Jer. 32:35 π Mt. 24:10 π Mt. 24:24 π Jn. 1:3 π Jn. 8:32 π Jn. 17:21 π 2 Cor. 2:11 π 2 Cor. 3:17 π Gal. 5:13 π Gal. 5:19-21 π Gal. 5:22-23 π Eph. 4:3 π Eph. 4:13 π Eph. 4:14 π 2 Ths. 2:3 π 2 Ths. 2:4 π 1 Tim. 4:1 π 2 Tim. 3:1-5 π 1 Pet. 5:8 π 1 Jn. 5:19 π Rev. 9:20 π Rev. 13:11
All quotes are from the short article “Against School: How Public Education Cripples Our Kids, and Why,” by John Taylor Gatto, unless otherwise specified. Anyone with children or an interest in public education should also read his book Underground History of American Education.
There are at least three central goals or attainments embedded within the gospel of Christ Jesus that are not to be found anywhere in the American “education” system of compulsory schooling:
That public compulsory schooling should have no enforced standard of spirituality can be understood but there is not to be found these ideas in even their “secular” counterparts.
John Taylor Gatto writes, “By the time I finally retired in 1991 [after 30 years of teaching in some of the worst and some of the best schools in Manhattan], I had more than enough reason to think of our schools – with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers – as virtual factories of childishness. Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way.” This was one of the obvious inconsistencies (between compulsory schooling’s purported and oft-touted goals of making “good people, good citizens and each person his or her personal best”) and the routinely abysmal performance of the school system in attaining anything resembling any of these goals) that troubled Gatto throughout his long teaching career.
In the years that followed his retirement, Gatto traced the roots of the “educational revolution” that occurred in America between 1905 and 1930 to what we might call “the Prussian connection.” The names of many of these “revolutionaries” are obscure to most Americans (testimony to the concealed work of deceit and darkness involved) but their ongoing influence is real nonetheless. Gatto cites one such source, stating:
“[Alexander] Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, [in his 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education] makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant ranking on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever reintegrate into a dangerous whole.
“The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. …what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens – all in order to render the populace ‘manageable.’”
One should note well that Germany, whom the world fought in both WWI and WWII, was the direct “heir to Prussian thought and culture.” Germany and Hitler and his Third Reich movement which drew in millions of followers and engulfed Europe and the whole world in bloody warfare in which untold millions died, is a part of that heritage these “educational revolutionaries” have caused America to embrace.
Nor should it be supposed that race or class need be the only motivation for the elitism that requires a de-fanged, declawed, dumbed down, docile, brain-dead, unmotivated, isolated, divided populace. Gatto wisely points out, “…the motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the by now familiar belief that ‘efficiency’ is the paramount virtue, rather than love, liberty, laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed.” This list coincides well with Paul’s list of the works of the flesh that keeps one from inheriting the kingdom of God ( Gal. 5:19-21 ) as well as his list of the characteristics of the people of the end times! ( 2 Tim. 3:1-5; top ) What a strange “coincidence”! Note well the building blocks used to construct this compulsory schooling system!
Gatto goes on to say,
“There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or the family farm. But mass production [which required a dumbed-down, obedient labor force also] required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century, most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn’t actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn’t have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modern era – marketing. [This was the brain-child of men like Edward Bernays – Sigmund Freud’s nephew – and was first known as propaganda and then public relations.]
“Now, you needn’t have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School [especially with its pervasive boredom and meaninglessness] has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up.”
Gatto offers two “bottom line” conclusions to all this darkness:
- “…we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants.” And
- [As a result of compulsory schooling’s specifications to produce “a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor”] maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives… We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to the political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults.”
Those who intend to live a deeply spiritual life in Christ in light of Gatto’s research and findings (which is easily and readily verifiable on many counts), must ask even deeper questions like:
- Whose servants does this system train children to become? And
- How does one explain how a Christian nation like America would embrace this “educational” system so obviously built on tactics, beliefs and values that can only be called anti-christ?
When one sees the truth of what America has done to its children since this “educational revolution,” one must rightly compare it to the Israelites’ giving of their children to the foreign god Molech ( Jer. 32:35 ) and we can only rightly conclude that America is a nation that looks like a lamb but speaks like a dragon. ( Rev. 13:11; top ) And this is precisely how we should view this “educational revolution” – it is nothing less than a long-ranging pervasive scheme of the devil and the demonic to gain power and control over the generations of children subjected to this systematic conditioning falsely called “education.” To see it as anything else is an exercise in denial of obvious spiritual realities.
It would be extreme arrogance to believe that this immaturity trained into students at so young an age has no impact on our corporate expressions of following Christ. Gatto, speaking of his own experience in challenging “the official notion that boredom and childishness were the natural state of affairs in the classroom,” writes, “The empire struck back, of course; childish adults regularly conflate opposition with disloyalty.” Whole “churches,” especially mega-“churches,” are run by childish adults who respond to every act of opposition to their spiritually immature acts and teachings with “damage control” and ostracization of one who simply believes that faithfully following Christ is not necessarily the same thing as blindly following the “church” or the “pastor.”
The modern “educational” system incorporates far too many subtle (and many not at all subtle!) diversions and snares away from the true way of following Christ to be merely a plot of men wanting to practice easier governing and more lucrative business tactics. To be sure, those probably were the primary goals of the men who became “educational revolutionaries” – undoubtedly they were firmly convinced they were doing the world a favor. Hitler and Stalin, to name but two, were also similarly convinced about their own actions! Men whose good intentions blinded them to the realities of the consequences of their theories and actions is a common story in human history. Men motivated by fear, greed, class hatred or pride are particularly susceptible to this blindness.
We must see beyond the actions of men and recognize the deadly attacks of the enemy of our souls if we would be free of all their influence upon us. Anything less than this will not be the truth that sets us free ( Jn. 8:32 ) nor the vigilance we are instructed to exercise in regard to our spiritual enemy ( 1 Pet. 5:8 ) and will leave us unaware and unprepared to defend ourselves against his attacks and schemes against us. ( 2 Cor. 2:11 ) If we will not bear the fruit of God’s Spirit called self-control ( Gal. 5:22-23 ), it is not surprising that we , along with the rest of the world, come under the control of the evil one. ( 1 Jn. 5:19; top )
The compulsory school system is deliberately designed to torpedo all forms of unity, maturity and liberty. Without Christ-centered unity, the world can be excused for not believing that Christ came from God. ( Jn. 17:21 ) Without maturity, we will remain children, always vulnerable to the cunning deceptions of men and demons. ( Eph. 4:14 , 1 Tim. 4:1 ) Without liberty, we cannot fully experience the Lordship of Christ by His Spirit. ( 2 Cor. 3:17; top ) Is it any wonder that the demonic would instigate a worldwide system that would erode the humans’ ability to attain to these very basic things of God?
The modern “church” is also patterned, in most cases, after elements present in the compulsory school system. The “church” and the school system are indeed partnered in producing the great falling away, the apostasy, that occurs before Christ’s return. ( Mt. 24:10 , 2 Ths. 2:3 ) They are two of the great schemes enacted against mankind, schemes that have even deceived the elect people of God. ( Mt. 24:24; top ) Blindly attend these institutions at your own risk and send your children off into these very capable hands to their detriment and harm if you so choose. But from this day forward you cannot say you haven’t been warned. Your blood and the blood of your children will be on your hands.
Satan , because he was not, as Christ was, an integral part of creation ( Jn. 1:3 ), requires external methods of control. Fear, oppression, persecution and execution are his methods of achieving his worldwide kingdom where he intends to be worshiped as if he were the Most High God. ( 2 Ths. 2:4; top ) Satan’s form of rule will always be top-down, trickle-down, outward tyranny over the people. Satan’s human tools are routinely duped into believing themselves to be possessors of a superior ability or light whereby they (unlike the common-herd, ignorant masses below them) are able and entitled to rule over the lowly rabble they so callously “educate” for their own ends and purposes.
The result of this experimental tinkering with human development that men commonly call “the educational system” will be a generation of children willing to follow and serve Satan ‘s kingdom. They will not likely be “devil worshipers” in the full-blown sense of the word (though some undoubtedly will be – Rev. 9:20; top ) but rather they will be so caught up in the trivial pursuits of their childish, self-centered ideas of personal success that they will never think about, let alone come to understand, just who it is that they serve. The devil, who as long ago as the Enlightenment convinced men that he no longer existed, loves that this is so.
Let he who has ears hear.
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