The Harsh Truth About Government Schools

Bruce Shortt has written what may be this decade’s definitive critique of the government-sponsored school system in this country. Shortt is a member of the South Carolina-based Exodus Mandate network. Along with T.C. Pinckney (who penned the forward) he was one of the co-sponsors of the recent resolution put before the Southern Baptist Convention to remove Christian children from government schools. The resolution was not adopted, but drew nationwide attention to the issue of our rapidly deteriorating government schools. Shortt’s book is aimed primarily at Christian parents, but can be read and appreciated by non-Christians.

Shortt draws on hundreds of sources ranging from newspaper reports to scientific studies. His topics include:

(1) the anti-Christian bias in government schools;

(2) the "mainstreaming" of homosexuality in them;

(3) the longstanding dumbing down of government schools, including manipulated test scores and statistics as well as the long-term growth of an anti-academic mindset;

(4) the breakdown of discipline and the rise of violence, as well as the underreporting of violent crime in government schools;

(5) the war against boys, a chief component of radical feminist incursions;

(6) the use of legal mind-altering drugs such as Ritalin and Prozac;

(7) many others.

Shortt has a look at a number of "school reform" efforts, argues that they are delusions, and concludes by contending that the time has come to speak out against government schools with our feet. He has ready responses for Christian parents who would claim (for example) that they do not have time or the resources to homeschool their children, and for Christian teachers who would maintain that they have an obligation to remain in government schools to ensure a Christian presence in them.

The history of how we got into this mess has been told many times before, so I will be as brief as possible. State-sponsored schools were not part of the original make-up of this country. None of the Founders – all of whom were educated at home or privately – saw providing compulsory, state-sponsored education as a proper function of the central government, which is why education is not mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. There were no government schools in any modern sense of that term until the 1840s, when Horace Mann’s Unitarians started them up in Massachusetts as what were then known as common schools. Mann had been to Prussia where he learned of a far different view of the relationship between central government and its citizens than our own tradition which sees the individual as special both morally and economically. Prussian schools considered children property of the state, and educated them accordingly. They were raised to be obedient to the state, their purpose being to advance the interests of the state.

Shortt also cites Robert Owen, one of the Anglo-American world’s first influential socialists, who developed a similar philosophy of education. Owen believed that children should be separated from their parents as early as possible and raised by the state. He believed people were exclusively the products of their social environments, and that if nurtured properly by the state, could be molded into whatever was desired. A key to the thinking that went into forming the official ideology of state-sponsored education was that human beings are innately good, not sinful, and that human nature could be perfected by the right kind of educational system. The ideology that eventually developed would hold that children could be molded into willing consumers of the products of big business and obedient servants of government. In short, the aims of state-sponsored schools were to transform thinking, highly individualistic and very literate citizens into an unthinking, collectivized mass. The slow but steady decline in literacy of all kinds was a by-product.

Why did nineteenth century Christians go along with this scheme? One of the central reasons was that most were Protestants who hoped common schools would slow the spread of Catholicism in the new world. What mattered most about Horace Mann was that he wasn’t sympathetic to Catholicism! It mattered less that he and his Unitarian colleagues were preaching that man could perfect himself through his own efforts, and that compulsory education was a means to this end. So Protestant Christians, including many clergy, supported government schools thinking they could control them.

Very slowly, Pandora’s Box opened. A creeping secularization began. A few theologians (R.L. Dabney is an example) warned of the emerging dangers of state-sponsored education. Dabney, who was no friend of Catholics, was surprisingly prescient. He warned that the danger was not Catholicism but secularism, and that if the common school movement continued unchecked, government schools would end up entirely secular institutions. Christianity – in whatever form – would eventually be driven from them. At the heart of the danger was the transference of responsibility for education from the home to the government, an inherently secular institution.

The official philosophy of state-sponsored education gradually became a materialistic humanism, protected by statism. When the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), it made the federal courts arbiter of what the states could do regarding religion in government schools. This opened the door to the eventual court-ordered removal of officially-sponsored prayer (even, in some cases, prior to athletic events), by virtue of the Court’s new "wall of separation" doctrine. This misreading of the Constitution holds that Establishment Clause in the First Amendment means the need to remove Christianity from all public institutions.

Various forms of ethical subjectivism, relativism and nihilism become unavoidable. They took forms such as "values clarification," which urged children to talk openly about "their values" but provided no direction. "Everybody has their own morals," teenagers learned to say (complete with grammar mistake). While the dialogue over moral theories may captivate career academics, the absence of definitive moral guidance in young people’s lives has proven catastrophic. During the past half-century, with materialistic humanists more and more in control, we saw the rise of teen pregnancies, sexually transmitted infections, a cavalier and casual attitude toward sex (and at ever-younger ages), the break-up of families – and epidemics of cheating and other forms of academic dishonesty. In the last analysis, what needs to be said about humanist ethics as that they don’t work. Humanism’s message, essentially, is: we are responsible for our own moral lives, and one should never be judgmental (and never mind the contradiction here). Humanistic approaches to morality, combined with opposition to "judgmentalism," leads to the idea that all "lifestyles" are morally equal. Shortt adds to the burgeoning literature on the incursions of radical homosexuals in government schools. Their methods, predictably, have assumed and attempted to inculcate the moral equivalence of gay and straight "lifestyles." Inroads have been made into elementary schools, affecting grade school children who, not long ago, were considered too young to know what sex was.

The plummeting levels of literacy have been even more pronounced. Shortt reiterates how government schools are graduating legions of seniors who cannot construct grammatical English sentences, do arithmetic beyond a rudimentary level, and have little or no knowledge of the history of this country or its Constitutional foundations. These results are hidden by grade inflation, recalculations of GPAs, and the dumbing down of standardized tests, often in accordance with the politically correct need to remove "cultural bias." This ought to concern everyone worried about the status of our liberties in what little is left of our Constitutional republic. Shortt is addressing mainly Evangelicals. But it ought to be clear to anyone that we are in serious trouble when a sufficient number of students graduate from schools not knowing anything about our founding documents or their authors, or what rights the Constitution was written to encode and protect, or how our government is put together and what functions it is supposed to serve.

The situation is even worse. Children are actually in more danger in government schools than they could ever be from terrorists. Back in the 1990s government schools were witness to an epidemic of well-publicized shootings, the most dramatic being the Columbine killings in 1999. One root of the problem of violence in government schools is the collapse of discipline, resulting in a "blackboard jungle" where not just children but teachers must fear being assaulted, robbed, or even raped. Shortt cites two more Supreme Court decisions, Tinker v. Des Moines School District and Goss v. Lopez, as watersheds events leading to the end of discipline in government schools. The former asserted that children have the same Constitutional rights as adults even in elementary schools (including the right to free speech, expression, etc.). The latter asserted that students have the same right to "due process" as do adults prior to disciplinary action to be taken for misbehavior. The federal government had become the final authority on when government schools could administer discipline. Since everything the federal government touches it ruins, we immediately saw a meteoric rise in discipline problems in government schools. Corporal punishment – the administering of "spankings" – became a thing of the past. Teachers could no longer touch misbehaving youngsters. As a result, not only did their misbehavior continue, it worsened until it gave rise to the epidemic of crime, violence and disorder seen more recently. Students who stand out because they are different from the mass are particularly at risk. Shortt describes how a young amputee, a cancer victim, was tormented by her classmates until her parents feared for her safety, and how a boy – presumably a "nerd" – was beaten savagely on a school bus while the bus driver pretended nothing was wrong (pp. 183–84).

Is the situation really this bad, or are we just being paranoid, or relying on skewed statistics based on a few atypical cases? Shortt describes how defenders of "public schools" have played down the violence in them, citing the federal government’s own Indicators of School Crime and Safety, compiled periodically by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the National Center for Education Statistics. Some 87 percent of school police officers, Shortt observes, have complained that crime is underreported in their school district. Moreover, evidence of violence among children at ever younger ages is mounting – having doubled between 1995 and 2001 according to one report from California. National surveys report increases in aggressive behavior by very small children (third grade and below) during just the past five years or so. At least one study suggests a connection between the epidemic of violent behavior among very young children and time spent in day-care centers. This reflects negatively on a society where the percentage of mothers working outside the home has reached two-thirds. Radical feminism is not the culprit here. I have met or known of any number of working moms who never heard the phrase gender feminism. But over the past decade or so the combination of taxes and cost-of-living expenses has escalated while the number of good-paying jobs has diminished, forcing both parents into the workplace and leaving children to flounder in day-care. This suggests an ominous future for America’s children if the trends responsible cannot be reversed.

Radical feminists have, however, launched an aggressive attack on boys. It is common knowledge that boys tend to be more adventurous, more rambunctious, and have a harder time sitting still for long periods of time than do girls. In the name of "gender equity," boys are sometimes put on mind-altering drugs such as Ritalin or Prozac to control their behavior, even though these drugs’ long-term effects is not that well known and may be worse than cocaine. One pretext for prescribing these substances to children include "diseases" such as Attention Deficit / Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), "discovered" just within the past couple of decades. Another effect of radical feminism in government schools has been the institution of "zero tolerance" sexual harassment policies even in the elementary grades. At one school, this ludicrous policy resulted in that infamous case in which a first-grade boy received a suspension for pecking a first-grade girl on the cheek.

Is "school reform" an option? Government schools, argues Shortt, cannot be reformed. The system is structured to resist what would be necessary, such as ending federal control and ousting the bureaucrats, guidance counselors, and change agents. State-sponsored education has actually been quite effective in producing mindless consumers and loyal, obedient servants of the state. The feds and their minions thus don’t want any non-cosmetic changes. As Shortt puts it, "The truth is harsh, but simple. Those who control government schools want your children and they want your money. They don’t want you sticking your nose into what they consider their business … " (p. 323). His recommendation: speak out with your feet. Shortt has an arsenal of reasons why Christians ought to homeschool their children or place them in private Christians schools. His arguments ought to be listened to by non-Christians. The dysfunction that has fallen over government-sponsored education, after all, affects Christian and non-Christian children alike.

Does homeschooling work? Shortt cites Dr. Brian Ray’s 1997 landmark study showing that homeschooled children are typically four or so years ahead of their government-schooled counterparts in every major academic subject and Richard Rudner’s 1999 study of over 20,000 homeschooled students also demonstrating their superior performance over government-schooled students (pp. 342–43). Homeschooled teenagers have won national spelling bees, been accorded national awards for academic performance, and been admitted to major universities, including Harvard, Yale and Stanford. Shortt cites literature solidly refuting complaints that homeschooled students are not properly "socialized." Now to be sure, homeschooled students aren’t "socialized" in the way the National Education Association types would prefer. Alongside serious academic subjects they are learning the values of their parents and their church. They are not becoming little collectivists, or pawns of mass-consumption popular culture unable to control their spending habits. They are, however, socialized in the proper sense of being involved in their communities. They do volunteer work, get involved in team sports, attend dance classes or chorus, and so on. They are self-directed, focused, and soon exhibit more leadership skills than their government-schooled counterparts. They do not find either government or civic activities too complex to understand as, according to one study, does approximately a third of government-schooled graduates (pp. 350–51). And they do not exhibit the behavioral problems we saw above. As independent minded potential leaders directly involved in their communities, however, growing numbers of homeschooled Americans would represent a potential threat to this country’s ongoing centralization and steady evolution toward socialism. The "socialization" issue is, in the last analysis, a red herring – a cover for educrats’ and change agents’ fears of free and independent minds.

Addressing Christian parents, Shortt contends that they are out of excuses. He cites Nehemiah Institute results on how teenagers raised in Christian homes but graduating from government schools tend to abandon Christianity within a couple of years of starting college, many never to return. He has answers for parents who say they don’t have the time or money or other resources to homeschool, or who believe their children are "the salt of the earth" and need to remain in a government school. Parents can homeschool around work schedules. Shortt cites a case of a working single parent he knows personally from his church who has successfully homeschooled five children. If she can do it, he says, anyone can. No one, of course, says that homeschooling is necessarily easy. It is a major commitment. But there are now countless resources available for the homeschooler to draw upon. Most states have organizations to assist homeschooling parents. Finally, many churches are getting involved. Some are starting up private Christian schools – which makes perfect sense given that church buildings frequently stand empty during all five days of the regular workweek!

Christians – especially evangelical Christians – have taken the lead in working towards a mass exodus from government schools. Clearly, however, nothing is stopping non-Christians from doing the same thing (and lest there be any doubt, there are non-Christians who have looked at what goes on in government schools and chosen to homeschool their children). I believe Christians have taken the lead because they recognize more clearly what the culture war is really all about. It is, at base, more than a conflict between traditionalism and political correctness. It is more than a struggle against creeping (Fabian) socialism and the encroaching New World Order. It is a battle between two worldviews: the God-centered worldview of Christian theism that stands as one of the major pillars of Western civilization, and that of materialism, rooted in the idea that God does not exist and that, ethically, we are on our own. The former tended to produce literate, responsible citizens suited for life in a relatively free society characterized by honest commerce and voluntary community involvement. The latter has unleashed the obsession with power on the part of a few, expanded the central state, diminished literacy levels, and precipitated moral breakdown and behavioral chaos.

The "harsh truth about public schools" is that they are an enemy not just of Christianity but of academics, personal and intellectual independence, and even children’s safety. They cannot educate, which is unsurprising since over the past couple of decades their focus has been on inculcating political correctness and teaching job skills (Outcome-Based Education, School-To-Work, Workforce Investment, and finally No Child Left Behind). Their aim has not been education but the production of desirable forms of mass behavior. The government-sponsored educational system is thus the major contributor to the dumbing down of the country. Its guiding philosophies are materialistic humanism and moral subjectivism, with the full backing of the U.S. Supreme Court. Government schools have thus become not just anti-Christian but anti-academic, anti-male, collectivist, and violent.

The best thing to do, of course, would be to abolish the entire government school system, lock, stock and barrel. Given that this is not a live option at present, Christian parents in particular should remove their children from government schools and either homeschool them or place them in private Christian schools. These same arguments apply to non-Christians who are equally capable of surveying the facts and recognizing that their children might be victims of violence or put on potentially damaging but entirely legal mind-altering drugs such as Ritalin (especially if they are boys). They are equally in danger, moreover, of having their children simply taken away from them by the state on trumped up charges of "neglect" or "child abuse" if they refuse to allow such treatment.

Homeschooling is now the fastest growing educational movement in the country. Its documented results are sufficiently promising to hold out hope that if enough parents homeschool their children, in less than a generation we could halt the dumbing down of the country, win the culture war, restore morality, and possibly even reverse the steady transformation of America into a socialist nation of poorly educated, chronic dependents and mindless spendthrifts. If you are a parent, buy this book and read it even if you are not a Christian. You owe it to your children!

Bruce Shortt, The Harsh Truth About Public Schools (Vallecito, Calif: Chalcedon Foundation, 2004). Pp. 458 + index. $22.00.
February 12, 2005

Steven Yates [send him mail] has a Ph.D. in philosophy and is the author of Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (1994) and the forthcoming Worldviews: Christian Theism versus Modern Materialism and In Defense of Logic. He directs the Worldviews Project and has joined Stratia Corporation as a part-time consultant. He lives in Columbia, South Carolina.

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