“Things reveal themselves passing away,” wrote Irish  poet William Butler Yeats, reviving an old folk saying  about how changing times bring into sharp focus the  dying old ways that were once taken for granted. On  another occasion, he wrote in his 1919 “The Second  Coming”: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world … The best lack  all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate  intensity. 

Yeats’ analysis describes our world too, but our  situation is much worse than in 1919. The culture is in  steep decline, and conservatives and Christians  suddenly realize that our unique history and  constitutional system embody what is good and  beautiful about America. Many are battling to reverse  the slide into the moral abyss. They know now what is  being lost in the transformation of Western Civilization.  We grasp desperately for the past the more we see it  passing away.  

We have been warned. Just as the prophets Isaiah,  Jeremiah, and Ezekiel warned the children of Israel and  Judah to turn from sin lest they be carried into a  Babylonian captivity (Jeremiah 29:10- 13), so Christian  leaders and theologians have warned us over the  centuries not to accept the imposition of state sponsored and tax-subsidized public schools in our  nation. For the first 220 years of American history, from  1620 to around 1840, we had an entirely private,  Christian, parochial, and homeschool model for  educating our children. From 1837 to 1840, the state of  Massachusetts under Horace Mann set up the first  public-school model. The system spread rapidly, and by  1900 was the dominant K-12 education model in  America. Churches gradually gave up their “private” or  parochial schools.  

Presbyterian theologian R. L. Dabney warned the  state of Virginia strongly in the 1870s not to  accept the state-sponsored model for K-12  education, but he was not heeded. In 1887, Dr.  Archibald Hodge, professor at Princeton Seminary,  wrote: I am as sure as I am of the fact of Christ’s reign  that a comprehensive and centralized system of  national education, separated from religion, as is now  commonly proposed, will prove the most appalling  enginery for the propagation of anti-Christian and  atheistic unbelief, and of anti-social nihilistic ethics,  individual, social, and political, which this sin-rent world  has ever seen. 

In 1926, Princeton Professor J. Gresham Machen testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on  Education and Labor against the proposed  establishment of a Federal Department of Education.  He was effective in stopping the proposal, and the  United States did not create a Cabinet-level  Department of Education until 1978. Machen was  acknowledged in his day as America’s leading  Protestant theologian. His testimony, sermons, and  articles are compiled in Education, Christianity and the  State, published by The Trinity Foundation. Also, the  eminent John Taylor Gatto, New York City and New  York State teacher of the year, wrote and lectured  extensively on the problems with public education in  modern times. His seminal work, The Underground  History of American Education, was published in 2001.  His other works include Dumbing Us Down (1992), A  Different Kind of Teacher (2000), and Weapons of Mass  Instruction (2008).  

Now, 180 years on, all the toxic waste from this failed  experiment with government schools is washing up on  our shores. Christian families and churches are in shock  and confused about what is to be done. The long-term  consequences of government schools are ravaging our  nation, our culture, and our children. What is to be  done in such a desperate time? Already 70 percent of  millennials are self-identified socialists. Higher  education is deeply mired in leftist politics, and  conservative and Christian faculty are being “cancelled”  for speaking out against bias. About 80 percent of  Christian and conservative families currently send their  children to public schools, though those numbers are  starting to fall. Only a strong religious revival, a spiritual  movement with serious moral ambitions, can correct  this problem.  

Until now, both religious and conservative  organizations have failed to protect vulnerable  children from the anti-God secular schools. Before he  died in 2008, Paul Weyrich, co-founder of the Heritage  Foundation and the Free Congress Foundation and  political godfather to the Christian Right, told me that  “conservatives and Christians had mostly invested in  politics to effect the culture, but the left concentrated  on winning the culture: controlling the media, K-12 and  higher education, the arts.” Thus, even when  conservatives won elections, they still lost because  “culture always trumps politics.” He added, “Ray,  you’re doing the right thing by growing Christian  schools and home schooling.” 

A great new hope for a fundamental change in our  national educational fortunes began in March 2020,  when the government shut down public schools in the  face of the COVID pandemic. Fifty-five million American  children were sent home, a silver lining in an otherwise  dark COVID cloud. The shutdown sent 1.37 billion  students home from school worldwide.  

Research done by Dr. Brian Ray of the National Home  Education Research Institute (www.NHERI.org)  indicates that 10-15 percent of children will continue to  be homeschooled and never return to public schools. In  one year, homeschooling has nearly doubled, now  serving five million students per year nationally.  

A plethora of news articles in mainstream media report  on this astonishing sudden growth. Private and  Christian schools have also experienced a substantial  growth in numbers. We call this good news a “kairos”  moment, Greek for “an opportune time,” because it  represents an opportunity for private, Christian, and  home education to gain a significant number of  children. Today, dozens of viable organizations and  ministries assist in assimilating millions of new children  into K-12 private, Christian, and home education, such  as the Home School Legal Defense Association,  Foundation for American Christian Education,  RenewaNation, Alpha and Omega, Freedom Project  Academy, Classical Conversations, Association of  Classical and Christian Schools, Bob Jones University Press, A Beka, Apologia, National Black Home  Educators, Public School Exit, and Exodus Mandate.  

As state-sponsored public schools continue to fail and  are rejected by a growing number of families, it is  possible that a “tipping point” could occur for private,  Christian, and home education.  

The late Marshall Fritz, founder of the Alliance  for the Separation of School and State, was  known to say, when challenged on such a  development, “Impossible things happen every day.”  Today, the mass exodus from government schools that  once seemed impossible is happening.  

One important part of the return to education sanity is  the restoration of constitutionalism in education. The  Founders and framers of the Constitution made no  provision for an education policy at the federal level.  Educational policy was left entirely to the states and to  the private arena, such as private associations, families,  and churches. Ultimately, getting the feds out of public  education could be a useful precursor to ending state  and even local government involvement. One way to  accelerate that process is to continue showing parents  and pastors why no child should be left to suffer in a  government school. Rod Dreher, in his important book,  Live Not by Lies, quotes social-policy expert Hannah  Arendt: “A totalitarian society is one in which an  ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and  institutions, with a goal of bringing all aspects of  society under control of that ideology.” This has been  the strategy of the Left in America since the time of  Horace Mann in the 1840s. Mann was eventually  superseded in the progressive era by John Dewey,  professor of philosophy from 1904-1930 at Teachers  College, Columbia University.  

Conservatives and Christians have only in recent  decades awakened to the reality of the danger of  totalitarianism in our country. Like Rip Van Winkle, they  are awakening from a deep slumber. Some powerful  and hopeful trends are emerging that could lead to a  new reformation in education and a fresh great  awakening. This awakening about the evils taking place  in government schools can and must serve as a  precursor to a broader awakening — an awakening to  America’s true history, the value of individual liberty,  the incredible feats of Christian civilization, and so  much more. If we are to win back this nation, it will  require energy, determination, comprehension of the  crisis, faith, and fervent prayers not exhibited by many  conservatives or Christians in the recent past.  

Is there a second act for America? Children  have always been the future of every nation, for good  or ill. If a happier future for America exists, it will  require conservatives and Christians to awaken to the  peril and begin again to train and educate the youth of  the land in a new system of private, Christian, and  home schools. 

LT. COL. E. Ray Moore (USAR, Ret.) holds a Th.M. and has served as a chaplain. He is the co-founder and president of  Frontline Ministries, Inc., director of Exodus Mandate, chairman emeritus of Christian Education Initiative (www.Christedu.org), and chairman of the board of Public  School Exit (www.PublicSchoolExit.com).

[This article was originally published in The New  American Magazine, June 2021 special education issue. Excerpts from the article used here.] 

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