The Messianic Character of American Education
Rushdoony’s study tells us an important part of American history: exactly what has public education been trying to accomplish? Before the 1830s and Horace Mann, no schools in the U.S. were state supported or state controlled. They were local, parent-teacher enterprises, supported without taxes, and taking care of all children. They were remarkably high in standard and were Christian. From Mann to the present, the state has used education to socialize the child. The school’s basic purpose, according to its own philosophers, is not education in the traditional sense of the 3 R’s. Instead, it is to promote “democracy” and “equality,” not in their legal or civic sense, but in terms of the engineering of a socialized citizenry. Public education became the means of creating a social order of the educators design. Such men saw themselves and the school in messianic terms. This book was instrumental in launching the Christian school and homeschool movements.
Index
The Messianic Character of American Education
Introduction: By Ivan R. Bierly
2. The “Divine Rights” of Education
3. Horace Mann and the Messianic Character of American Education
4. James G. Carter: An Engine to Sway the People
5. Edward A. Sheldon: Oswego and the Secular School
6. Henry Barnard: The Wheeling of the Spheres
7. William Torrey Harris: The State and the True Self of Man
8. John Swett: The Self-Preservation of the State
9. Charles De Garmo: Morality as Social Adjustment
10. Col. Francis Wayland Parker: The Divine Child in the Divine State
11. William James: Education and Conditioning
12. Nicholas Murray Butler: Education for the State
13. G. Stanley Hall: The Child-Centered Society
14. Herman Harrell Horne: Man and the Universe
15. John Dewey’s New Jerusalem: “The Great Community”
16. J. B. Watson: Science and Utopia
17. Carleton Washburne: Education to Save Democracy
18. Edward Lee Thorndike: Education as a Science
19. Boyd H. Bode: “Is Progressivism a New Absolutism?”
20. Willam Heard Kilpatrick: The Repeal of the Past
21. Harold O. Rugg: Democracy as a Messianic Religion
22. George S. Counts: Who Shall Control Education?
23. Theodore Brameld: Democracy and Consensus
24. The Kindergarten: Model for a New Eden
25. Is the University Beyond the Laws?
26.The Freedom of Higher Education
27. “Education as a Religion”
28. the Lowest Common Denominator
Rev. R.J. Rushdoony (1916–2001), was a leading theologian, church/state expert, and author of numerous works on the application of Biblical law to society. He started the Chalcedon Foundation in 1965. His Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) began the contemporary theonomy movement which posits the validity of Biblical law as God’s standard of obedience for all. He therefore saw God’s law as the basis of the modern Christian response to the cultural decline, one he attributed to the church’s false view of God’s law being opposed to His grace. This broad Christian response he described as “Christian Reconstruction.” He is credited with igniting the modern Christian school and homeschooling movements in the mid to late 20th century. He also traveled extensively lecturing and serving as an expert witness in numerous court cases regarding religious liberty. Many ministry and educational efforts that continue today, took their philosophical and Biblical roots from his lectures and books.
Learn more about R.J. Rushdoony by visiting: https://chalcedon.edu/founder