by Al Benson Jr.
Today we see a giant, monster public education bureaucracy, financed by Washington (with our money). There is, after all, nothing quite like financing your own destruction. Horace Mann and the Order notwithstanding, we have as much crime, poverty, and sin as we ever had--more in fact. We should be able to look back at how wrong Horace Mann was, intentionally or otherwise, and see how closely akin to Marxism his thought processes were. Mann was a beautiful example of what I call the Yankee/Marxist.
Undoubtedly due to his connections with the Order and under the influence of it, Mann worked diligently to free schools of their basically Christian and independent status and to put them under the thumb of government. His hostility toward Calvinism and the Reformed Faith in New England and against schools free of government meddling knew almost no bounds. In his view schools were only "free" once they experienced the "liberty" of state regulation. Before that they were captives to their own independence and the independence of the churches that ran them. This had to cease and Mann helped to make sure it did.
Some have said that Mann was naive about socialism, though with his connections to the Order I might question that. He was completely committed to a socialized order, of which the government-controlled school was the first basic part. The conversion of American education into a government-run instrument was the most dangerous step into socialism this country could have taken--and the sad tragedy of it was that Christians had been gulled into going along with and promoting it. They still do.
In the "Communist Manifesto" which hack writer Karl Marx wrote at the behest of the League of the Just (Illuminati) in 1848 (if you look at the first edition of the Manifesto it didn't even have Marx's name on it) you will see that Marx listed ten measures which Communists could use in varying degrees to accomplish the undermining and, hence, the eventual takeover of a nation by communism. The tenth point on that list is "free education for all children in public schools..." Can it not be said, then, that the government-run public school system is one of the measures of a communist society? That tenth point is the most insidious of all. So what Marx advocated in "The Communist Manifesto" Horace Mann had already set out to accomplish in the United States. Whether these two individuals were acquainted with each other or not, the damage has been done. Today we live with the results. Don't ever think that ideas from the past don't have consequences for you today.
Mann's contention that public education would cure all the social ills of the nation has been shown to be utter folly. Mann contended that by changing a person's environment you would change the person. He neglected to deal with the problem of human sin, which for him, did not exist. Hence his system of education will never do what he thought it would. The only answer for the problem of human sin is Jesus Christ and Mann had rejected Him as little more than a good moral example. He did not grasp that education without Christ does little more than to create clever devils. Whether Mann grasped this or not, those that influenced him did.
Going in the other direction, let us look at a man named Zach Montgomery. He was Assistant Attorney General of the United States, and in 1886, he published his thoughts on education in a book entitled "The School Question." Montgomery was an outspoken opponent of government-run education and he had done his homework. Montgomery showed with statistics that a relationship existed between state-run education and the rise in criminality, suicide, and delinquency--exactly the opposite of what Horace Mann had predicted! States which had most recently gone over to public schools showed a lower rate in each of these instances than states which had accepted public school education earlier.
Montgomery questioned the right of the state to even enter the field of education. He felt this was and should be a parental concern (the Bible makes this clear). The children did not and do not belong to the state, or to the Board of Education, yet the implication of a government-run education system were and are that they do.
This created a problem in West Virginia. Parents still thought their children belonged to them and not to the state. They had to be taught a lesson.
To be continued.
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