The recent June 21st issue of The New American magazine is a special report on education in America. The people that publish The New American realize that the major problem we have with education in this country is the public school system. An informative article by Alex Newman in this issue is entitled Government Schools vs. Christianity. Among other things Alex Newman noted: Despite the myth of religious ‘neutrality’ and ‘secular’ schooling perpetrated by the government school establishment and its apologists, all education is fundamentally religious in nature. That is just as true in government schools across the United States as it is in Islamic madrassas of Pakistan. The only question is what what religion and what worldview is being taught.” This is a cogent truth that most people, Christians included, never seem to grasp.

Newman goes on to observe that “non-Christians and anti-Christians with communist leanings were primarily responsible for the government takeover of education in America beginning in the mid-1850s…The gradual replacement of Christianity in the public schools began early on in the history of government-run education. It started with Communist Utopian Robert Owen, the first serious advocate of a total government takeover of education in America. In Owen’s view, only government training of children in collectivism from a young age could produce people ready to dispense with private property and live for what he viewed as the greater good of the collective.

Owen’s collective colony in New Harmony, Indiana went belly-up after only a few years, as most of such socialist experiments did in the 1800s. And there were a lot of them here in the 1800s, from Brook Farm to Fruitlands to New Harmony to the Shaker towns in several states, although the Shakers lasted longer than some of the others.

After his dismal failure at New Harmony, Owen teamed up with Orestes Brownson to promote a “secret society modeled on the Carbonari, an early 19th century Italian secret revolutionary society to work toward that goal.” And Newman tells us that the object of this society was “…convincing the public to support a government takeover of education. The second was to get men elected to the legislatures who would help advance that mission. But there was an even more ambitious goal: setting up a national system of compulsory government schools that would exclude all religion.” Brownson said that “The great object was to get rid of Christianity.”

And Unitarian Horace Mann “wanted to get the Bible out of education under the guise of stopping ‘sectarianism’.” Mann was totally opposed to the Calvinist church schools in Massachusetts. Mann was totally opposed to Reformed theology–indeed he had apostatized from it and formed his own creedal statement of how he felt life should be lived and he wanted to foist that apostate world view on the children of Massachusetts.

All of this happened in the early to mid-1800s–not the 1900s! Our problems with public schools go way, way back to their beginnings. You are not going to reform them by going to parent-teacher meetings or running for the local school board or throwing more public money at the public schools under the fallacious guise of “quality education.”

The public school system will not be reformed because it is doing what it s founders intended it to do. Those who say public education has failed do not understand what this system was created to do. Actually, the public schools have been a howling success at what they were created to do–propagandize your children into accepting and embracing the socialist, anti-Christian worldview.

This should be apparent to anyone who engages in serious thought when you see what is being taught in public schools in our day. Our public schools are teaching concepts that Lenin and Mao would love and endorse. Why do you think that so many of our kids are so sold on communism and socialism? Because they are getting it taught to them in school, that’s why. Oh they don’t call it communism. They give it nobler-sounding names like Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project and a host of others. But what it amounts to is socialist doctrine and propaganda. If you choose to use public schools your kids are being indoctrinated in this stuff.

The articles in this latest issue of the New American advocate that you remove your kids from public schools and work to defund them and I could not agree more. Every new bond issue for public schools that comes up should be voted down. And they would be if only parents started to grasp the agenda of these brain laundries in sufficient numbers.

This Chinese virus that kept so many kids out of school last year allowed parents to get a look at at least some of what was being taught in schools and lots of parents did not like what they saw. Enrollments in public schools are down this year in many states, even here in Louisiana. Home school enrollment is on the rise–and that is good. We need to continue this trend.

More parents need to begin to grasp what the public school system is really all about, particularly Christian parents. Their primary goal is robbing your children of their faith and turning them into good, compliant little collectivists. Despite the efforts of some good teachers, that is the objective of the public school system and those that promote it, and people need to start figuring that out.

June 25, 2021

~ The Author ~
Al Benson Jr. is the editor and publisher of “The Copperhead Chronicle“, a quarterly newsletter that presents history from a pro-Southern and Christian perspective. He has written for several publications over the years. His articles have appeared in “The National Educator,” “The Free Magnolia,” and the “Southern Patriot.” I addition he was the editor of, and wrote for, “The Christian Educator” for several years. In addition to The Copperhead Chronicles, Al also maintains Revised History.

He is currently a member of the Confederate Society of America and the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and has, in the past, been a member of the John Birch Society. He is the co-author, along with Walter D. Kennedy, of the book “Lincoln’s Marxists” and he has written for several Internet sites as well as authoring a series of booklets, with tests, dealing with the War of Northern Aggression, for home school students.

Mr. Benson is a highly respected scholar and writer and has graciously allowed the family of Kettle Moraine Publications to publish his works. We are proud to have his involvement with this project.

He and his wife now live in northern Louisiana.