Values

Education (part 22)

Even though the most enthusiastic opposition to any blending of religion and education comes from the supporters of government schools, no school of any kind can maintain such separation. Value-free education is a contradiction of terms, and any hierarchy of values constitutes a religious system. John Dewy, another public school guru from the past, supported public schools as "religious in substance" but in a way that did not come "at the expense of a state-consciousness." He recognized that Christianity placed limits on the loyalty that one could have towards the state, but that the new religion of the schools did not.

Author Herbert Schlossberg observes that:

Education is a series of religious acts partly because the power of assumption is so great. Assumptions are even more powerful than assertions because they bypass a person's critical faculty and thereby create prejudice. Government education assumes God to be irrelevant to the educational process when, in fact, 'The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge' (Proverbs 1:7). Such false assumptions by the government schools can then be combined with arguments that prove the truth of what is false. These false assumptions are particularly beguiling because they appeal to one of our worst instincts—the desire to be fashionable or at least to avoid being associated with the unfashionable or unpopular." [Idols for Destruction, 1983, p. 210]

The assumptions of modern government education concerning the nature of man, the function of the state, the nature of truth, and so on, are such as to inculcate a set of presuppositions into our children that cannot escape being called religious.

As Christians, we cannot allow our children to be sacrificed to such a modern-day Molech. Can you imagine the ancient, faithful Jews taking their children to be taught by the Levites on the Sabbath and then handing those same children over to be educated by Canaanite schools the rest of the week? Remember, it is not a matter of whether our children will be taught religion in school; it's only a matter of which religion they will be taught.