers, as the new priesthood, must have their particular training which is more than academic competence or a way with children. It is educational theory and experience.
Page 54.
The chief end of man shortly before this had been defined as glorifying God and enjoying him forever. Now it was to glorify the community and enjoy life therein.
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Page 70.
All the benefits of past cultural attainment accrue to the present without loss. Christianity may disappear or be superseded, but all its advantages will remain without diminution as the inheritance of man. Such were the implications and assumptions of this Hegelian concept of society.
Helpful to understand the liberal mind, which is happy to stand on the shoulders of Calvinism, acknowledging its debt to Calvinism, while at the same time rejecting it because it is outdated and unsuited for this modern age.
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Page 90.
Basic to his educational philosophy was the insistence that education be moral in outlook, morality, however, be not primarily religious in nature but social, ?a matter of adjustment of the individual to society.?
In reference to Johan Friedrich Hebart
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Page 95.
Man?s morality, moreover, is social adjustment. The results of such education have not been, however, new achievements culturally and advances ethically, but the rise of the holy barbarians, men who have invested their ancient lusts and violence with a modern sanctity.
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Page 104.
At the 1895 N.E.A. meeting in Denver, Parker again emphasized ?the evolution of pure democracy? as the goal of education. ?The child is not in school for knowledge. He is there to live, and to put his life, nurtured in the school, into the community.?
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The schools, accordingly, are not for knowledge or education in any historical sense but are religious and political instruments for the total reshaping of man and his society and the conditioning of the child in terms of that way of life.
It is for this reason that it is not wise for homeschoolers to focus too much on the academic excellence of homeschooling over and against the government school results. It is true that homeschooling produces far superior academic results. But this is not the point of contention of those in the government schools. They are philosophically opposed to homeschooling. So too, we must be philosophically opposed to government schooling.
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Page 106.
All this is done in the name of altruism and the love of humanity, and is ostensibly a transcending of personal egoism. But this love of humanity is only and always an extension of the diseased self-love which masquerades as righteousness. Man does not widen his horizon or transcend himself by multiplying his ego or substituting humanity for himself, but only by transcending himself in the obedience to, and glorifying and enjoying of God, the transcendent and ontological trinity.
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Page 109.
There is no escaping this dilemma of 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. The state ownership of children is the implicit or explicit fact of all statist education: ?German youth belongs to the Fuehrer,? and all statist youth belong to the state.
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Page 191.
Lacking the biblical conception of evil as an aggressive, positive and ambitious power in creation?.
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Page 219.
In the biblical view, man was created as Adam, alone, and allowed to remain alone for some time, to know his calling as God?s viceregent and image-bearer before he knew himself in marriage and society. Thus, Adam had to know himself as man alone, before he was permitted to know himself as man in marriage and in human community. In a sense, ?privation? and isolation, such as was not the case with the animal creation, was the first condition of man in Paradise and the ground of his status as man. As a consequence, marriage, the family, the church, the state, and every other God-ordained institution, while God-given and necessary in their respective spheres, were under man and never prior to him as the creature and image-bearer of God. Man is thus not a social animal who must run in the pack, and whose life is comprehended in the state, nor is he the creature of society or the state, but always and only the creature of God, and, as redeemed man, having been ?bought with a price,? the blood of Christ, cannot become the servant of man (1 Cor. 7:23), or of any institution. The centrality of this doctrine in Reformation teaching had vast libertarian and antistatist effects and repercussions.
Page 258.
The task of the schools has become religious conversion to a politico-economic statist order rather than education.
I might add that this goal is largely frustrated in the excellent American higher education, largely because of the selfishness of the system, which makes the professors largely disinterested in students because it simply does not pay them to spend any time and effort with the students. What pays, as later quotes show, is the ability to land big government research grants. When choosing to make hires, as I recently found out, the ability, or inability, to teach does not play a role at all.
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Page 267.
She implored former pupils who came to visit her to hold fast to Froebel?s teaching and the ideal of the kindergarten. Her last words to one group were urgent: ?Have faith in the kindergarten, strive to represent approval in his essence. I believe in the power of the kindergarten to reform the world.?
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Page 269.
Froebel?not only held to cosmic evolution but saw education as a major element in that continuing process. For Froebel, the entire universe was a living, evolving organism, the unity of which is called God. It?s evolution is possible because of the law of activity, the law of action, reaction, and equilibrium, the broader application of the intellectual principle of process, i.e., thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. This process has come to self-consciousness in man; thus man, who is evolving to a higher order of being, can guide that process through education.
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Page 282. Why then did the kindergarten succeed? The answer was and is clear-cut: the desire of women to get rid of their children. Educators have had to set an age requirement for kindergarten children, else they would be deluged with mothers trying to push very young children into their hands. Thus, kindergarten has proven to be in part a polite and oblique form of infanticide, one which hypocritical women can indulge in while getting credit for solicitous motherhood. The kindergarten movement was born out of romantic and idealistic philosophy and its idealization of the child. It prospered because women, drinking the heady wine of feminism, had come to regard womanhood and motherhood as burdensome, and lacked the honesty to say so. The nursery school and the kindergarten were thus admirable as respectable escapes from responsibility.
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Page 287.
The price of support is always control, and the university cannot complain of government interference when it except so readily the government support. In a day when the universities most loudly proclaim their autonomy, they are most rapidly, and too often willingly, succumbing to the encroachments of statism. A kept woman has no honest protest against adultery or claim to virginity.
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Page 288-289.
A major and insistent threat to academic freedom today is the decline of private giving to education. The mainsprings of freely given financial support are drying up as a result of the rise of statism. A confiscatory system of taxation and a policy of government encroachment on a free economy increasingly render it difficult for the university to command a financial support from a financially free population. Lacking resources, the university finds very tempting the constant flow of government funds. Today atomic research, and, with it, allied avenues of study, has largely passed into the hands of the government and its subsidized allies. The temptation grows to emphasize the value of research in terms of governmental needs.?
Page 293.
Jaspers had called attention to the anti-intellectualism of the university as an institution. In appointments, ?the excellent are instinctively excluded from fear of competition, just as the inferior are rejected out of concern for the prestige and influence of the university.?
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Page 295.
Knowledge ceased to be the correlation of mind and matter?
Another definition of knowledge!
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Page 305.
By and large, however, the university is content to see its problem as basically twofold: the need for more money, and the need for more license so that it can indulge in that total irresponsibility which it calls academic freedom. But as Stanley Baldwin once observed, ?power without responsibility? is ?the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.?
Remember Peter Erdman?s comments about us all knowing what we are? He understood the nature of academia.
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Page 306.
Hitler not only controlled the most educated and advanced of modern states, but he thoroughly commanded the loyalties of educators and scientists because he understood and was able to use their myths and tools.
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Page 309.
The fiercely competitive spirit such as leftists normally ascribe to ?predatory capitalism? is the normal life of the police state. In all of this, education becomes radically divorced from learning and becomes an instrument of state and the means of social advancement.
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Page 312.
What constituted the free man in Greek and Roman cultures sharply differed from Christianity?s conception of the free man.
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Page 322.
Early in the history of the United States, the courts had no doubt that education was a function of the parents and no more a function of the state than is the begetting of children. Education was seen as an aspect of child-rearing.
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Page 329.
If the state can own and socialize our children, then it can most certainly own and socialize our property. We cannot legitimately surrender our children to the state and its schools and then claim the right to withhold our property.
Page 332.
The future has never been shaped by majorities but rather by dedicated minorities. And free men do not wait for the future; they create it.
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