We Americans are locked in a cultural war for the soul of our country...The battle over our schools is part of the war to separate parents from children, one generation from another, and all Americans from their heritage.

EDUCATIONAL LEADERS
"Bill Bennett thinks the schools ought to get five more years to get back to where they were in 1963.  ‘If they’re still bad,’ he says, ‘maybe we should declare educational bankruptcy, give the people their money and let them educate themselves and start their own schools.’"

Detroit News, Suzanne Fields, October 6, 1989

"We must do better or perish as the nation we know today."

The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people… If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on American the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen ourselves.

80% of 13 year olds cannot write a persuasive letter
40% of students cannot read well enough to handle books and lessons the teacher assigns
20% of 12 year olds can‘t find United States on a World Map
50% of 17 year olds can't put Civil War in correct half century.

30% of larges companies offer remedial reading
27,000,000 adults are functionally illiterate — most are high school graduates
46,000,000 adults are marginally illiterate — can’t complete a job application

If this trend continues 2/3 of the U.S. population will be illiterate by 2000

Fewer than one-fourth of all seventeen-year-olds tested in 1984 were able to perform at an "adequate" level on writing tasks considered essential to academic study, business, and professional work....We are still at risk!

Report before the National Academy of Sciences in 1986 showed U.S. near bottom in comparison of math skills of U.S. students to students in 18 other countries.
Arithmetic 10th
Algebra 12th
Geometry 16th

With very few exceptions, I watched for fourteen years as student after student entered and left high school having learned next to nothing during his or her four year term. And the problem is not in someone else’s backyard, not in someone else’s school district: It’s systemic. My experience has convinced me that if the purpose of the public schools were to prevent children from acquiring an education, they could not do a better job than they are right now, at this very moment, in classrooms all across the nation.

Ours is an educational system that labels children "learning-disabled" and then calls for more tax dollars to remediate the problem it created. It is an anti-intellectual, morally bankrupt system whose values-clarification classes and bogus drug and sex education programs contribute to the very addictions they sanctimoniously claim to solve. It is a system that crushes our children’s intellectual curiosity and then demands that they learn anyway.

Average scores for Houston Independent School District students on the Scholastic Aptitude Test fell by 17 points. ... Down for the third consecutive year. Averages on the verbal lowest in a decade. The president of the board sponsoring the test said results should send a warning that reading could become a "lost art" among high school students.

Since 1979, spending on public education in Texas has risen from $5.7 billion to $17.2 billion. During that period, although student populations rose only 33%, expenditures per pupil increased a hefty 127%, yet since 1971 SAT test scores in Texas have declined by 45 points. 1992 verbal scores reached an all time low.

...43 percent of HISD’s students passed all three sections of the TAAS test this year, up from 36 percent last year. Statewide, scores climbed from 48 percent passing all sections to 54 percent.  "I think it is an extraordinary result..."

Houston Superintendent Frank Petruzielo said.

[Some schools showed exceptionally low rates of passing:]

 Chronicle Jan 14, 1993
"TAAS scores climb statewide; 43 percent in HISD pass test"

The results of the 1990 Nation’s Report Card were so poor that Education Secretary Lamar Alexander declared a "math emergency" saying, "None of the states are cutting it. This is an alarm bell that should ring all night in this country."  One commentator remarked: How bad are eighth graders’ math skills? So bad that half are scoring just above the proficiency level expected of fifth-grade students. Even the best students did miserably; at the top-scoring schools, the average was well below grade level. Hardly any students have the background to go beyond simple computation; most of these kids can add but they have serious trouble thinking through simple problems.  Only 14% of eighth graders scored at the 7th grade level or above, regardless of whether the students were in a wealthy suburban system or a poor school system.

It seems apparent from these math test results and the many other studies described above that the longer children are in public school, the worse they perform academically. In the Nation’s Report Card, for example: 

4th graders:
72% at or above 3rd grade level
11% at or above 5th grade level

12th graders:
46% only at 7th grade level
5% able to do pre-calculus math

Reading and writing skills of children in the public schools are "dreadfully inadequate," despite a decade of "educational reforms."  The National Assessment of Educational Progress report found 58 percent of seventeen-year-olds cannot understand a twelfth grade academic textbook or comprehend many articles in the Wall Street Journal, Time, or Newsweek. Ninety-five percent of the seventeen-year-olds do not have the reading skills to understand college-level textbooks.

More than one-fifth of the students could not identify George Washington as the commander of the colonial forces during the Revolution. Almost one in three did not know Lincoln was the author of the Emancipation Proclamation. And nearly half failed to recognize Patrick Henry as the man who said "Give me liberty or give me death."  NAEP’s evaluation of its most recent writing assessment is that "performance in writing in our schools is, quite simply, bad."  Less than 50% of 17 year olds knew that Byron, Keats, and Wordsworth were poets

National Assessment of Educational Progress Report - 1988.

A survey of 826 campuses in fifteen states and discovered that one-third of all freshman need remedial training in reading, writing, or math and are not ready to begin regular college courses.

We have huge numbers of kids in colleges and universities who are basically getting their elementary and high school education and calling it a Bachelor of Arts degree.

Albert Shanker, president
American Federation of Teachers

Did you know that you and I and all the rest of American industry together spend more money each year teaching remedial math to U.S. workers than all the grade school, high schools, and colleges in this country combined.

Gerald Greenwald, vice chairman of Chrysler Corporation

Only 33% of employers said their recently hired high school graduates were able to read and understand written and oral instructions. Only 25% found their high school graduates were able to do math functions.

In 1978 the National Institute of Education released its "Safe Schools" report. Some of its findings were:
1) the risk of violence to teenagers is greater in public schools than elsewhere;
2) over 5,200 secondary school teachers were physically attacked per month, with at least 1,000 of them seriously injured;
3) each month 282,000 secondary school students are physically attacked;
4) about 11 percent of secondary school children, 2.4 million, are victims of robbery or theft in a given month;

In 1940 the top discipline offenses, according to educators, were:
1. talking
2. chewing gum
3. making noise
4. running in the halls
5. getting out of turn in line
6. wearing improper clothing
 7. not putting paper in wastebaskets

By 1982 the top discipline offenses had become:

1. rape
2. robbery
3. assault
4. burglary
5. arson
6. bombings
7. murder
8. suicide
9. absenteeism
10. vandalism
11. extortion
12. drug abuse
13. alcohol abuse
14. gang warfare
15. pregnancies
16. abortions
17. veneral diseases

USA Today, 1985

In May 1991 the National Crime Survey was released by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. This study showed that ... almost three million violent crimes and thefts occur on public school campuses annually. This equals approximately sixteen thousand incidents per school day, or one every six seconds. As a result of shootings, some students are wearing bullet-proof vests to school.

The Right Choice– Home Schooling,
Christopher Klicka

Therefore, in the last decade, from 1982 to 1992, per-pupil spending has nearly doubled from approximately $3,000 per student to just under $6,000 per student. However the SAT scores continue to decline, causing U.S. Education Secretary Lamar Alexander to remark: "We in the 80s went from spending $160 billion to $400 billion [on education at all levels] without much improvement in results." In fact, from kindergarten through twelfth grade, the United States spends more per student than any other country, except Switzerland.

Only 60 percent of the money even gets to the classroom. At least 40 percent goes to maintaining the educational bureaucracy..

Cost of Public Education Rising

According to Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers (second largest teachers’ union):
One of the major differences between American schools and all others in the world is that we spend half of our money on bureaucracy, whereas the other schools in the world don’t spend more than 20 percent… You know, have about one teacher to every twenty-five kids in the country but we have one supervisor for every six teachers.

Former Secretary of Education, William Brock emphasized that public education is a failing bureaucracy out of control:
We have public education at the elementary and secondary level that ranks below every industrial competitor we have in the world… Education is the most backward single institution in all the U.S. It is not for lack of money. It’s lack of intelligence and will and competence. It is bureaucratic inertia that is unbelievable and inexcusable.  Between thirty-eight cents and forty-one cents of our education dollar gets to the classroom. This is an act of irrationality… In the city of New York there are more administrators than there are in all of France. In the state of New York, there are more administrators than there are in all of the European Community, and the E.C. has twelve countries and 320 million people.

Time, 23 Sept 1990

The philosophy of the class room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.

A nation which does not remember what it was yesterday, does not know what it is today, nor what it is trying to do. We are trying to do a futile thing if we do not know where we came from or what we have been about.

Woodrow Wilson

...we Americans are locked in a cultural war for the soul of our country. What is it all about? As columnist Sam Francis writes, it is about power; it is about who determines "the norms by which we live, and by which we define and govern ourselves."  Who decides what is right and wrong, moral and immoral, beautiful and ugly, healthy and sick? Whose beliefs shall form the basis of law. Give me the child for six years, Lenin reportedly said, quoting the Jesuits, and he will be a Marxist forever.

...public education is the training ground, the hothouse, the farm team, for the next generation of liberals. How else to inculcate multiculturalism, political correctness and historical revisionism into children? How else to drum into them the view that they evolved from slime, that sex is an intramural sport and that liberal agenda is best? Children might not be expected to encounter these "truths" on their own and are even less likely to learn them in private schools, especially private, religious schools where a real education, a moral conscience and wisdom can still be found. Public education is not about education. In too many instances it is about propagandizing and controlling the minds and hearts (and bodies) of the next generation. Without public schools, liberalism would qualify as an endangered species. With them, liberals hope to train sufficient numbers of left-thinking drones to replace them when they are gone.

Cal Thomas AFA Journal, April 1993

Where did the L.A. mob come from?  It came out of public schools from which the Bible and Ten Commandments were long ago expelled. It came out of drugstores where pornography is everywhere on the magazine rack. It came out of movie theaters and away from TV sets where sex and violence are romanticized. It came out of rock concerts where rap music extols raw lust and cop killing. It came out of churches that long ago gave themselves up to social action, and it came out of families that never existed.

The secularists who have captured our culture have substituted a New Age Gospel, with its governing axioms: There are no absolute values in the universe; there are no fixed and objective standards of right and wrong. There is no God. It all begins here and ends here. Every man lives by his own moral code. Do your own thing. Well, the mob took them at their word, and did its own thing.

I asked Nobelist economist Milton Friedman why most American students still graduate from high schools not only with low performance but with such a socialist perspective … His answer was characteristically clear: "Because they are products of a socialist system. How can you expect such a system to inculcate the values of enterprise and competition, when it is based on monopoly state ownership?" Friedman is absolutely right. America’s public education system is a Socialist system in which the government takes money from those who do not send their children to public school (and who still must pay to educate their children privately) and uses that money to endlessly support a bloated educational monopoly. The public schools hate competition, so how can they teach it?

"I am as sure as I am of Christ’s reign that a comprehensive and centralized system of national education, separated from religion, as is now commonly proposed, will prove the most appalling enginery for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief, and of anti-social nihilistic ethics, individual, social and political, which this sin rent world has ever seen."

Dr. A.A. Hodge , Popular Lectures on Theological Themes
(Philadelphia Presbyterian Board of Publications, 1887)

I am much afraid that the schools will prove the very gates of hell unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures and engraving them in the hearts of youth. I advise no one to place his child where the Scriptures do not reign paramount.  Every institution in which men are not unceasingly occupied with the word of God must become corrupt.

The Battle for Our Children
Taking place at this moment is a major battle for our children’s minds. This is a philosophical battle which has significant spiritual ramifications. The battle for our children’s minds is being waged by those who have a Christian mind-set (requiring the teaching of Scripture as the basis of all knowledge), and the humanists (who believe man is the measure of all things). The humanists goal, as envisioned by many of the founders and present operators of the public school system, is to use education to manipulate and control masses of students.

Satan’s goal is to capture a child’s mind

What is education? In simple terms, education is the transmission of basic skills and values to the next generation. It is inescapably religious, and it cannot be neutral.

Every educational philosophy, every educational system, every educational curriculum has an ultimate concern. In this sense, every educational system is inescapably religious.

There is no neutral ground in the universe: every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.

David Barton, in his book America: To Pray or Not to Pray? documents the apparent connection between the removal of prayer from the public schools in 1962 by the U.S. Supreme Court in Engel v Vitale and the drastic decline in the public schools. He demonstrates how, beginning in 1962, SAT scores suddenly plummeted and teen pregnancies, teen sexual diseases, teen suicides,violent crimes among youths, teen alcohol and drug abuse, use of pornography among students, and illiteracy rates abruptly increased 200 to 300 percent.  Barton’s research shows that when God was removed from the public schools, chaos set in.

Of all dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. …And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality may be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds… reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religion.

The most powerful single influence in all history has been Christianity. This influence has shown itself not only in the religious beliefs and spirititual ideals of the human race, but in the march of political events and institutions as well.

Compton’s Encyclopedia quoted in America: To Pray or Not To Pray, David Barton.

The goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.

Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places.

Human beings are never neutral with regard to God. Either we worship God as Creator and Lord, or we turn away from Him. Because the heart is directed either toward God or against God, theoretical thinking is never as pure or autonomous as many would like to think. It seems clear then that some people who appear to reject Christianity on rational or theoretical grounds are, in fact, acting under the influence of non-rational factors, that is, more ultimate commitments of their hearts. The arguments they want the rest of us to think were the grounds of their unbelief are in fact simply an exercise in self-justification. The unbelief came first; then came the arguments.

Closing of the American Heart

Humanism simply means that man, rather than God, is the measure of all things. The basic tenets of humanism as described in Humanist Manifesto I and Humanist Manifesto II:
1.Humanism hold to an evolutionary explanation of both human rights and development.

2.Humanism believes that the scientific method is applicable to all areas of human concern and is the only means of determining truth.

3.Humanism affirms cultural relativism, the belief that values are grounded only in a given culture and have no transcultural normativity. [In the words of Humanist Manifest II, third thesis, it says, "We affirm that moral values derive their source from human experience. Ethics is autonomous and situational, needing no theological or ideological sanction."]

4.Humanism affirms an anthropocentric and naturalistic view of life [i.e. there is no supernatural God and man has no soul].

5.Humanism affirms an ethic of individualism, one in which personal values take precedence over community standards for behavior. [Humanist Manifesto II, sixth and seventh thesis, advocates any type of sexual behavior between consenting adults, euthanasia, and the right to suicide.]

6.Humanism affirms cultural determinism, the belief that values in a given society are largely determined by environmental circumstances.

7.Humanism believes in the innate goodness and perfectibility of man.

"The battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith: A religion of humanity . . . utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to carry humanist values into whatever they teach . . .  "The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new — the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism…"

Children in the public schools have been reliably prohibited from learning any kind of aspect of Christianity (except to degrade it), in the name of avoiding the "establishment of religion." However, the empty moral vacuum has been filled to the brim with warped occult practices and the tenets of humanism. If this is not an "establishment of religion," I do not know what it is!

Dewey once wrote that "faith in the prayer-hearing God is an unproved and outmoded faith. There is no God and there is no soul. Hence, there are no needs for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable truth is also dead and buried. There is not room for fixed, natural law or moral absolutes."

Ronald H. Nash
The Closing of the American Heart.

In the Impressions curricula children are also forced to read anthologies that describe violent ritual practices, including a poem by Jack Pretlutsy called "The Sorceress." This poem describes the sorceress casting spells, entering trances, and sending souls to hell, where the demons rejoice with the arrival of each additional soul. Children are also required to role play as witches, and the program applies the symbols, belief systems, and practices of witchcraft and neo-paganism. The curriculum publishers and creators of the programs, in fact, have developed training seminars for teachers to instruct them on how to counter parental objection to these insidious programs.

Horace Mann, called "the father of public education," became the first secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education in 1837. … His goal was to create a non-sectarian school system, and he envisioned that education would bring salvation to society. He wanted to establish "a new religion, with the state as its true church, and education as its Messiah." Mann stated: "What the church has been for medieval man the public school must become for democratic and rational man. God will be replaced by the concept of the public good… The common schools… shall create a more far-seeing intelligence and pure morality than has ever existed among communities of men."  Horace Mann and other proponents of public education were intent on reforming society by changing the values of children. Mann had little sympathy for Calvinists or Catholics, and he was determined to use every legal means— including state coercion in schooling— to ensure that other people’s children were taught the truth as he understood it.

People in control of education have, to be sure, stripped away important content, leaving many of our students functionally and culturally illiterate. But in an even more sinister way, ideologues committed to their own secular, humanistic agenda have succeeded in cutting traditional moral and religious values from what our students learn while cleverly making it appear that the substitute (which is really simply a different religion) is a neutral alternative. No real progress towards improving American education can occur until all concerned realize that an education that ignores moral and religious values cannot qualify as a quality education.

"The Connecticut Mutual Life Report on American Values in the 80’s: The Impact of Belief."

"the crisis that threatens us, the force that could topple our monuments and destroy our very foundations, is within ourselves. The crisis is in the character of our culture, where the values that restrain inner vices and develop inner virtues are eroding. Unprincipled men and women, disdainful of their moral heritage and skeptical of Truth itself, are destroying our civilization by weakening the very pillars upon which it rests."

It is important to recognize that it is impossible to separate one’s view of education from his or her world view. A teacher’s world view, for example, influences her educational philosophy which influences her educational policy which in turn influences her educational practice. One’s philosophy of education will always be a reflection of a more general world and life view.  A Christian philosophy of education is based unapologetically upon a Christian view of life and the world. A Christian philosophy of education recognizes that all human knowledge is distorted and fragmented. It knows that education is never neutral; its ultimate dependence on philosophical and religious presuppositions is a fact of life. What sets a truly Christian education apart is the Christian’s acceptance of the biblical perspective (that is, the framework of convictions found in Scripture) as normative and authoritative.

According to Paul Vitz, a professor of psychology at New York University, the struggle over American education is more than a battle to end functional and cultural illiteracy. The real conflict reflects a cultural war "between those who are religious and support traditional values and those who are secular and advocate anti-traditional or modernist values." Those on the side of religious, traditional values include conservative Protestants and Catholics and Jews. "They have in common the same God, the same commitment to family, and the same general moral values. Today, America is dividing into a new two-class society— one committed to religion and conservative, traditional values and the other committed to secular and liberal, modernist values." The real war over American education, then, is between these two camps. Of course, the effective participants in the struggle understand this. But the majority of Americans do not and hence often misunderstand what is really going on.

The moral crisis in the public schools is acute, and we as a nation are already reaping the consequences in the rise of violence, crime, sexual diseases, divorce, selfishness, various forms of paganism and the occult, and a growing rejection of God’s absolute moral standards. In the name of "neutrality," the public schools are steadily and many times subtly assaulting the traditional family and destroying the minds of our youth. We, as adults, should do all we can to "clean up" the public schools, but can we afford to lose our children in the process? The public schools’ curriculum and atmosphere clearly oppose God and His laws. Christians armed with this information can no longer be held guiltless in regard to their children’s education.

The Right Choice– Home Schooling

For the secular individual in a secular society, the American system of education may be the finest that has ever existed in the history of the world. But Christian children are not secular individuals. They are citizens of a different country with a different set of values, a different set of standards, and a different idea of truth. When we [Christian] parents give our sons and daughters to the state for education, we invite the values, standards, and untruths of a godless cosmos to penetrate their spirits, and that is not healthy for any family, especially the Christian family.

The world is not composed of religious and non-religious people. It is composed rather of religious people who have differing ultimate concerns, different gods, and who respond to the Living God in different ways.… All humans are incurably religious; we simply manifest different religious allegiances. It is absurd, then, to think that the choice in public education is between sacred and secular. Whatever choice the state makes under the current modes of thinking will only establish one person’s set of ultimate concerns at the expense of others. An education that pretends to be religiously neutral is a fraud. Secular Humanism, as we should all know by now, is a religious world view as certainly as Christianity and Judaism. It expresses the ultimate commitments and concerns of its proponents.

Closing of the American Heart

Pupil not above Teacher

"A pupil is not above his teacher: but everyone, after he has been fully trained, will be like his teacher"

Hank & Jeannie Tate * Educational Support Foundation * 12954 Westleigh *

Houston, TX 77077 * 281-870-9194 * fax 281-870-9669 * hank@t8s.com