Education is not neutral. Math, science, history, reading and writing – each subject is shaped by the lens through which the teacher views the world. Education is not neutral. It’s forming the minds of the next generation, instilling in them the framework through which they’ll see and operate in life. Education, in other words, is discipleship.

Don’t believe me? Take it from G3 Ministries, which stands for Gospel – Grace – Glory. We recommend this G3 podcast episode (#68)  entitled “The Need For Christian Education.” Josh Buice, Virgil Walker, and Scott Anoil discuss not only the history of public education, but, also, they discuss how our whole idea of education has been upended by the world.

This uniquely different, but helpful, discussion is a wonderful take on the education debate worthy of your time. Please watch “The Need For Christian Education” and share it on your social media platforms and send the link to your friends:

As Mao Zedong took over China with his communist revolutionaries, he sparked one of the largest mass migrations of the 20th century. Between 1948 and 1950, an estimated 2 million Chinese refugees fled Mao’s regime and escaped to Taiwan and other countries around the world. While Mao was razing and restructuring Chinese culture and society, these refugees were able to begin new lives in safer and freer countries.

While the Chinese mass migration makes the history books, a similar 2-million-in-2-years migration is currently happening—across educational borders. An analysis published by Harvard’s Education Next Institute (EN) recently announced that, between the spring of 2020 and the spring of 2022, “Our polling data indicate that district-operated schools lost 4% of student enrollments to other types of schooling between 2020 and 2022.” EN went on to say, “If that percentage is accurate, it means that nearly 2 million students have shifted from traditional public schools to alternative school arrangements.”

Individual examples of the recent dramatic shift in educational choices are not hard to find. While New York City (NYC) public schools have been steadily losing students over the past five years, they lost 10 percent of their remaining students during the COVID-19 epidemic alone. Those children are not expected to return, and the NYC public school system is now at a 15-year enrollment low. California’s state school system is at a 20-year enrollment low; over 270,000 students have left since COVID. Los Angeles alone lost more than 10 percent of students. The Chicago government school system is projected to have lost 100,000 students—more than 25 percent of total enrollment—by the end of the ten-year period between 2015 and 2025.

And states such as Michigan, Rhode Island, and Minnesota have all experienced drops in enrollment, continuing even after the initial COVID-19 year. Now, EN does caution that “the overall picture shows less change than media reports portray,” and that these trends do not constitute a “mass exodus,” but the statistics are nonetheless remarkably significant.

Harsh lockdown policies and virus mitigation measures have surely been significant in shifting the nation’s educational choices. According to Education Next’s analysis:

“In November 2020, Education Next polling data revealed widespread parental worries about the learning loss, social isolation, emotional distress, and physical inactivity induced by school closures, online learning programs, and other measures designed to prevent Covid spread.”

However, the presence of COVID-19 lockdown policies can’t be the only factor; EN also points out that when pandemic measures were relaxed, their polls showed a notable improvement in parent satisfaction. “By spring 2022 … parental distress had subsided.” Yet enrollments continue to decline. Something else must be up.

As the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) suggests, what started as “pandemic pods” during the thick of the crisis eventually became co-ops and “microschools,” which many families have found to work better for them than government schools. Catholic schools and private schools were more likely to remain open during the pandemic and thus received an influx of students. In short, FEE assesses, “Parents are recognizing that they have many more options for their children’s education and are continuing to abandon government-assigned district schools.”

This change is notably visible in EN’s data. Contrary to their government schools over the same two-year period, private schools (8 to 10 percent), charter schools (5 to 7 percent) and homeschooling (6 to 7 percent) all boasted shares of enrollment greater than when the pandemic started. And the enrollment numbers match the parental polls:

“Parents expressed higher levels of satisfaction with their child’s school if their student was attending a private or charter school rather than a district school.”

This change in the nation’s educational landscape has provoked a range of reactions from the nation’s leaders—on the one hand, no fewer than 18 new states over the past two years have passed laws broadening education choice. However, not all government officials have been as friendly to the widening school choice trend; the U.S. Department of Education recently considered instituting new hurdles for charter schools to receive government funds, inciting bipartisan protest and raising the hue and cry of even powerful liberal advocate Michael Bloomberg. Government reactions to parental choices will likely continue to unfold along one or the other of those two lines, and for Christians, who are commanded to pray for our leaders (1 Timothy 2:1-2), this is both a timely and an important area to focus on.

In a plummeting culture such as ours, educational choice is becoming increasingly imperative. Former governor of Virginia Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, inadvertently expressed one reason why: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” This is a stark departure from the biblical model of education, in which parents are responsible for teaching their children (Deuteronomy 6:7, Ephesians 6:4). Schools help parents accomplish that goal; parents don’t abdicate their responsibility to the school system, and neither should that responsibility be divested from them by force of law.

When parents decide that their child would be better served by a private school, charter school, homeschooling, or online learning, it should not be the authority of the school district, local, state or federal governments to tell them otherwise. Doing so flips the biblical model on its head, and comments such as McAuliffe’s are foundationally wicked, because they imply that schools, not parents, are the ultimate authority over the education of children.

Education freedom should be championed in every state in the Union. Make no mistake about it, parents who want their children to attend government schools should be able to do so. However, the rising migration across educational borders—only accelerated by the the pandemic—also means “we, the people,” must work to reduce all barriers to education choices so that parents, not the government, are enabled to make the best decisions possible about their children’s development. This should be a consideration in picking candidates to vote for in this upcoming election, and in every future election we participate in.

When humanist John Dewey and his disciples took over the emerging government-education system created decades earlier to advance collectivism, the fledgling system was still in its infancy.

By the time he died in 1952, though, it was a well-oiled collectivist machine that would obliterate America’s religious, intellectual, and political heritage more effectively than any force previously imaginable.

Dewey is often lauded as the founding father of the “progressive” education that now has more than 85 percent of American children in its grip. Although he wasn’t alone—he stood on the shoulders of fellow collectivists Robert Owen and Horace Mann—Dewey certainly deserves much of the credit, or blame, for unleashing it on the United States and humanity.

Like Mann and Owen before him, Dewey had ulterior motives when he dedicated himself with missionary zeal to the cause of “education reform.” Fortunately for future generations and historians, he was a prolific writer who cranked out a seemingly never-ending stream of essays, papers, manifestos, and articles. His views and objectives, then, are hardly a mystery.

Dewey wanted to fundamentally transform the United States. He wanted it to look more like the Soviet Union, in fact. To do that, he believed a total transformation of education and society was required—literally “changing the conception of what constitutes education,” as he wrote in “The Relation of Theory to Practice in Education” in 1904.

Education must bring about a “new social order,” he argued.

As was the case with virtually all of the key figures involved in the government takeover of education, Dewey rejected Christianity and even the very existence of God. More on his religion later. He also rejected the individualism and liberty that defined America up to that point, with its strong protections for God-given rights, private property, and free markets.

Instead, Dewey worked fiendishly to continue the severing of American and Western education’s Christian roots. The process was launched by Owen, the Welsh communist whose commune in Indiana failed. It formally took root under Mann in Massachusetts, when he imported the Owen-inspired Prussian model of education. But that was all to be just the beginning.

By the time Dewey and his disciples worked their magic, the scheme would culminate in a nation in which the overwhelming majority of high-school seniors violently reject the biblical worldview, and in which most young people describe themselves as socialist.

On top of that, the system would produce a nation in which less than a third of those same seniors would even be considered “proficient” in reading and math, according to federal data gathered from the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Replacing Freedom With Collectivism via Education

Interestingly, Dewey was from Burlington, Vermont—socialist Bernie Sanders’s stomping grounds. And like Sanders, Dewey styled himself a “democratic” socialist. But many decades before Sanders visited the Soviet Union on his honeymoon while it was slaughtering and torturing dissidents, Dewey made a pilgrimage to Moscow under Bolshevik rule.

Of course, Karl Marx called for government control of education in “The Communist Manifesto,” and so the Soviets complied. Decades earlier, Owen, another communist, did the same. Dewey picked up where they left off, fervently advocating total control of all education by the state with even more passion than Sanders does today.

Writing in the far-left magazine New Republic, Dewey provided glowing reports about the communist system being imposed upon the people of the Soviet Union. He was especially pleased with its so-called education system, celebrating the way it was instilling a “collectivistic mentality” in Soviet children in his “Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World” published in 1929.

Despite his fondness for Soviet totalitarianism and the communist “ideology” behind it, Dewey would publicly criticize Stalin and Stalinism later in life. His model for a communist United States, by contrast, was outlined in Edward Bellamy’s 1888 book “Looking Backward,” a fantasy about a wonderful collectivist America in the year 2000 where all private property would be nationalized by government.

Dewey’s socialist views were hardly a secret. In “Liberalism and Social Action,” he wrote that the “only form of enduring social organization that is now possible is one in which the new forces of productivity are cooperatively controlled.” “Organized social planning,” he continued in his well-known 1935 work, “is now the sole method of social action by which liberalism can realize its professed aims.”

In common with virtually all the totalitarians of the 20th century, Dewey understood that the education of children would be fundamental to achieving his Utopian vision of collectivism. “Education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness,” he claimed. “The adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction.”

Out With 3 Rs, in With Collectivism

In his important 1898 essay “The Primary Education Fetich [sic],” Dewey argued strongly against the then-heavy emphasis on reading, writing, and arithmetic in the younger years. It produced highly literate, independent-minded individualists with faith in God and freedom. That was not conducive to a collectivist Utopia, obviously.

Instead, Dewey thought the main focus of education during those precious early years should be socialization and emphasizing collectivism. In particular, the reformer wanted to ditch reading and writing in the primary grades to concentrate on giving children “the habits of thought and action” that he believed were “required for effective participation in community life.”

An astute operator, Dewey recognized that the liberty-minded and overwhelmingly Christian teachers, taxpayers, and parents of America of that era would never knowingly support his radical educational and political ambitions if they understood them. “Change must come gradually,” he explained in that same essay. “To force it unduly would compromise its final success by favoring a violent reaction.”

So instead of going to the American people, Dewey went to the Rockefeller oil dynasty, which was giving away unfathomable amounts of money for “educational reform” through the “General Education Board.” The “philanthropic” outfit gave Dewey millions of dollars to create an experimental school to try out his ideas—a school that successfully cranked out reading-disabled collectivists.

In his crucial 1916 work “Democracy and Education,” Dewey argued that the education regime he envisioned would be “the process through which the needed transformation may be accomplished.” And so, he set about taking control of the education system.

Having failed as a primary- and secondary-school educator, Dewey’s effort to seize control of the school system began with a leadership position in education at the Rockefeller-funded University of Chicago. Later, he went to Columbia University’s Teachers College.

From his ivory-tower perch, Dewey would train up legions of teachers and disciples to unleash on an unsuspecting United States and carry forward his vision. It worked. Dewey became the founding father of America’s “progressive” public education system, and his ideology went mainstream.

Another Dewey “achievement” while in academia was resurrecting quack methods for teaching reading that had been discredited in the 1840s under Mann in Boston. That incredible saga—the root cause of America’s current illiteracy crisis—will be the subject of a future piece in this series.

Perhaps even more important and far-reaching than being able to advance his views on education and politics was Dewey’s influence on the religious views of Americans. Dewey was a self-proclaimed humanist, with his public declarations on religion fusing atheism with socialism and communism. His success on this front is unquestionable and will be the subject of an upcoming piece in this series as well.

In fairness to Dewey, Owen, Mann, and the lesser-known characters behind the government takeover of education, they didn’t have the 20th century in the rearview mirror. It might be said, in their defense, that they did not know the ideology of collectivism, when implemented, would lead to the untimely deaths and mass slaughter of hundreds of millions of people. Now, we should know better.

This article was originally published by The Epoch Times, and is one report in a series of articles examining the origins of government education in the United States.

Over the last few generations, Christianity has declined at a massive rate in America, with millennials becoming the first generation in American history with self-proclaimed Christians in the minority. Now, the culprit is becoming clear to everyone: Government. In particular, anti-Christian, anti-God indoctrination masquerading as “public education” has been the key driver of those trends.

While it is a widely held misconception that government schools became more secular as the culture did, the reality is that the “public education” system was always intended to turn Americans against God. Indeed, it was created for that purpose. And it has been phenomenally successful in pursuing that goal, with most Christian children abandoning the faith after more than a decade in a public “school.”

According to a massive report headlined “Promise and Peril: The History of American Religiosity and Its Recent Decline” from the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, the record is clear on the issue. It is not urbanization, or more education, or the progress of “science,” or even more welfare spending, that has so thoroughly de-Christianized America and the rest of the Western world.

Instead, the data and the historical record show that the more tax money a secular government spends on “education,” the more the public will turn away from God. “Childhood religiosity was heavily affected by government spending on education,” wrote AEI researcher Lyman Stone in his report, perhaps stating the obvious.

“Thus, while more educated people were not less religious, societies that spent more public money on education were less religious,” Lyman found. “It is not educational attainment per se that reduces religiosity, but government control of education and, to a lesser extent, government support for retirement.”

Other researchers have theorized that simply receiving more “education” could explain the trend away from faith and Christianity. However, researchers Raphael Franck and Laurence Iannaccone, who studied the issue in depth, noted that “higher educational attainment did not predict lower religiosity: More and less educated people are similarly religious.”

Similarly, the move toward cities and industrialization could not explain the trends either. Ironically, the two researchers found the opposite. “A more urban and industrialized population was associated with greater religiosity,” the report states, adding that even government welfare largely taking the place of churches supporting the poor did not explain the catastrophic plunge in religiosity.

Indeed, according to Lyman, who also cites other researchers, secularized education provided by government that banishes any mention of God “can explain nearly the totality of change in religiosity.” As he puts it, “increasingly secularized government control of education … can account for virtually the entire increase in secularization around the developed world.”

This is exactly what Scripture warns of. “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it,” reads Proverbs 22:6. Jesus warned in Luke 6:40, “A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher.” And yet American Christians continued to send their children to anti-Christian government schools.

The fruit is clear, too. Since 1960, the report says, the share of American adults who attend any religious service has plunged from half to about a third. Meanwhile, the share who say they are members of any religious body has fallen from over 75 percent to just 62 percent. And the number of American who identify with any religion has plunged from over 95 percent to just 75.

This was deliberate, of course. “The decline in religiosity in America is not the product of a natural change in preferences, but an engineered outcome of clearly identifiable policy choices in the past,” the AEI report explains, again stating the obvious.

This writer has investigated those policy choices in depth. It began with anti-Christian Communist Robert Owen in the early 1800s, who created what whistle-blower Orestes Browson described as a “secret society” to promote the then-radical idea that government should “educate” children.

Horace Mann and John Dewey, the architects of America’s government “education” system, also used “public school” to wage war on Christianity and individual liberty. The outrageous 1962-1963 U.S. Supreme Court rulings against Bible and prayer in school merely formalized the revolution and put the final nails in the coffin.

Decades after sensible conservative leaders such as E. Ray Moore of Exodus Mandate began sounding the alarm and calling for Christians to leave government schools, even the Big Government neo-“conservatives” at the anti-Trump National Review have finally caught on.

“For religious conservatives who care about the fate of American culture, it cannot be emphasized enough that education is the whole ball game,” wrote Cameron Hildtich in NRO in an article about the AEI report. “All other policy areas amount to little more than tinkering around the edges.”

“The time has come for religious parents to take their children back from the state,” he concluded. “It simply will not do anymore for faithful Americans to drop their sons and daughters off at the curbside every morning for the government to collect as if they were taking out the trash…. the only real road to religious revival is the one that begins with each parent’s first step out of the public school’s doors.”

Finally, the fact that government schools have brainwashed generations of Americans against God and the church is becoming too obvious to hide. Whether it is too late to turn the tide in America and the rest of the West remains to be seen. But at this point, what is clear is that religious parents of all faiths must run for the exits of the government indoctrination system — now.