The Messianic Character of American Education

The Messianic Character of American Education

Author: R. J. Rushdoony

Publisher: Chalcedon Foundation

Published: 2014-08-26

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 1879998068

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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.


Religious Fundamentalism and American Education

Religious Fundamentalism and American Education

Author: Eugene F. Provenzo

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1990-01-01

Total Pages: 158

ISBN-13: 9780791402177

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For the past twenty-five years, 'ultra-fundamentalist' Christians have put increasing pressure on American public education to conform exclusively with their own philosophy and vision of education and culture. Eugene Provenzo considers and addresses the impact that the fundamentalist movement has had on such issues as censorship, textbook content, Creationism versus Evolution, the family and education, school prayer, and the state regulation of Christian schools. In exploring both sides of the debate, however, the author concludes that many fundamentalists' concerns are justified, due to a basic inconsistency between the rights guaranteed under the First Amendment and the position that many public schools have legally assumed.


Intellectual Schizophrenia

Intellectual Schizophrenia

Author: R. J. Rushdoony

Publisher: Chalcedon Foundation

Published: 2009-11-23

Total Pages: 133

ISBN-13: 1879998297

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The title of this book is particularly significant in that Dr. Rushdoony was able to identify the basic contradiction that pervades a secular society that rejects God's sovereignty by still needs law and order, justice, science, and meaning to life. Secular man wants to use the thinks of creation while denying their creator. As Dr. Rushdoony writes, 'there is no law, no society, no justice, no structure, no design, no meaning apart from God.' And so, modern man has become schizophrenic. He wants to assert his autonomy while rejecting the divine order that gives meaning to life. To the humanist, the aim of living is something he calls the 'good life.' For the nihilist, it is violence and death. Dr. Rushdoony saw cultural schizophrenia as a split between thought and feeling, a withdrawal from the reality of God and a flight into fantasies of world government achieved through an unattainable unity. Utopians are undeniably schizophrenic. They want a heaven on earth, which can only be achieved by coercion and enslavement. But perhaps what they really want, as depraved human beings, is coercion and enslavement, and use utopian idealism to deceive and entrap the gullible. Nor is it by accident that the government schools now lavish so much time on death education, which has been marbleized throughout the curriculum. As Dr. Rushdoony writes: 'For man to turn his back on God, therefore, is to turn towards death.' And this is exactly what the government schools have done. Add to this, multiculturalism, transcendental meditation, sensitivity training, explicit sex education, drug education, evolution, behavioral psychology, humanism, whole language, and other such programs, and you get a curriculum that is so profoundly anti-Christian that one wonders how any Christian parent or minister can condone putting a Christian child in a government school from the forward by Samuel L. Blumenfeld


The American Model of State and School

The American Model of State and School

Author: Charles L. Glenn

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2012-04-26

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1441119728

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State and Schools argues that the American educational model represents a third way of organizing the provision of schooling, and that this accounts for some of its strengths as well as some of its weaknesses. Charles L. Glenn looks closely at the tradition of democratic localism in the management of schooling, and the powerful and anti-democratic effect of the emerging education 'profession,' which has in some respects the characteristics of a religious movement more than of a true profession. A sweeping chronological survey, State and Schools includes chapters on the colonial background, schooling in the New Republic, the creation of an education profession, and the progressive education movement, among others. Glenn's primary purpose, in this authoritative and thoroughly researched book, is to illustrate the deep roots of ways of thinking about schools that have made it difficult for policy-makers and the public to do what needs to be done to enable schools to function as they should, for our society and for future generations.


The Mythology of Science

The Mythology of Science

Author: R. J. Rushdoony

Publisher: Chalcedon Foundation

Published: 2009-11-16

Total Pages: 188

ISBN-13: 1879998262

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The "mythology" of science is its religious devotion to the myth of evolution. In evolution, man is the highest expression of intelligence and reason, and such thinking will not yield itself to submission to a God it views as a human cultural creation, useful, if at all, only in a cultural context. Views of origins are dependent on faith, and one's position speaks much as to one's religious tenets. Evolutionary faith, however, cannot tolerate any view of the natural world or science that places it under another faith, such as the Christian belief in a sovereign causative God. Darwin gave an ostensibly scientific justification for man's rebellion against God. He put men at the top of the evolutionary ladder, allowing them to believe they had realized Satan's lure to Adam and Eve and become "as gods, knowing [determining] good and evil" (Genesis 3:5). We can attack the science of evolution all we want, but the battle for our faith, true science, and our culture is a religious one over the nature of truth. Evolution is a religious faith that has become entrenched as a presupposition of modern thought. For Christians to argue about the "unproven" nature of the evolutionary hypothesis or the circular reasoning of its thought is of some value, but the essential issue is that two opposing religious faiths are in conflict. Evolution is popular because it is such a useful paradigm to sinful men; it dispenses with God as a prerequisite of all things. But Christianity as a religious faith depends not on proofs that are constructions of man's fallen mind, but on the reality of an almighty God who reveals Himself to us by grace. Christianity, too, depends on circular reasoning: we even begin and end with faith in God and His revelation. The purpose of this book (first published in 1967) is to define the nature of the opposing religious systems of thought, Christian creationism and Darwinism (in its various forms). It is a call to urge Christians to stand firm for Biblical six-day creationism as a fundamental aspect of their faith in the Creator.


The Scientific Spirit of American Humanism

The Scientific Spirit of American Humanism

Author: Stephen P. Weldon

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Published: 2020-10-06

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 1421438585

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Significantly, the book shows why special attention to American liberal religiosity remains critical to a clear understanding of the scientific spirit in American culture.


Reading Appalachia from Left to Right

Reading Appalachia from Left to Right

Author: Carol Mason

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2011-02-23

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 0801459567

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In Reading Appalachia from Left to Right, Carol Mason examines the legacies of a pivotal 1974 curriculum dispute in West Virginia that heralded the rightward shift in American culture and politics. At a time when black nationalists and white conservatives were both maligned as extremists for opposing education reform, the wife of a fundamentalist preacher who objected to new language-arts textbooks featuring multiracial literature sparked the yearlong conflict. It was the most violent textbook battle in America, inspiring mass marches, rallies by white supremacists, boycotts by parents, and strikes by coal miners. Schools were closed several times due to arson and dynamite while national and international news teams descended on Charleston.A native of Kanawha County, Mason infuses local insight into this study of historically left-leaning protesters ushering in cultural conservatism. Exploring how reports of the conflict as a hillbilly feud affected all involved, she draws on substantial archival research and interviews with Klansmen, evangelicals, miners, bombers, and businessmen, a who, like herself, were residents of Kanawha County during the dispute. Mason investigates vulgar accusations of racism that precluded a richer understanding of how ethnicity, race, class, and gender blended together as white protesters set out to protect "our children's souls."In the process, she demonstrates how the significance of the controversy goes well beyond resistance to social change on the part of Christian fundamentalists or a cultural clash between elite educators and working-class citizens. The alliances, tactics, and political discourses that emerged in the Kanawha Valley in 1974 crossed traditional lines, inspiring innovations in neo-Nazi organizing, propelling Christian conservatism into the limelight, and providing models for women of the New Right.


Raising Your Kids Right

Raising Your Kids Right

Author: Michelle Ann Abate

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2010-07-14

Total Pages: 261

ISBN-13: 0813549957

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Dr. Seuss's classic character the Lorax has delighted children for decades while passing along a powerful message about environmental responsibility. The book's young readers, and their parents, would likely be surprised by the emergence of a new character, Truax, a kindly logger created by a longtime employee of the wood products industry, who, not surprisingly, has a far different viewpoint to share. Yet the Truax character, and the book of the same name, is just one example of a growing genre of conservative-themed narratives for young readers spawned by the continuing strength of the American political right. Highlighting the works of William Bennett, Lynne Cheney, Bill O'Reilly, and others, Michelle Ann Abate brings together such diverse fields as cultural studies, literary criticism, political science, childhood studies, brand marketing, and the cult of celebrity. Raising Your Kids Right dispels lingering societal attitudes that narratives for young readers are unworthy of serious political study by examining a variety of texts that offer information, ideology, and even instructions on how to raise kids right, not just figuratively but politically.