My wife is a school teacher. This morning when she woke up, got ready and leaving for school, I told her, ‘Do you have to go to school?’. She said, ‘You shouldn’t have to be scared to go to school’. Everyday as she leaves for school, I worry about her life. I have a six year old son going to school. Everyday I worry about his safety. I ask my wife, ‘Sweetie, why don’t we start a homeschool? You can just teach our son at home?’
What is going on in our schools? A 19 year-old student destroyed 17 human lives with an AR – 15 rifle. Nicholas Cruz, a former student of this school wore a gas mask, took smoke grenades and set off the fire alarm so the kids would come out of the classrooms to meet his bullets. Nicholas Cruz killed 12 people inside the school and three outside it. Two more people died of their injuries in the hospitals. I looked at the social media posts of the killer. To say they are disturbing is an understatement. A 19 year-old kid obsessed with death, violence and carnage.
Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel said, ‘This is catastrophic. There really are no words’. This happened yesterday at a high school about an hour northwest of Miami. I watched some cellphone videos sent out by students as they ran in horror in classrooms when the shots were fired. In one video circulating on social media, a student was yelling, ‘Oh my God! Oh my God!’ as more than 40 shots thundering in the background.
The police entered the school with military-grade vehicles armed with military-grade weapons. It feels like a war zone. Rebecca Bogart, a 17 year-old student said, ‘My teacher was finishing up a discussion of the Holocaust when I heard a series of shots’.
I remember the massacre at Sandy Hook back in 2012 when 26 people were killed in Newtown, Connecticut. Over the last 6 years, we had over 200 school shootings claiming 400 lives. Sadly we are getting used to these school shootings. The school shootings have become so frequent that many schools run safety drills in which students practice survival skills during mock shootings.
How did we come to this place?
When America was founded, we started with an educational system based on God, Bible and Christian principles. I went to a Christian school in Florida where we would start every day with prayer and Bible study. We had to memorise Bible verses. Ten Commandments were posted in our classrooms. We had to take a course titled, ‘Fear of the Lord’. The Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. True wisdom starts with God, His presence and his authority in our lives. My teachers used to tell the class: We are created by a God who made us in His image. Every human life is precious. Jesus taught us even hating someone in our thoughts is sinful. Our anger should be brought under control with the Holy Spirit of God.There were times I thought of hurting someone who was picking on me. But I did not act on my impulses because I used to ask myself, ‘What would Jesus do?’. I got such a Christian education in school.
When America was founded, every school was a Christian school and every child got Christian education. They cultivated a Christian worldview that stayed with them rest of their lives.
Western education until recently was a thoroughly Christian enterprise preparing students to mature their character with a Biblical worldview of life, liberty and eternity. Scottish educator John Buchan explained it this way,
“Our greatest inheritance, the very foundation of our civilization, is a marvel to behold and consider. If I tried to describe its rich legacy with utmost brevity, I should take the Latin word humanitas. It represents in the widest sense, the accumulated harvest of the ages, the fine flower of a long discipline of Christian thought. It is the Western mind of which we ought to turn our attentions to careful study.
The now frivolously disregarded Trivium – emphasizing the basic classical scholastic categories of grammar, logic, and rhetoric – once equipped untold generations of young pupils with the essential tack and apparatus for a lifetime of learning. These are the very notions that once set acourse the great cultural flowering of Christendom over the past thousand years.”
The First and Second Great Awakenings brought a great revival across America. Great leaders like Jonathan Edwards and Charles Finney advocated for Christian education for every child. Harvard University was established in 1636. The purpose of this university was to train young men and women in Christian principles. How is Harvard today? It became a bastion for Satan. It became the devil’s mouth piece to propagate atheism and materialism.
Then the State took over the educational system. God was evicted out of the schools. Bible was shown the door. Ten Commandments were ripped off the walls. Secular humanism became the primary dogma of our educational system. Bible is not the standard. Man decides what is right and wrong. Man decides what is knowledge. Man decides what is sexuality. Man decides what is marriage. Man decides what is our purpose. Man decides what is our destiny. We are paying taxes to support our public schools which teach secular humanism and Darwinism to our children five days a week. Thomas Jefferson wrote the teachings of Jesus Christ, ‘the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man’. The moral codes of Jesus have been discarded. Vice President Mike Pence is a devout Christian. The media is mocking and ridiculing his faith. On the View show, someone said, If you talk to Jesus, that is faith, if Jesus talks to you that is mental illness. The media constantly mocking God and Lord Jesus Christ. Off course, they don’t do this to any other religion. Our elite has rejected the Christ-centered education for a Darwin-centered education.
Stephen McDowell wrote in his book Restoring America’s Christian Education, ‘Johnny is in trouble – not because he is playing hooky from school, but because he is attending school. Some of the most negative influences that young Americans can face today are found in public schools. In the past few decades this has exponentially worsened. In 1940 the top offenses in public schools were chewing gum, talking in class, unfinished homework, and running in the halls. In 1980 the top offenses were drugs, drunkenness, assault, murder and rape.While at school, Johnny not only is confronted with drugs, immorality and violence, but he is also receiving a second rate education. The average verbal scores of the SAT dropped over 50 points and the average math scores dropped over 35 points’.
So, this secular education not only ruining the morality of our children but also delivering them poor quality education. South Korea is just 1/4th of our population but making 4 times more engineers than us. We are spending $5000 – $10,000 dollars per year on each kid, but our educational achievements are worse than many developing nations.
Education is about knowledge. Knowledge of reality. Today postmodernism has taken over our schools. They teach reality is not knowable objectively. It is just a social construction. You can construct your own reality.
Malcolm Muggeridge was a British journalist and satirist. He was born in 1903 and died in 1990. When Joseph Stalin was ruling Soviet Russia, Western media and press were obsessed with him. They were praising Stalin. They said, ‘Russia is the future. Stalin is doing wonderful things in Russia and other Communist countries. We should implement Stalinism in the West.’ Muggeridge was also attracted to Communism. He and his wife travelled to Moscow and later to Ukraine. He watched the bondage of people under communism. In Ukraine, he watched people dying from famine, an artificial famine brought out by social engineering. From his observations, Muggeridge wrote the book Winter in Moscow in 1934. The Western press was not impressed with the factual reports Muggeridge sent them. New York Times journalist Walter Duranty denied the existence of any famine. Duranty was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Muggeridge called Duranty, ‘the greatest liar I have met in journalism’. Muggeridge became a Christian and wrote many insightful books.
What is wrong with our public schools? Let me read you what Muggeridge wrote:
“So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over–a weary, battered old brontosaurus–and became extinct.”
What a profound insight! He said, while other civilizations had collapsed by attacks of barbarians from without, the West is collapsing from within. We are training our destroyers at our own educational institutions. We provide them with facilities to propagate their destructive ideology. All at the public expense. What are the fruits of this humanistic godless education?
We create boredom out of our affluence
we become vulnerable out of our strength
we become impotent out of our erotomania
We think we are overpopulated, and through birth control pills and abortions, we bring on a demographic winter.
What happens at the end? He said, ‘Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over – a weary, battered old brontosaurus – and became extinct’.
What Muggeridge prophesied 50 years ago, are being fulfilled in our time.
The opioid epidemic
The porn epidemic
The debt epidemic
The school shooting epidemic
they are the fruits of our godless, educational system.
In his book Millstones & Stumbling Blocks, Bradley Heath wrote the impact of public school education on his life. He wrote,
“The irrelevance of God is a fundamental doctrine taught by all public schools….
Is the Bible true? My science, health, and literature teachers said no.
Is God providential in the affairs of men and nations? My history, social studies, and economics teachers said no.
Is there design and purpose evident in creation? My biology, chemistry, and math teachers said no.
Are there absolutes? My sex-education teacher said no and my friends said “cool”.
Is God relevant to any subject taught in public school? All of my teachers and all of my books said no.
Consequently, every day for twelve years the content and context of my public schooling said there is no God, and even if there is, He does not matter.”
So, the content and context of our public schooling became atheism and secularism. They teach a godless way of life. G.K.Chesterton said, ‘Education is not a subject and does not deal in subjects. It is instead a transfer of a way of life’. We mistakenly think public schools just teach chemistry, physics, astronomy and send the kids home. It is more than that. They teach a way of life.
Once upon a time, our schools were teaching centrality of God and cross of Christ. In today’s education, God and Christ are rejected. As Malcolm Muggeridge said, “The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment”.
This transformation of public education did not happen overnight. John Dewey is called ‘the father of American progressive education’. He was born in 1859, the same year Charles Darwin published his book On the Origin of Species. John Dewey embraced Darwinism and atheism. He wanted to build an educational system without any reference to God or Bible.
He was the most famous American philosopher of the early and mid-20th century. He was influenced by Hegel, Karl Marx and Darwin. He combined Hegel’s dialectic with Darwinian naturalism.
He argued that this naturalism must be applied to every area of philosophy and life, from logic to politics to education to aesthetics to science. He treated science as a pragmatic belief system with no reference to God. He said, science will sweep the supernatural into history’s dustbin. He said the philosophical conception of knowledge is religion continued under another name, and it should be abandoned. He wanted to base all knowledge on materialism, pragmatism and secularism. Pragmatism took the place of Word of God as our source of truth.
Truth is what works, falsehood is what does not. This philosophy of pragmatism was initially formulated by Charles S.Peirce and WIlliam James. But, Dewey took their secular pragmatism and built it into a comprehensive, systematic materialistic philosophy. In Dewey’s pragmatism, experience is the most elementary feature of ‘reality’. You decide what is reality by your experience. So, this is a man-centered epistemology. He wanted to apply this naturalistic philosophy to all social problems. He wanted to teach this atheistic, materialistic philosophy to every American kid.
Dave Breese wrote this about Dewey in his book Seven Men Who Rule the World from the Grave. “This humanism, of which Dewey was a fountainhead…became pervasive in our American schools, especially on the graduate level. From that point on, the ruling point of view in American education was that there was no ruling point of view”.
So, today, the ruling point of view in American education is that there is no ruling point of view.
The only absolute is that there are no absolutes.
The only standard is that there are no standards.
What Should We do?
So, what should we do about it? Don’t lose hope. These seven men might be ruling from their graves and leading countless people to early graves, but Jesus is ruling from His throne. They are dead, He is alive. Lord Jesus clearly warned us in John 8:44
Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own, for he is a liar and the father of it.
Satan was a murderer from the beginning and there is no truth in him. Revelation 12:9 says, Satan deceives the whole world. 2 Corinthians 4:4 says, as the god of this world he blinded the minds of them which believeth not. Public schools have rejected a God-centric education, so there is no truth in its philosophy of education and it is fostering a culture of rape, drugs, violence and murder. Do you know many Hindus and Muslims send their children to Christian schools? They say, Christian schools are lot, lot better than public schools because they teach an eternal, moral dimension to life.
We should bring back a Christ-centric education. Christian children need Christian education. We should tell our children that God should be the center of our education. Christ should be focus of our attention. Cross should be the object of our affection. We should teach them critical thinking. Jesus said in Matthew 22:37, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind”.
With all thy heart, with all thy soul and with all thy mind….
You see, love is the foundation for all human behavior. Yesterday, when this school massacre happened, it was Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday. It’s unusual both days happened on the same day. Both originated in Christian religion. Valentine’s Day is about love, Ash Wednesday is about the Lent. Remembering the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. That is where our hope lies.
Let us pray.
‘Lord Jesus, we grieve for the precious lives lost in the school shootings yesterday. We pray that you comfort mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, grandfathers, grandmothers, relatives and friends who lost their loved ones. We pray that you help us to build a God-centric, Christ-honoring, Bible-based educational system. Help us to resist the lies of Darwinism, materialism and secularism that pervaded our culture and educational system. We worship you the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, Amen.
References
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/17437.Malcolm_Muggeridge
Christian Education for the Real World By Dr. Henry M. Morris
Millstones & Stumbling Blocks: Understanding Education in Post-Christian America
By Bradley Heath
Restoring America’s Christian Education
By Stephen McDowell