Public Schools Are Humanist Seminaries

Seeing that this coming Monday will be Independence Day, I had a thought. What a wonderful time it would be if American Christians decided to declare their independence from the Humanist seminaries, we call public schools. Because that’s what these “schools” really are.

Sam Blumenfeld, when researching for his book Is Public Education Necessary? noted that “Out of this labor came some fascinating discoveries: that American intellectual history is inseparable from its religious history; that public education was never needed, and that literacy in America was higher before compulsory public education than it is today; that socialists, who were very active in the public school movement, began operating covertly in secret cells in America as early as 1829, before the word socialism was even invented; that philosophy is more powerful than economics; and that religion, in the long run, is more powerful than philosophy…” Blumenfeld is telling you a lot here and what he is leading up to is that the public school system is inherently a religious institution. He observed the religious aura of public schools when he said: “The youngster that passes through its classrooms emerges indoctrinated in a body of secular values as if he had gone to a sort of governmental parochial school…This is particularly true in the social sciences, where a secular humanist view of the world is presented virtually as a revealed religion based on an unquestioned faith in science and materialism. Thus, the rituals of school life replace the rituals of the church to fill the youngster’s days with a formalism called ‘education’.”

Blumenfeld has thus identified the spiritual nature of the public school system. It is a spiritual entity in competition with the Christian faith. Where years ago, the church used to be the center of the community, today it has been relegated to the fringe of the community, having been replaced by the public school with its band and sports programs–and unfortunately it seems that most Christians are perfectly content with that. Thanks to their miseducation they are unable to grasp the public school as a religious worldview and entity that is in competition with their Christian worldview–and when someone tries to explain this to them, they mostly don’t want to hear it. Easier to ignore it all. Less personal responsibility that way.

The humanists, though, are quite vocal about their religious relationship to the public school system, if you are just willing to listen to them. One of their most noted practitioners made a statement that was published in The Humanist back in the January/February issue in 1983. John Dunphy, who held a B.A. in history and political science from the University of Illinois, was a humanist who saw the public-school classroom in quite a different light than most Christians are aware of. Dunphy wrote an article for The Humanist entitled “A Religion For A New Age.” Dunphy stated, in part, “I am convinced that the battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school’s classrooms by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity that recognizes and respects the spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being. These teachers must embody the same selfless dedication as the most rabid fundamentalist preachers, for they will be ministers of another sort, utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever subject they teach, regardless of the educational level–preschool day care or large state university. The classroom must and will become an area 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, resplendent in its promise of a world in which the never-realized Christian ideal of ‘love thy neighbor’ will finally be realized.” Is that a religious statement or not?

Obviously, for Dunphy, the public school was much more than a place to promote neutral knowledge. It was a seminary to promote the anti-Christian faith of humanism. You can look at the public schools, even since 1983 when Dunphy wrote this, and it shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to discern where they have gone. So when people tell me not to give up on the public schools yet, I have to ask “Why?” This is an institution Christians need to declare their independence from and I can’t think of a better time to do that than now!