America's Trojan Horse: Public Education

Remembering the Trojan Horse

The crafty Odysseus won the Trojan War for Greece by deception with the Trojan horse. An entire city was desolated by sleight of hand, worship of a false goddess, and false security. The Trojans sincerely thought the war was over, but sincerity is insufficient without the truth. They found out too late that they were wrong. They unknowingly led the enemy right into their city’s heart, blindly trusted the enemy’s word, failed to do their own research and inspection, and became complacent, focused on their own pleasures. Because of these foolish actions, they lost their children, families, city, and lives. America is Troy; our public education system is the Trojan horse. 

Indoctrination

Seventeen years ago, God called me to His Son. As I sought His will for my life, I believe that He led me out of engineering and technical sales into a career in education. For the last fifteen years I have held the following positions in public education: fourth-grade teacher, middle school assistant principal, and most recently, elementary principal. I have also served as adjunct faculty at a respected college and taught for Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth. My goal has always been to be a godly example of excellence, a male role model, and “salt and light” in a system I knew had long ago expelled God.

Over the years I have had many opportunities to be that “salt and light” and have plugged up more than a few pinholes in the dike. Administratively, I have fought for the Good News Club to use facilities for which other organizations are never questioned. I have staved off the Anti-Defamation League’s “No Place for Hate” campaign promoting the “acceptance” of questionable beliefs and lifestyles. I have argued to keep the names Easter and Christmas on the school calendar beside Rosh Hashanah and Ramadan. Educationally, I have focused teachers, students, and parents on state and federal mandates to the extent that my school is consistently one of the top in our state. 

But over the past few years, I have been inspecting the foundations of the public education system. Research, reading, and observation have proven to me that the foundations of the system are broken. It is crumbling away under my feet, our children’s feet, the family’s feet, the feet of our cities and our nation, under the feet of future generations.

Why do I say this? Let me respond Socratically. How many well-intending parents wanting the best for their children, Christian or non-Christian, can answer the following?

• Where and why was public education established?

• Who were public education’s “founding fathers”; what were their beliefs and goals?

• What is the foundation of knowledge?

• Is there ultimate truth? What are the ramifications if the answer is “yes” or “no”?

• Are schools void of religion? If you say “yes,” are you sure? If you say “no,” what is their religion and why does it matter?

• What science and history is being taught? Is it true science, accurate history?

• What is education’s ultimate role? Who determines it?

• Are we truly educating our children in our public schools, or are we indoctrinating them?

I daresay most public school employees would be hard-pressed to answer; I admit that I would have been three years ago. Why? Partly ignorance and lack of education, but mainly because the education we have received is captive to the system itself. Our education system is such a part of us and of society that we no longer even think to question it. We accept it, work within its boundaries, polish it to look better, and rename it to sound better. Just as the people of Troy welcomed that horse, we have naively welcomed public education into our cities and homes without discernment, willingly accepting the words of “leaders” of the system just as the Trojans unwisely took the Greek captive at his word without questioning if it were a trap, a setup.

In opening up that Trojan horse, I was stunned and appalled. I not only realized what the horse was, but saw the deceivers’ plans. In a phrase, what I found was indoctrination in an anti-Christian worldview called humanism.

My eyes having been opened wide, I realized that we are in a war for the truth, the souls of our children, and the future of our country. The hardest thing for me to accept is that I have been the Trojan soldier listening to the Greek captive and accepting his description of the horse as a gift to society! My sweat, my energies, were tearing down the wall of my city and wheeling this horse inside. By not questioning and inspecting public education deeply enough, I put my family and America’s children right into the archenemy’s hands. 

We must act! We must understand that education is not a neutral enterprise because there is no neutral territory, no neutral thought. Rushdoony states, “Such a view presupposes neutrality in the knower and the known … For us as Christians, this view is false.”¹ “God forbid that we should rebel against the LORD, and turn this day from following the LORD” (Josh. 22:29). We cannot be passive and watch our children, families, cities, and nation turn slaves by the enemy’s sleight of hand and by our complacency.

Look Inside the Horse: The Current State of Education

I have seen firsthand the issues we face. I know the results of taking our focus off educating children as individuals created in the image of God with unique talents and gifts. I have witnessed how special interests promote their own agendas and obstruct efforts to improve our schools. Most Americans only see the attractive outside of our Trojan horse: the “gift” of education provided by a government wanting the “best for all.” But if we take off our rose-colored glasses and approach this colossal caballus with discernment, we will notice its many blemishes and faulty workmanship; we will notice the hatch leading inside the beast. If we peer into it to see what’s there, we will see many uncomfortable sights. If we will only shine the light of truth into the cracks and crevasses deep inside the system, we will see of what it is truly made.

I do not doubt that teachers, parents, administrators, and school board members are often sincere in their desire to educate children. But anyone reading the news will quickly note that there is a growing culture of corruption and the sacrifice of ethics for self-interest and personal gain in public education.

Accountability, national standards, class size, and teacher qualifications are all red herrings, draining tax payer coffers with no statistically significant gains in achievement.²

Our government has enacted legislation such as the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act and the Gun-Free Schools Act of 1996 under No Child Left Behind. Employees engage in intruder training, bomb threat training, and Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E), but all to no avail. All one has to do to see this is to read or listen to the news. According to the National Center for Education Statistics’ Indicators of School Crimes and Safety 2009 report, “For the first time, rates of violent crime victimization at school were higher than rates of violent crime victimization away from school. In 2007, there were 26 violent crimes per 1,000 students at school, compared to 20 violent crimes per 1,000 students away from school.”³ This same report indicated that “in 2007–08, 75 percent of public schools recorded one or more violent incidents of crime” and “17 percent recorded one or more serious violent incidents.”

Well-intentioned people scratch their heads and ask why. There is plenty of blame to go around. We can blame the teachers unions, the largest lobbying organizations in political history, for demanding to be treated as professionals while maintaining a union-bully mentality. But we must also blame fathers who have abandoned the principles of Deuteronomy 6:7 and Ephesians 6:4; we have shirked our responsibilities. As a by-product, we can also blame children who become “disobedient to parents.” 

To get the true picture of the future of the statist education system, do an internet search on our current leaders: Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Safe School Czar Kevin Jennings. Jennings is founder and prior Executive Director of GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network placed into position by President Obama with no congressional confirmation, possessing great power and authority over schools. What is being promoted? Brace yourself and make sure no little eyes are watching! Search “the little black book queer in the 21st century,” “Homosexual movement + Kevin Jennings,” or “Fistgate tapes.”

Many have probably pondered at least some of this already. But as we probe further into the egalitarian equine of public education, we must do away with the mindset that is so much a part of our culture, if we are really going to understand it. When I started researching what my education history classes failed to teach, I realized how far we have strayed from true Biblical education. I took for granted the concept of age-segregated teaching—as do most churches—because I neither looked into its socialist roots nor considered its complete focus on class management and psychological remedies that breed mediocrity and social promotion. But G. Stanley Hall, the “father of adolescence,” friend to Jung and Freud, planned this monstrosity from the start. Hall used evolutionism and Haeckel’s recapitulation theory to form the concepts of age-segregated learning and racial eugenics.⁴ Is that not why we fought Hitler?

It is not hard to imagine the next step the social engineers of public education took: remove God from schools, not all gods of course, just that “intolerant” Old Testament God demanding, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Exod. 20:3), and that “intolerant” New Testament God claiming, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). True Christianity is what the Anti-Defamation League defines as bigotry because of its exclusivity. They do not accept my belief, but tell me I must accept everyone else’s.

Do not be fooled; our public schools do teach religion. Oh, I know about the separation of church and state comment by Thomas Jefferson that most Americans believe is part of our founding documents. That separation only applies to Christianity. Public schools are deeply entrenched in the religion of secular humanism. As Sam Blumenfeld points out:

[O]n March 4, 1987, U.S. District Judge W. Brevard Hand, in Smith v. Board of School Commissioners of Mobile County, Ala., ruled that secular humanism is a religion. The 172-page ruling defines religion and concludes, after reviewing the relevant aspects of humanism, that “For purposes of the First Amendment, secular humanism is a religious belief system, entitled to the protections of, and subject to the prohibitions of, the religious clauses.”⁵

• This man-centered religion is indoctrinating our American children in many ways. To name a few: 

• Evolutionism at the expense of true science.

• Revisionist history (creatively called social studies).

• Socialism with their mantra, “We’re the experts. We’ll handle all your educational needs.”

• Psychology focused on segregation, self-esteem, and what “feels” right.

• Androgyny: the feminization of our boys and masculinization of our girls.

• Acceptance, not just tolerance (unless you disagree with their point of view).

• Misguided environmentalism: mother earth versus God the Father.

• Rebellion against the family (Google “We Generation”).

The Effects of the Unknown Horse: Where Education Stands in Our Nation

Where does all this leave us as a nation in which 90 percent of professing Christians send their children to state schools? We have become exactly what the system is designed for us to become: apathetic, uninformed, uninvolved, and uneducated (or educated for very little). We have become uncreative non-thinkers lacking reasoning and rhetoric. On one hand, we have become a society of self-focused, self-indulgent couch potatoes growing only enough sprouts to text our sweet-potato friends on Facebook. On the other, we are gerbils on a wheel that run our children to every imaginable program and sport. 

Let me also name a few of the effects of indoctrination in secular humanism through public education: abortion, divorce, single-parent families, euthanasia, gay marriage, condoning homosexual behavior, pornography, racism, and no public nativity scenes or Ten Commandments. These societal effects directly transfer into schools in the forms of removing God from the Pledge, banning the teaching of Creation, expelling prayer, increased violence, and casting Christ out of Christmas. America’s children are becoming slaves to a government telling them “we control and dole out all rights.” John Dewey, the illustrious “Father of Experiential  Education” states the need for such indoctrination as follows:

The superficial explanation is that a government resting upon popular suffrage cannot be successful unless those who elect and who obey their governors are educated. Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created only by education.⁶

Who Made This Horse? History the Halls of Higher Education Do Not Teach

When earning my teacher certification, I innocently assumed I was getting the full picture of public education in my educational history classes. As a young Christian I questioned everything I read, but I did not think to question if what I read was everything. We read about Dewey but never went back to the true roots of his educational philosophy. We never studied Rousseau, a major philosopher of the Enlightenment and a key figure in the development of humanist educational theory. Nor did we research G. Stanley Hall, Lev Vygotsky, or Jean Piaget in any depth or look into the lives of these educational icons. My studies never looked at their ties to social engineering, Marxism, Communism, or Platonism. But it is all there. 

Vladimir Lenin once said, “If we can effectively kill the national pride and patriotism of just one generation, we will have won that country. Therefore, there must be continued propaganda abroad to undermine the loyalty of citizens in general, and teenagers in particular. By making drugs of various kinds readily available, by creating the necessary attitude of chaos, idleness and worthlessness, and by preparing him psychologically and politically, we can succeed.”⁷ I have had days working in the public schools when I vividly remember thinking, “Dear God, we are in trouble!”

How did public education begin in America? Many point back to 1647 and the Massachusetts General School Law of 1647, known as “The Old Deluder Satan Law” because it opens with “It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures …” This law is said to be foundational to the socialist mindset of the government school system, but this proves untrue at a deeper look: its central focus was to combat the neglectful, infidel parents not raising their children in the Lord.

The real beginning was later in Massachusetts when the Unitarians and their clandestine counterparts, the secularists, approached the Puritans to initiate a more formal public system to educate poor, illiterate Catholics immigrating to New England. But the watered-down Christian education of the Unitarian-Puritan alliance quickly turned secular when the Puritans and Unitarians disagreed among themselves and withdrew from the table. The secular socialists were right there to take the reins.

Evolution has unquestionably played a role in public education. As Aldous Huxley, the evolutionist leftist grandson of “Darwin’s Bulldog” T. H. Huxley states:

I had motive for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world … is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves … For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.⁸

During the post–Civil War era, Andrew Jackson’s social-engineering paradigms used against American Indians, Mormons, etc., combined with the visions of Horace Mann, first Secretary of Education for Massachusetts, into a destructive political force. Ever since then, special-interest groups have ferociously fought to control the mechanisms of state inculcation, with each group attempting to use the hammer of compulsory attendance to impose its worldview. No one has done this better than secular humanists, “[w]ho changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen” (Rom. 1:25).

As the Humanist Manifesto I & II point out, the goals of secular humanism, now endearingly referred to as postmodern liberalism, are simple: firstly, remove the foundations of Judeo-Christian morality and beliefs, and secondly, fill this gap with a new enlightened, man-centered religion. But this takeover cannot be too overt; it must be under the guise of religious freedom, tolerance, equity, and scientific fact.⁹

The Origin of Education: The Biblical View

Was there education before Dewey, Mann, Hall, Rousseau, and Plato? Many think Plato, Socrates, and classical education was the start. But any Bible-reading Christian must disagree, for “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction” (Prov. 1:7). 

Genesis 1 through 11 give the foundation upon which to build our knowledge of religion, history, geology, biology, anthropology, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and more. Ken Ham points out, “If the history leading up to Jesus Christ, all of the earthly things, is not true, then the spiritual and moral things are not true also.” Ham continues, “Christianity is based in real history not just interesting stories, and Jesus Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection happened in history.” It is that history that leads to Jesus Christ. We must look at all things through the lens of the Bible.¹⁰

God and Genesis do matter; the family, children, and home also matter. Deuteronomy 6:5–9 clearly tells fathers:

And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates. 

God purposed that each chapter of Proverbs 1 through 7 starts as follows:

My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother. (1:8)

My son, if thou wilt receive my words, and hide my commandments with thee. (2:1)

My son, forget not my law; but let thine heart keep my commandments. (3:1)

Hear, ye children, the instruction of a father, and attend to know understanding. (4:1)

My son, attend unto my wisdom, and bow thine ear to my understanding. (5:1)

My son, if thou be surety for thy friend, if thou hast stricken thy hand with a stranger. (6:1)

My son, keep my words, and lay up my commandments with thee. (7:1)

The New Testament is just as clear:

The disciple is not above his master: but every one that is perfect shall be as his master. (Luke 6:40)

Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ. (2 Cor. 10:5)

Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. But shun profane and vain babblings: for they will increase unto more ungodliness. (2 Tim. 2:15–16)

In all these Scriptures we see that ultimate truth matters, worldview matters, and education matters.

Wake Up Troy, Destroy That Horse, Repair That Breach: A Call to Those with Children Inside the Walls

With the 90 percent of Christians still sending their children into this statist education system, I need to be brutally direct. According to current research, if you send your child to public school, you WILL most likely lose your child to the secular humanistic worldview. In two reports to the Southern Baptist Convention, T. C. Pinckney found that 70–88 percent of evangelical teens will leave the faith within two years of graduating from high school.¹¹ The fatal combination of secular education and the lack of true Biblical discipleship is reflected in separate studies by the Barna Group and Britt Beemer of America’s Research Group. They found that one-third of twenty-somethings who were churched as teens have disengaged spiritually. Over “60% of the children that grow up in our churches will leave them as they reach the threshold of young adulthood.”¹² We are losing more children much younger than previously thought: 83 percent of those surveyed started doubting the Bible in middle school and high school.¹³

“But when the righteous turneth away from his righteousness, and committeth iniquity, and doeth according to all the abominations that the wicked man doeth, shall he live? All his righteousness that he hath done shall not be mentioned: in his trespass that he hath trespassed, and in his sin that he hath sinned, in them shall he die” (Ezek. 18:24). We cannot sit idly by and let secular public education destroy our children. We must “[c]ease … to hear the instruction that causeth to err from the words of knowledge” (Prov. 19:27).

The Biblical model of education is what is needed—an education centered in the Word of God and the family where the father is in charge and engaged. This is becoming the clarion call from the likes of E. Ray Moore Jr.,¹⁴ Voddie Baucham,¹⁵ Bruce Shortt,¹⁶ Doug Phillips,¹⁷ and Scott Brown.¹⁸ Rushdoony heralded it for years.¹⁹ Even the Southern Baptist Convention has joined the call.²⁰

I challenge you to be a “repairer of the breach” (Isa. 58:12). Return to the Bible, “[f]or the nation and kingdom that will not serve thee shall perish; yea, those nations shall be utterly wasted” (Isa. 60:12). Return to Genesis, for “in the beginning, O Lord, you laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands” (Heb. 1:10 NIV). Return to Matthew Henry’s “church in the house,”²¹ and “[s]et your hearts unto all the words which I testify among you this day, which ye shall command your children to observe to do, all the words of this law. For it is not a vain thing for you; because it is your life” (Deut. 32:46–47a). Return to manliness and end female chauvinism. “Watch ye, stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong” (1 Cor. 16:13), for “I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God.” (1 Cor. 11:3). Return to learning about and learning from accurate history, “[f]or the transgression of a land many are the princes thereof: but by a man of understanding and knowledge the state thereof shall be prolonged” (Prov. 28:2). Return back to the home: men standing up and leading their families, and women standing beside them in support; “And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4). And return to true education, repudiating the indoctrination of public education, for “[t]he wicked worketh a deceitful work: but to him that soweth righteousness shall be a sure reward” (Prov. 11:18). 

Van Til writes, “You cannot expect to train intelligent, well-informed soldiers of the cross of Christ unless the Christ is held up before them as the Lord of culture as well as the Lord of religion. It is of the nature of the conflict between Christ and Satan to be all-comprehensive.”²²

We must act now! 

1. R. J. Rushdoony, The Philosophy of the Christian Curriculum (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 2001), 165.

2. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress’ Nation’s Report Card, http://nationsreportcard.gov/.

3.This information may be found at the National Center for Education Statistics, http://nces.ed.gov/programs/crimeindicators/crimeindicators2009/index.asp.

4. See “A Brief Biographical Sketch of G. Stanley Hall,” http://www.ithaca.edu/beins/gsh/gsh_bio.htm. 

5. Samuel Blumenfeld, “Is Humanism a Religion?” The New American, February 23, 2010, http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/opinion/sam-blumenfeld/3001-is-humanism-a-religion.

6. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (Stilwell, KS: Digireads.com Publishing, 2005), 53. 

7. This quote from Vladimir Lenin, Bolshevik ruler of Russia 1917–1924, can be found at: http://www.itwillpass.com/quot...

8. Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means, an Enquiry Into the Nature of Ideals and Into the Methods Employed for Their Realization (London, England: Chatto & Windus, 1941), 270ff.

9. See “Humanist Manifesto I & II,” American Humanist Association, http://www.americanhumanist.or... and http://www.americanhumanist.org/Who_We_Are/About_Humanism/Humanist_Manifesto_II. 

10. Ken Ham, podcast entitled “Genesis: Reclaiming Culture,” Answers in Genesis Ministries; similar information can be found at http://www.answersingenesis.org/PublicStore/product/Genesis-The-Key-to-Reclaiming-the-Culture,4741,190.aspx.

11. T. C. Pinckney, Report to the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee, Nashville, TN, September 18 2001. See also the 2002 Report of the Southern Baptist Council on Family Life.

12. Ken Ham, Britt Beemer, and Todd Hillard, Already Gone (Green Forest, AR: Master Books, 2009), 25, 141.

13. Ibid., 172.

14. E. Ray Moore and Exodus Mandate can be contacted at http://www.exodusmandate.org/. 

15. Voddie Baucham can be found at http://www.voddiebaucham.org/vbm/home.html. 

16. Bruce Shortt can be found at http://web.me.com/voddieb/vbm/Blog/Entries/2010/3/9_The_Continuing_Collapse__March_2010.html. 

17. Doug Phillips and Vision Forum can be contacted at http://www.visionforumministries.org/. 

18. Scott Brown and the NCFIC can be contacted at http://ncfic.org/. 

19. See R. J. Rushdoony, The Philosophy of Christian Curriculum, The Messianic Character of American Education, and Intellectual Schizophrenia. 

20 Robert Parham, “Southern Baptist Convention Top Exec Boosts Anti-Public School Agenda,” Ethicsdaily.com, June 10, 2009, http://www.ethicsdaily.com/news.php?viewStory=14356. 

21. Matthew Henry, A Church in the House, Restoring Daily Worship to the Christian Household (San Antonio, TX: The Vision Forum, Inc., 2007).

22. Cornelius Van Til, Essays on Christian Education (Nutley, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1974), 26.