No Middle Ground
(goals of a godly education contrasted with the proclaimed aims of secular ‘progressive’ educationalists)
First published in DAYSPRING 13 (see publications on how to obtain your own free copy of future issues)
Secular humanism despite its continued appearance of virility has shown itself to be an ignominious failure in all that it undertakes. Nowhere is this more apparent than in state school systems. Surprisingly, few seem to have recognised this and so the tampering and reforms continue. Nothing can be done to breathe life into this decaying body; the stench of death is already upon it. Complete collapse must come at some point.
Many North American parents are so concerned about what is going on in their government schools that they are removing their offspring in large numbers and have been doing so for years. Children are either channelled into private and independent schools, often Christian, or parents are joining the growing band of home schoolers. There are signs that the same thing is happening here in the UK although, it must be said, as yet on a much smaller scale. Once parents, however, become increasingly aware of what is really going on inside state schools, the stream may well turn into a torrent. Some of the well-informed and well-heeled have returned to employing tutors for their children at salaries in excess of £40,000 a year. Yet many parents still fondly imagine that all things are as they were when they went to school, but this is not so.
The present failure of state schools was predictable, and obvious from the beginning to all save those blinded by their own ideology demanding compulsory, ‘free’, but stringently secular education for all. What things are at the beginning will without fail determine what they become. Government schooling was always a rotten idea, begun for all the wrong reasons. Our school system today is a shambles feeding a rising tide of illiteracy and misery.
The government response to any rejection of state education in Britain and North America is unlikely to be an immediate outright ban on alternatives, although this can never be ruled out. Attempts in the USA in the 1980s to use the blunt instrument of the courts to criminalise home schoolers and close Christian schools largely failed. Jailing the pastor of Faith Baptist Church in Louisville, Nebraska along with six other fathers and locking the doors of his Church only drew more and more support for their cause from across the nation. Many flocked to this small town to show their support for those in jail and ‘America’s First Padlocked Church’. It would be easy for British politicians to blame the EU for any ban they introduced. Overall in Europe there is far less educational freedom than here in the UK. Were the Christian school and home schooling movement to expand significantly, a move against those whom politicians of all colours deem to be the hated ‘Christian right’ would be almost inevitable. All independent schools would never disappear. Where then would politicians send their offspring in order to avoid the hoi polloi?
Our illiberal libertarians may well at first use financial means, tax incentives, manipulative grants, as they did in the late 19th century to rid England of its voluntary schools. This will, at the very least, dilute the distinctiveness of independent and home schooling. We need to be vigilant. Government aid to independent schools should be viewed with suspicion because of the inevitable strings attached. Should this not be sufficient to bring private and particularly Christian schooling to its knees, the government plan would then doubtless be to introduce a mandatory curriculum to ensure a measure of control over what is taught. This again was a strategy used in the 19th century. The next step would be to insist on government teacher training for all teachers in the interest of ‘maintaining standards’. (Surely, you cannot be serious?)
These are general observations but, serious though they are, there are other considerations that apply for Christian believers quite apart from whether state schools are educationally good, bad, or indifferent. Government schools will fail because they have stood truth on its head and as a consequence have lost touch with reality. What is truth to them is a myth to us. It ought not to be too difficult to be academically superior to failing state schools. But is this sufficient? We should not imagine for a moment that the goals of a Christian education are in any way similar to those of a government run school. Our aims, methods, and curriculum can have nothing in common with those of humanist educators. If we simply reproduce under the banner of a Christian education what is being taught in non-Christian schools – in the state, or for that matter the independent sector –, striving for a ‘Christian’ version of non-Christian education, we shall end up with the same humanism and the same failure as is common in these schools. Furthermore, apart from academic standards and curriculum, we would also want to know what kind of Christian faith is being presented to the children. Not all ‘Christian’ schools are places we would like our children to attend anymore than we would ourselves attend the churches that support them.
In this, the first of three projected articles on Christian education, we shall trace how ‘voluntary’ private and religious schools were deliberately squeezed out of existence by the radicals of the 19th century and replaced by compulsory state education. We shall continue by looking at some of the men and the ideology that has given us our modern secular education system and show how schools are used deliberately to undermine the Christian faith. This first article will then conclude with a brief outline of a Christian and biblical approach to education.
How it all began
A battle for the hearts and minds of our young people is taking place right now in secular government-sponsored schools. It is an on-going spiritual warfare. Believing Christian parents put their children in the path of spiritual danger by sending them to state-run educational institutions. Yet many seem oblivious to the reality of this battle or chose to ignore it, but this is not true of those on the other side of the fence. A writer on education commented recently, “government schools are evangelistic institutions for secularism and various forms of New Age theologies.” Writing back in 1983, (The Humanist Magazine Jan/Feb), the ‘new-ager’, John Dunphy described the battle succinctly.
“The battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity….
The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new – the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and miseries, and the new faith of Humanism, …will finally be achieved.”
In the 1830s, Alex de Tocqueville visited America and was genuinely surprised at the strong influence of biblical Christianity and wrote about the daily use of the Bible by families living even on the far-flung frontiers of the republic. His experiences are recorded in his Democracy in America. The desire to read the Bible in one’s own language has historically always provided a positive and strong motive for education. In the early
days of voluntary schools in Britain, Christian belief was an important motivating force. In virtually every school in Britain then, and even into the 1950s, prayer and the reading of the Bible were a normal part of school life. Most schools now largely ignore what is still a legal requirement. Remaining enclaves of Christianity have been progressively taken over by humanists. Today in Britain even tokens of Christian belief, such as the wearing of crosses (not something we would necessarily want to promote), are banned from many schools, despite similar items being allowed to children of other ‘faiths’. This inconsistency demonstrates not a desire to be even-handed in a ‘multi-faith society’, but a deep-seated prejudice against Christ and any public representations of Him. Secular humanists in education appear at times to take every opportunity to express what appears to be spiteful hatred towards the Lord Jesus.
A. A. Hodge of Princeton Theological Seminary was one who saw this situation coming in 1887.
“I am as sure as I am of Christ’s reign that a comprehensive and centralised 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.” (Popular Lectures on Theological Themes, p.283)
We have no choice but to remove our children from the influence of these institutions. To leave them there is to sin against God and our children. Quite apart from the fact that government sponsored schools seem to have lost the skill of being able to teach pupils how to read, write, and do their sums, how can we let their minds be filled with the godlessness that is the daily diet served up to them? Despite ‘league tables’ and ‘spin’, the situation continues to deteriorate – academically, morally, and in pupil safety, not to mention all things godly. We cannot allow our children to be exposed to what is little more than blatant daily brainwashing. Waiting upon God, other schooling options need to be rigorously investigated.
Government sponsored education is now taken for granted as being the normal way for children to be educated. Yet state education as such is but little more than around 130 years old. Before that time, a quite adequate education – although it certainly had its weaknesses – was provided by voluntary schools. Evidence suggests that for the most part the education in these schools was somewhat superior to most of that provided in state schools today. For example, even in workhouses research shows that 95% of all the children there could read and write well. Most children spent at least some time in fulltime schooling, a far greater proportion than ‘progressive’ educational historians are prepared to allow. Even the progressive educationalist, Horace Mann (1796-1859), conceded that school attendance in Britain is likely to have been on average to as much as five years. Education was not free but was paid for even by the poorest of families, many of whom would make tremendous sacrifices to see that their children learned to read and write. It is repeatedly said that ‘poor families could not afford schooling’; this is a blatant untruth. There was a programme of government subsidies from 1833, but even before this the number of schools had increased substantially. The greatest portion of the costs was always met by parental subscription. Schools were viewed as a preparation for life. In the words of John Knox, “for the business of life and the purpose of eternity.” That many of the voluntary schools were capable of improvement goes without saying. However, to denigrate them as many do is rich when their modern critics have themselves only been able to produce schools that are in large numbers failing. In 1840 two-thirds to three-quarters of the working classes were already literate. It is clear that in the England of the late 1860s most people were literate, most children had received up to five years schooling, and most parents had contributed towards it.
In a fascinating book first published in 1975, Education and the Industrial Revolution, Professor E. G. West, has shown that general education was good, if not better before than after the introduction of state education. Misconceptions about Victorian schools persist and are based largely on the political and the ideological bias of ‘orthodox’ but liberal historians such as G. D. H. Cole and G. M. Trevelyan. Add to this the emotional fiction of Charles Dickens’ Dotheboys Hall and the distortion is complete. ‘Dotheboys’ cannot be thought of as representative. Indeed, many question whether there were ever any such schools. Dickens when pressed was quite unable to name the school in Yorkshire on which he claimed ‘Dotheboys’ had been built. Dickens was an enthusiastic follower of Jeremy Bentham and he also favoured compulsory state education. He, as others, had his own reasons for painting such sordid pictures, fascinating stories but hardly historically representative or reliable. We hear nothing from these prejudiced critics about the excellent schools founded by men like the Wesleys and others, or later of the orphan homes of George Müller in Bristol – they even boasted an indoor swimming pool!
The unfounded assertion that education and social services declined with the increasing hardship and ignorance accompanying the growth of capitalist industrialisation is a deliberate misrepresentation of the Victorian era in England by liberal ‘progressives’ at the time and since. Using precisely the same historical sources, Professor E. G. West has successfully shown the very opposite: that both in quantity and quality neither schools nor social services were as bad as is often claimed. The reasons for introducing and maintaining comprehensive, compulsory education were what they always will be: an exercise in social engineering and the attempt to fulfil impossible utopian visions of a ‘new world order’.
Measuring the quantity and quality of Victorian education in England depends much on how the relevant statistics are interpreted. Clear is that 90% of all children received some education at some time. Not all children between the ages of 5 and 14 will have been at school for the whole of that time, possibly some less than four years. The general rate of literacy is therefore that much more surprising. Possibly one third of children would have been at school at any one time. However, it is not to be supposed that the other two thirds never had any schooling at all. Yet this is how the figures are often dishonestly interpreted. To say that schooling deteriorated as Britain became more industrialised is not supported by the evidence. It is more likely that education overall has deteriorated in post-industrial Britain under social welfare and state-sponsored schooling.
All schooling was voluntary and fee-paying. Most parents wanted their children in school and made sure that they attended, so the argument for compulsory education was weak. Furthermore, they were able to remove their children from a poor school and send them to a better one. Most Victorians were literate even before the 1870 Forster Education Act ever came in to force. This is evident alone from the numbers of religious tracts printed, Bibles purchased, popular literature circulating, such things as the penny magazine, and then there were the newspapers. The evidence for this widespread literacy is conveniently ignored by many educational historians. Much statistical evidence shows that Trevelyan’s assertion that during the industrial revolution education stagnated or even regressed is misleading and plainly wrong. Factory Commissioners’ in 1834 found that 86% of all factory workers could read and in Scotland it was as high as 96%.
Nevertheless, caution must prevail when using government figures then as now. There was a very selective use of figures, ‘embarrassing’ research was replaced by ‘new’ to dilute, obscure, and supersede it. Outside independent research was almost always ignored. W. E. Forster was guilty of this in presenting his 1870 Education Act. Right up to the last minute changes were being made. Blatantly misleading statements were used to further his ends. In order to make a case for grants, schools were presented as having a low standard.
Forster grossly exaggerated the numbers of children who had ‘never had a schooling’ by distorting the reading of the figures. Had Forster been a little more honest he would have found that by 1870 the average time spent in school by any child was 6 years, just 1 year short of the desired statutory target. All that was required was to raise the school leaving age, which the 1870 Act failed to do. Fewer school buildings would then have had to be built. In 1880 compulsory school attendance was introduced for all children aged between 5 to 9 years, although this was not enacted immediately. Those between 10 and 13 years old could have a certificate to say that they had reached the standard required by law.
On the back of the 1870 Education Act there was a boom in school building with the result that there were more government ‘Board Schools’ (as they were known) than there were children to fill them all. To counteract this, Board Schools lowered their fees using a subsidy provided by local rate revenues, whilst at the same time denying this to the voluntary schools. West quotes from The National Society report for 1876:
“…while the ratepayers are compelled to furnish whatever sums the school board is disposed to spend, all deficiencies in the revenues of denominational schools must be supplied by voluntary contributions.” (p.109, footnote 13)
As local taxes increased in order to pay for state ‘Board schools’ “the ability to give on the part of subscribers is proportionately diminished.” Those providing an education for their children from their own pockets were forced to subsidise state education through taxes. The more money that was taken from them that much less would be available for school fees. Thomas Paine (1737-1809) – pamphleteer, republican, revolutionary, and utopian dreamer – complained that taxes, for the most part hidden, took away a quarter of the income of the poor, preventing them from providing their own education. Today we are rid of a monarchy with any real power, a delight to Paine, but such taxes in the UK are estimated to have now risen to around something near to 50% of average income and they are the greatest burden to those least able to pay. Consequently, school fees are likely to be even more difficult to find than in Paine’s day.
The same 1876 report urged that measures were needed
“…to place the Denominational Schools in a position to compete with the Rate-aided Schools, which were called into existence solely to supplement them.”
There was a discrepancy in the available school places of about 10% to be made up, but the building programme after 1870 far exceed this. The result was inevitable, many of the voluntary and denominational schools closed because they could not compete. Was this deliberate? Who can say? State schools were able to dominate education by forcing all competitors out of business by abusing the tax system.
These days, after compulsory incarceration for up to twelve years – a prison sentence indeed – at the cost to the longsuffering taxpayer of on average now of £6000 per year per child, the majority emerges at the other end poorly educated and with huge numbers of them functionally innumerate and illiterate. What we can say is that more spending does not necessarily produce better education for our children. Historically it has not done so. In truth, the 100-year experiment in compulsory, ‘free’, state education has been a complete disaster and is nothing short of a national scandal. As far as the children are concerned it is an inexcusable tragedy of gigantic proportions. In order to obtain an adequate education for their children those with the means are compelled either to pay for private education or move to an area where there is a half-decent state school. The rest send their offspring to be penned up in the holding camps (bog standard comprehensives?) they dare to call schools where even the brightest pupils are deterred from learning very much. There they remain until they are old enough to be pushed out into the wide world often to take dead-end jobs should they be able to find one, join the army, or go to prison. The findings of a Department of Education survey on adult literacy in the USA in 1993 revealed that 90 million adults could hardly read, that amounts to around half of the nation. The situation in the UK is hardly better where, according to government figures, around 25% of adults are functionally illiterate and this is probably a fairly conservative estimate. 20% of 7-year-olds fail to learn to read as they should, by the time they are 11 the situation has become worse, with half failing in both maths and English. Despite all the assurances the situation does not improve. It is just made to look better by moving the goalposts.
Examination results can be made to look respectable by making the examinations themselves easier and the pass marks lower. Only 47% is required to achieve a top A* grade in a GCSE. On one maths paper worth 25% of the total grade the requirement was just 16% for a grade C pass. Many elements of mathematics that once featured in the earlier GCE O-level papers are now entirely missing. This is the same for more than 100 GCSE papers set by the AQA examination board in 2004. What message does this send to more able students able to achieve 90%+? How do these people get away with it? Business studies is perceived by students to be considerably easier than subjects such as physics or modern languages, particularly German, and is therefore popular. Russian has now all but disappeared. Only 47% is needed for an A* grade. Year after year, spokesmen for the examination boards and the educationalist mafia trot out the same nonsense insisting that standards were ‘just as tough as in previous years’. But who believes them any longer?
This sorry state of affairs is a direct result of the philosophy behind our education system. As Christian believers, educational failure in state schools is to be expected and is but one part of the problem. Even were they academically excellent, we would still not want our children attending them. To teach in these institutions as a Christian as some of us have done, whilst individually we may bear testimony to the truth up to a point, overall we contribute to the dismantling of our own faith. In the end where conflict does not arise our consciences will be smitten – or ought to be.
Late 19th century discussions on education were supplied with an additional strand by Horace Mann’s ‘social fusion’ argument. The most important function of state education is a socialistic redistribution of wealth. However well intentioned, this approach petrifies into permanence distinctions of class and race, achieving the opposite of what is intended, causing deep resentment on all sides. Few low-income parents of today reflect for a moment on the fact that they are paying for ‘free’ health care or education through taxes. Nothing is free; someone pays. The reality is that although progressive taxation was not introduced until the 20th century the largest part of tax revenue, then as now, is taken from those at the bottom end of the earnings bracket. Tom Paine believed the poor were well aware of the advantages of education, but the burden of taxation on those with the least income was such that they could ill afford it. He argued for a remission of taxes to be given to families to enable them to pay for education. Tom Paine’s interest in education was that he believed ignorance kept in power the aristocrats he so hated. Paine wanted to cut taxes and provide education for all. Those using private schools today, ‘voluntary schools’ then, pay twice. Money is redistributed in favour of State education. The result in the 19th century was unfair competition between state-aided public elementary schools and voluntary schools in which the latter were always bound to lose out.
In 1870, W. E. Forster’s Education Act was passed by parliament. Four separate plans were presented to him for consideration when drawing up this legislation. The most progressive of these was that presented by the Birmingham League. The Birmingham League was a group of doctrinaire radicals led by Joseph Chamberlain. The Chamberlain family were industrialists from the Midlands. Joseph’s son, Neville, will be remembered as the British prime minister who met with Adolf Hitler at Munich. The Chamberlains were staunch Unitarians and did much to support this apostate faith in and around Birmingham.
Modern progressives like to claim Forster as one of their own. This is very far from being the case and he would be appalled at our modern state education system. His aim was very straightforward and in some ways a laudable one: it was simply to secure for all children in the country access to a good education. A draft Bill compiled in 1869 set a number of goals. First, the bill was to give the least possible encouragement to parents to neglect their duties towards their children and he was opposed to any suggestion that they should be relieved of direct financial responsibility for the education of their children. Then, education should involve the least possible expenditure of government money. Thirdly, there should be the least possible injury to the existing private schools. In all these points Forster eventually lost out to the Unitarian radicals who set the course of education and made it what it is today. Forster did not want ‘free’ schooling; fees were to be charged at all his new ‘Board’ schools. Most parents were both willing and able to pay. ‘Free tickets’ would be given to the very poor by the school board. In this way the poor were not deprived of the freedom to send their children to any school they chose. A ‘welfare’ approach towards education or anything else, by its very nature, always removes choice. The goals of the Birmingham League were eventually realised. In their campaign they had been supported by George Dixon, Robert Applegarth, Jesse Collins, Charles Dickens, but not J. S. Mill, who did not insist on free education.
According to Forster’s reckoning, three-quarters of all children were already in school. The purpose of the 1870 Act was simply to fill the gaps in voluntary provision with state schools to form a heterogeneous national school system. Today the opposite applies, the independent sector now takes up any slack in the system. After the passing of the Act under the guidance of ambitious officials, the administration that had been set up ran out of control. Schools appeared everywhere, often where they were not needed. There can be no doubt but that voluntary schools were discriminated against. They were in a difficult position and many closed. All this went far beyond what Forster had envisaged, but by this time he was gone from government and could do nothing. Additional government spending did nothing to increase education, but only secured more power for the state. The expansion of the public sector to the detriment of the private and voluntary sector was to people like Horace Mann a ‘fact of life’ – Darwinian progress, perhaps, the survival of the fittest. To many others it was the cause of complaint and deep disquiet.
Mann was clear that all children should be sent to the same type of school in the interests of ‘social cohesion’. Schools needed to have a ‘public quality’, which meant in reality being controlled by the political process. Under a false banner of neutrality a highly secularised, anti-religious, ideological schooling was being imposed on the nation by law. There was nothing neutral about their goals at all. The axe was finally laid to the root of Forster’s 1870 Education Act when a few years later government Board schools, ‘common schools’, became ‘free’, no fees. This is how our education system was hijacked by godless ideologues and the freedom to educate our own children according to our own beliefs was diminished and made difficult. In the name of ‘liberty’ they took it away and imposed the worst kind of compulsion to impose their own goals upon everyone else.
The Birmingham League campaigners claimed that ‘human nature could not be trusted to supply itself with instruction’ – what they meant was: with their kind of instruction! Chamberlain was candid. Now that ‘democracy’ had arrived with the enfranchisement of 1867, it was necessary to get the people to vote for the right kind of people. Berthold Brecht put it another way: “If the vote goes against a political party, we should change the voters not the party.” Board schools were there to put an end to Church of England schools and indeed all denominational schools. Edwin Chadwick made clear his support for compulsory education at ‘nationalised’ schools. Small ‘sectarian’ schools were, he claimed, necessarily of poorer quality and did not provide an appropriate ‘secular’ curriculum. This is a myth perpetuated today to denigrate Christian schools in defiance of the reality – they cannot possibly be as good as state schools! The strongest motivation for compulsion was the desire to secularise, politicise, and collectivise the population through education. To achieve this, education must be compulsory and universal. Such aims remain in place today.
Legislators still believe they and they alone know best and so will always favour free, compulsory, universal education and will employ inspectors (enforcers) to see that their will is carried out to the letter. The more that parents are deemed to be the best judges, the less need there is for an inspectorate. There is to this day a disdain by inspectors for schools where parents have a dominant influence. Inspectors were as patronising then as they are today about independent education.
Whilst professing liberty the Birmingham League objected strongly to parental choice favouring ‘sectarian’ schools. The aim was to remove all choice but for state schools. Despite this, many parents still preferred to find the relatively high fees required to send their children to denominational schools of their choice rather than to pay the lower fee at Board schools. It was the embarrassingly poor attendance at some Board schools, despite the subsidised lower fees and better paid teachers, and the overall excess capacity in the state sector that led eventually to the abolition of all fees in state schools, making independent schools the expensive luxury they continue to be to this day.
To summarise: in the 1860s there was an almost universal system in Britain of private fee-paying schools used by the most parents. In 1870 it was thought necessary to complement this with a number of government ‘Board schools’, simply to fill in any gaps. By 1880 universal compulsion was legislated. Fees meant no truancy, something that grew with the introduction of free schools. Education was to be ‘free’, as it was thought indefensible to legislate for something parents could ill afford. Free schooling meant a total subsidy, but it was only for government schools. There was to be no money for private schools run for ‘profit’, nor for denominational (Christian) schools that existed to promote their own beliefs. It was protested that public taxes ought not to be used to promote any particular faith. Nevertheless, public monies were to be used to sustain secularist schools to promote the secularist faith! Yet Christians could be taxed – and still are – to support state enterprises that undermine their faith. Where argument cannot bring a victory, subterfuge nearly always does.
The Human Rights Act of 1998 allows parents to have their children educated “in conformity with their own religious or philosophical convictions”. The belief that the state knows best when it comes to education is positively prehistoric. The present chaos in schools is evidence enough that ‘nanny’ does not know best. Why should we be coerced into sending our children to schools that offend our ‘religious and philosophical convictions’ at every turn? Yet ‘liberals’ seem unable to see their own illiberal attitudes.
Eventually Board Schools set up to complement the private system superseded it by unfair manipulation of the system. As private schools closed there were changes made to board schools. Where there is a monopoly quality suffers. Previously parents could and did remove their children from failing schools, now they had no choice. It cannot be shown that a compulsory later school leaving age for all children meant more education, just longer education and more frustration. Chamberlain’s claim that educational irresponsibility applied to ‘a great many human beings’ was simply untrue. The reality was that in 1869 the majority of families were sending their children to school without compulsion and what is more they were paying for the privilege directly out of their own pockets.
Unlike today, the evidence from the mid-1800s onwards suggests that most school-leavers were literate and numerate! State education has proved to be the most disastrous social experiment of the 20th century. It cannot be repaired because its basic assumptions are fatally flawed.
The men and their ideas
What ideas motivate the enemies of Christ and the Gospel? The apostle Paul describes them as those:
“Whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.” (Philippians 3:19)
Instead of being motivated by the glory of God, their own appetites and desires rule. They mind earthly things not on those things from above They see nothing beyond this immediate and physical world. They glory in that which ought to be a matter of shame.
The philosophers Paul met on Mars Hill (Acts 17) were Stoics and Epicureans, two distinct branches of Greek thinking. Stoicism was the most influential teaching of the ancient world. Their secret was that indifference brings freedom. If you are indifferent to what was going on around you, to events and the actions of others, then they can have no power over you. In this way we all make our own good or evil. Stoics believed in a kind of fatalistic predestination. Virtue is to accept all that happens ‘stoically’. We may live a life of pleasure or poverty, but must remain indifferent to both. Responsibility for our own happiness lies with the individual not society. We are powerless to change the world so we must renounce it.
The Epicurians, on the other hand, were quite a different group and they may have been in Paul’s mind as he penned Philippians 3:19. The message Paul preached that day in Athens divided his listeners sharply. There were two completely different responses when he spoke of judgement and particularly of the resurrection. It would have been the Stoics who postponed a decision, “we will hear thee again.” It would have been the Epicureans who mocked the resurrection. Their philosophy was very firmly tied to the physical and material world – “who mind earthly things.” Beyond this world there is nothing. That alone exists that can be sensed with the five human physical senses, nothing else is there or is worth living for. Founder of this school, the Greek philosopher, Epicurus (341 to 270 BC) took a close interest in education. He deprecated the pursuit of knowledge as an end in itself, but instead asked: What is the goal of life? And how can this goal be attained? Pleasure and happiness in this life is the sole good. This philosophy is also called ‘hedonism’.
More recently, hedonism was revived in England in another form by Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century. The aim and end of life for everyone is his own self-centred happiness. A direct Epicurean influence on modern state education came through its reintroduction in the late 18th century in England by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and then later John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). They sought to lay down an objective principle to determine whether an action was right or wrong. This was called the principle of ‘utility’, hence the name given to their philosophical school of ‘utilitarianism’. They concluded an action is right if it tends to produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. It was the action that was to be deemed good or bad, quite apart from the good or evil nature of the person performing it. Bentham and Mill identified happiness with pleasure, as the Epicureans had done before them.
THE DEATH OF THE SOUL
Jeremy Bentham was leader of a group of reformers often known as the ‘philosophical radicals’. Between them these men were responsible for many wide-reaching social and political changes in England affecting the British criminal code and more particularly education. The Benthamite doctrine was that character and intellect can be completely determined by education. These ‘radicals’ pressed for, and with time were successful in achieving state-sponsored education for all. All this took place, despite the fact that J. S. Mill, for example, was educated at home by his father, James Mill, another radical and a home schooler at that! The young John Stuart was deliberately shielded from association with other boys of his age. The beliefs of these men laid the foundation of government schools, the tragic results of which are with us today.
Bentham denied that there was anything outside the physical world. He was, incidentally, among the first philosophers to take animal liberation and animal rights seriously. His views have lent support to much evil in this area, ranging from vegetarianism at the one end to animal rights terrorism at the other. Man has no invisible eternal soul and is little more than a superior species of animal. As if to prove his point, this godless man prepared an extraordinary last will and testament. Three days after his death his body was to be dissected in an amphitheatre at the Web Street School of Anatomy in London, an illegal act at the time except in the case of executed murderers. It was as if he were saying, “Look there is no soul just bones and flesh – there will be no resurrection!” He knows better now. His organs having been removed, his body was preserved, stuffed, and dressed in his own clothes and he sits to this day in a glass fronted mahogany case in the busy lobby of University College, London, the college that he had helped to found. Bentham’s own head was replaced later with one of wax. His real head was stolen by students for a prank and so has since then be kept locked in a safe. He is visited by scholars, was once carted off to a beer festival in Germany, and was at one time regularly wheeled into the annual meeting of the Board of Directors. It would be recorded in the minutes of the meeting, Bentham present but did not vote. Can there be anything more gruesome or bizarre? Let the Word of God be the final and definitive statement on such behaviour.
“Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.”
(Galatians 6:7-8)
Shall we entrust our children to schools founded on principles advocated by such a man?
The views of the ‘philosophical radicals’ had been greatly influenced by the writings of David Hartley (1773-1836). Although today he is not very well known, his ideas persist in various forms. They have been added to and revised, but their influence on modern education is unmistakeable. He is known as being the author of Observations on Man, his Duty, and his Expectations, a book that influenced minds not only here in Britain, but also in North America and on the Continent of Europe. He grounds consciousness in neuro-physiology, the mind is a physical operation of the brain. In fact, the whole person is a mechanism and as such subject to scientific study. Again, this also meant that the human personality could be ‘scientifically’ educated. In the Observations Hartley applies Newtonian science to the study of human nature. Hartley writes that
“Since sensations are conveyed to the mind, by the efficiency of corporeal causes…it seems to me, that the powers of generating ideas, and raising them by association, must also arise from corporeal causes, and consequently admit of an explication from the subtle influences of small parts of matter on each other, as soon as these are sufficiently understood.” (Observations 1, prop.11)
In other words, the workings of the mind are to be explained on a purely physical basis. Thoughts are physical. The response of the nervous system to its physical environment generates and raises ideas and consciousness. That which we associate with the workings of the human mind and soul is reduced to molecules, nerves and vibrations. The same is true for animals as for humans. Hartley suggested that if an organism could be endued with the most simple kinds of sensation, it might also arrive at all that intelligence of which the human mind is possessed – animals that can think. This is important, for although the form has been refined and redefined, the basic notion is still to be found at the heart of pedagogical methodology to this day. So by means of manipulating the environment, ideas, thoughts and emotions can be generated. External stimuli in the classroom cause physiological responses that end in thought and ideas.
Not that all this was new, it had been proposed many times before. What is important for us is the influence that Hartley had on those who would shape government-sponsored education in the future, men like John Stuart Mill. It is not surprising to find that Hartley too was a vegetarian believing as he did that animals are ‘near relations’ to humans. This obligates us ‘to be their guardians and benefactors’ and is reason enough from making them suffer for our sport or convenience, and from killing them for food (Observations 1, prop.93; cf. 2, prop. 52). What separates us from animals is not being made the image of God, but nothing more than differences in neuro-anatomy. Clearly, he provides a pseudo-scientific basis for vegetarianism of all kinds, environmentalism, ‘animal rights’. If we function mechanistically and are no higher level than animals then education can be little different than training a troupe of monkeys, and as we shall see, this is really what it has become.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” (George Orwell, Animal Farm)
Yet David Hartley was no atheist in any conventional sense, such as La Mettrie who wrote the notorious L’Homme machine in 1748. He professed instead a deep religious sensibility. He was a ‘dissenter’, a Unitarian, as were many of the radical educational and social reformers of the 19th century. Along with all Unitarians, he rejected all notions of a triune God and believed that the deity of the Lord Jesus and the substitutionary atonement obscured the original and true light of Christianity. He affirmed universal salvation or ‘restoration’ and even this he explained in ‘scientific’ terms. We are all framed physically and psychologically so as to attain ultimately a state in which all men are “partakers of the divine nature, loving and lovely, holy and happy” (Observations 2, prop. 56). Such is his interpretation of 2 Peter 1:4. His monistic understanding of being means that we shall all become essentially the same as God Himself. Hartley’s view of God, of man, of animals, his environmentalism and vegetarianism are not even an aberration of Christian teaching but a return to paganism, a ‘doctrine of demons’ (1 Timothy 4:1-5).
‘Man the machine’ is still with us:
“Isn’t the murderer just a machine with a defective component? Or a defective upbringing? Defective genes? Why do we vent hatred on murderers when we should regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? We shall grow out of this and laugh at it…” (Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist, Oxford University, quoted in the Daily Telegraph, 3 January, 2006)
THE ‘SCIENCE’ OF EDUCATION
The world became ‘scientific’ the day we stopped burning witches! We are now ‘enlightened’. The earth is round not flat and goes around the sun. Newton formulated the law of gravity and we invented the steam engine. The critical spirit was emancipated. Is there anything we cannot now achieve? We still await the new ‘golden age’, the new ‘world order’.
With the 17th century there dawned a new epoch with the many discoveries in science and mathematics. Most influential for our modern world was discovery that all motion is subject to mathematical measurement. These discoveries influenced not only the way we look at the world but also at ourselves. These discoveries took place over about 100 years. The new Copernican astronomy challenged the previous understanding of the planets. Galileo studied the swinging of the chandelier in Pisa cathedral and dropped weights from the leaning tower. He discovered that both motions could be expressed as mathematical formulas. As mathematicians developed this study, they found that the elliptical orbits of the planets, once thought to be uniformly perfect circles, could be measured by mathematics. The scientific research of this era was capped by the publication in 1687 of Newton’s Principia Mathematica. Certainty, once provided by church dogma, disrupted by the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo, was now restored in mathematics and reason. Nature was measurable. Human beings were a part of the mechanism of the natural world and therefore subject to the measurement of mathematical physics.
Starting with the work of Greek philosophy and Galileo, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) sought to apply geometric reasoning to the nature of man and society. Mathematical formulae were to be the answer to all moral and social problems. Hobbes projected a scientific utopia in which all vices would ‘faint and languish’. There was salvation in science, peace on earth and goodwill to all men thanks to mathematics. Man was an animal, a machine. Yet his passions, appetites and desires could only be controlled by a government strong enough to force its will upon all its citizens. Social ‘sciences’ were born. Social and moral problems were as scientific as mathematics and physics.
In France, René Descartes (1596-1650), was engaged in a somewhat similar enterprise. So confident was he that he believed that sickness, the infirmities of old age, and even death itself could all be overcome by science. His conclusion was that, like everything else under the sun, ethics too was a science as certain as physics and was a development out of mechanics and physics. There were others, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and many afterwards. One man in 1699, John Craig, published mathematical calculations said to prove the truth of the Gospel! Even more absurd theories followed that attempted to compute the morality of an action. By a plus or minus you would reach heaven or go to hell, commented novelist, Lawrence Sterne. What is important for us to note in our consideration of education and its development is the application of physics and mathematics to the understanding of human nature.
The English philosopher, John Locke (1632-1704) was an empiricist in the tradition of Hobbes and Bacon. Although born of puritan parents, his thinking was rationalist and anti-authoritarian. Locke went up to Christ Church, Oxford, in the autumn of 1652, the same year that the godly theologian, John Owen, was made Vice-Chancellor of the university by Cromwell. John Locke’s views still lie at the foundation of much thinking today. (William Rees-Mogg, one-time editor of the London Times, confessed recently to carrying a copy of Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration about his person as we would carry a pocket Bible.) His greatest work was the monumental An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Here he repeatedly states that morality is as capable of an exact demonstration as mathematics. Locke rejected Descartes view that the ‘soul’ was a ‘substance that thinks’. After 1700 scientific investigation into the psychology of the individual and human behaviour understood them to be subject to discernable natural laws that could be managed by controlling reason.
In Book I of Locke’s Essay, like Berkeley and Hume, he argues that we have no innate knowledge. This means that at birth the human mind is a sort of blank slate on which experience writes. Locke claims in Book II that all ideas are the materials of knowledge and originate from experience. An ‘idea,’ "...stands for whatsoever is the Object of the Understanding, when a man thinks." (Essay I, 1, 8, p. 47) We cannot create ideas; we can only get them from experience. In this respect the mind is passive. Once the mind has a store of ideas, it can combine them into more complex ideas. So, in this respect the mind is active. Thus, Locke subscribes to a version of the empiricist axiom that there is nothing in the intellect that was not previously in the senses – where the senses are broadened to include reflection. Creativity is stirred by the stimulus, the environment. Change the environment, change the man.
In applying such thinking to the classroom today, children ‘learn’ through stimuli supplied by the teacher. The mind is both passive and malleable, but becomes active in processing what is perceived. Different results are achieved if things are said and done in different ways, so the thoughts of the child are manipulated and directed. As many teachers will testify, in such an environment it is difficult even for the most resolute adult to resist. As practised by totalitarian regimes, we know this procedure as brainwashing. In the late 70s the rock group Pink Floyd also called it by its proper name – thought control.
We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teacher, leave those kids alone
Hey, Teacher, leave those kids alone!
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall
(‘Another Brick in the Wall’, 1979)
He who controls what goes on in the classroom controls the child. This is what a ‘liberal’ education is all about. Teachers themselves have been trained using the same methodology they now inflict upon their young charges. They will generally be as ignorant as to what has happened to them at training college as most of the pupils will be as to what is happening to them in the classroom.
Following this methodology crime and ‘yobbish’ behaviour are a response and can be changed by ‘education’. The perpetrators are not to blame, things around them are. Discipline in the classroom can be achieved by a changing the environment in which children become what they are, by adjusting the stimmuli to which they are exposed. The utter failure of such thinking evident all around us on our streets seems to do nothing to dispel the nonsensical view men have of themselves. Having rejected the existence of the soul and along with it any inherent evil within it, what can be said but that evil arises from ignorance to be remedied by education?
Most writers and thinkers at this time began with Locke. Yet, if all men are machines, then are not those who manage and manipulate these machines also machines and who shall manage them? Locke did not carry his conclusions as far as his followers, but they entertained no such inhibitions.
All reform and revolution could progress based on scientific laws, and in this education was central, all to make the world a better place in which to live. Everyone acts out of self-interest. All appetites and desires or impulses within us, according to their satisfaction or their frustration, will give us pleasure or pain. This pleasure-pain motive was to replace traditional ideas of moral values. Society is an arrangement by which fundamentally selfish individuals live together. Only education, which is the art of managing and controlling these passions and desires, can help us to achieve this end. Education is more than going to school it is co-extensive with life itself. It is above all a matter that government must take in hand. We have in our own hands the means of perfecting the human mind. Social harmony presupposes lawmakers who will take upon themselves the task of educating their citizens.
Despite the repeated failures, faith in this scientific regulation of human affairs remains a pillar of modern educational theory. When all the range of human behaviour has been studied with appropriate thoroughness all major human problems will be solvable by human engineering in which education will play a pivotal role. Again the assumption must be that human nature is some way mechanical and predictable. A true theory of human nature enables man to control his own future. This is still a dominant modern gospel. From Newton men learned the mechanical nature of the universe and deduced human consciousness must be the same. From Locke they learned that nothing enters the mind of man but through his senses. We are told that we are the total of what experience makes us. Evil therefore is not part of human nature but is acquired through bad experiences. Furthermore, man can be ‘born again’ by throwing out all this accumulated rubbish. A completely new society can be established ‘using reason’ if we begin with a sound view of human nature.
Lest we are tempted to believe that we have long moved on since those days, think again. With some small changes to method, the aim of progressive educationalists today remains that of achieving behaviour modification through emotional pressures and pseudo-psychological manipulation.
John Broadus Watson (1878-1958) is commonly recognised as the founder of the brand of psychology known as behaviourism. The ideas he originated in the area of psychology are still very much with us. He was brought up on a farm in poor circumstances. Watson’s father was known for his drinking and brawling. His mother on the other hand was a pious Baptist. Although named after the well-known Baptist minister, John Broadus, Watson inclined to the life-style of his father rather than that of his mother. His death in 1958 was brought about by chirrosis of the liver.
Watson managed to sweet-talk his way into Furman University, at the time a college for training prospective Baptist ministers. After obtaining his M.A. from Furman at the age of 21, he moved on to the University of Chicago. Here he encountered Wilhelm Wundt’s psychology, which did not impress him in the least. In 1908 he took a position at Johns Hopkins University where he taught until 1920 when he was booted out after a scandal. He then went to work for an advertising company.
Watson was greatly influenced by the work of the Nobel Prize winning Russian physiologist, Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936). Pavlov is remembered for his experiment with dogs whereby he was able to cause the animal to salivate at the sound of a bell, eventually on its own, after first pairing the sound with the presentation of food. Watson tried the same on humans using bells and electric shocks. Recognising no demarcation between humans and ‘lower animals’, Watson took Pavlov’s work further, adopting the ‘conditioned reflex’ to human behaviour. Darwin had said that we share common ancestors with gorillas, why could he not extrapolate from his own experiments with rats? Psychologists of the day generally opposed his work as they still held to an intrinsic difference between animals and humans.
Among the impressive names of those who taught Watson in Chicago was John Dewey of whom he said, “I never knew what he was talking about then, and unfortunately for me, I still don’t know.” He may have been somewhat disingenuous in this statement. Watson is firmly in the tradition of John Locke’s tabula rasa rather than the Rousseau to Spock pedigree of the spontaneous child brigade to which Dewey belonged. Watson’s bestselling The Psychological Care of the Infant and Child (1928) was the ‘Spock’ of its day. Watson was later rebutted by Dr Spock. Dewey would certainly not have appealed to Watson. What issued from the child in terms of wishes, needs, feelings, Watson ignored as though they did not exist. We should remember that despite their different approaches, these two different lines of thought also have many basic ideas in common. Both, for example, emphatically deny the biblical doctrine of human depravity. The followers of Locke deny virtually all things innate, whilst the followers of Rousseau say that if it comes naturally from the child it must be good. For his part, Watson gave ground a little in that he recognised three innate or ‘unconditioned’ emotional responses in infants who had not yet had the time to acquire conditioned responses: fear, rage, and something he provisionally called love. All other ‘natural’ reactions, fear of the dark, love of one’s mother, came about through Pavlovian conditioning.
The following definition of behaviourism, written by Watson in 1913, ought to be read with great care. As we shall see when looking at modern ‘progressive’ teaching methods, it is hard to overestimate the influence of behaviourism in education. This extract is from his well-known essay written in 1913, Psychology as a Behaviourist Views It.
“Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behaviour. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its date dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness. The behaviourist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal response, recognizes no dividing line between man and brute. The behaviour of man, with all of its refinement and complexity, forms only a part of the behaviorist’s total scheme of investigation.”
All orthodox modes of experience such as mind, consciousness, images, feelings, were excluded. He accepted only that which could be demonstrated in physical behaviour by actions of muscles, glands, and the like. Behaviourism was the study of how humans and animals alike adjust to their environment. The ‘descriptive categories’ were stimulus and response. In a thoroughly worked out system of psychology, “given the stimuli the response can be predicted”. The goal of his researches was “to learn general and particular methods by which I may control behaviour”.
Basic to all behaviouristic theory is that human nature is perfectible, passive and malleable, and without sin. The formative influences on behaviour are all external and do not come from within, either from natural goodness or original sin. They are responses to the stimulation of sense perceptions and environmental factors. By varying these man’s personality can be developed and controlled. Education is total conditioning. True education that encourages natural ability and latent talent, these things are beyond the reach of educators using behaviouristic teaching methods, and are resistant to control and so are an abomination to ‘scientific’ behaviourist educators.
Consciousness is non-existent, neither is the mind as a non-physical entity. After all, these things lead to the souls and to God.
“Behaviourism claims that ‘consciousness’ is neither s definable nor a usable concept; that it is merely another word for the ‘soul’ of more ancient times. The old psychology is thus dominated by a kind of subtle religious philosophy.” (Behaviourism, p.3, 1924)
Yet Watson and friends have no difficulty in accepting the ‘self-evident truths’ of their own system, declaring them scientific with no ground for doing so other than their humanist ideals. With consciousness gone, so has man. Man is a ‘whole animal’. No dividing line exists between man and animals. It is therefore quite appropriate to apply to man the results of psychological tests on rats, dogs, and any other similar animals. The absence of consciousness is the starting point for behaviourism.
“The behaviorist finds no mind in his laboratory, sees it nowhere in his subjects
…If the behaviorists are right in their contention that there is no observable mind body problem and no observable separate entity called mind, then there can be no such thing as consciousness or its substratum, the unconscious.”
(The Ways of Behaviourism, p.7, 1928)
The child in school now becomes, using behaviourist methodology, anything the state via the teacher wishes to make him.
“In short the cry of the behaviorist is, ‘Give me the baby and my world to bring it up and I’ll make it crawl and walk; I’ll make it climb and use its hands in constructing buildings of stone or wood; I’ll make it a thief, a gunman, or a dope fiend. The possibility of shaping in any direction is almost endless.” (The Ways of Behaviourism, p.35, 1928)
Given the stimulus, the response can be predicted; given the response the stimulus can be identified. Personality does not come as a gift from God but is man-made. If total control were possible then even adults could be changed completely. Every individual can be made to behave as society specifies. Social control must begin with behaviour not with thoughts, with external actions not internal theories. What a man thinks reflects what he does, not the other way round.
Behaviourism has entered the world of language. ‘Political correctness’ ensures correct thinking by proper language conditioning. Faulty behaviour is due to faulty conditioning through misused words. The introduction of manufactured words such as ‘homophobia’, making other words taboo, is designed to make us all think in ways socially acceptable to the liberal élite who make our laws. Correct verbal conditioning produces predictable thinking.
Where mind and body are one, thought and deed are the same. The only freedom we can know is conformity of the ethics and standards of the group.
“The universe will change if you bring up your children, not in the freedom of the libertine, but in behaviorisitic freedom – a freedom which we cannot even picture in words, so little do we know of it. Will not these children in turn with their better ways of living and thinking, replace us as society and in turn bring up their children in a still more scientific way, until the world finally becomes a place fit for human habitation." (Behaviourism, p.248, 1924)
Edward Lee Thorndike (1874-1949), son of a Methodist minister, was professor of educational psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University. Like Watson, he also did experiments with animals and transferred his findings to human beings. Thorndike used puzzle boxes to demonstrate instrumental conditioning. If the animal responds if it is rewarded, the response is learned. Animals could only escape from the box by making a response such as pulling a sting or pushing a button.
In his book, The Principles of Teaching based on Psychology, Thorndike endeavoured to make “the study of teaching scientific and practical.” This is how he described the art of the art of teaching and is one which would be readily recognised by student teachers in training today.
“The art of giving and withholding stimuli with the result of producing or preventing certain responses. In this definition the term stimulus is used widely for any event which influences a person, - for a word spoken to him, a look, a sentence which he reads, the air he breathes, etc., etc. The term response is used for any reaction made by him, - a new thought, a feeling of interest, a bodily act, any mental or bodily condition resulting from the stimulus. The aim of the teacher is to produce desirable and prevent undesirable changes in human beings by producing and preventing certain responses. The means at the disposal of the teacher are the stimuli which can be brought to bear upon the pupil, the teacher's words, gestures, and appearance, the condition and appliances of the school room, the books to be used and objects to be seen, and so on through a long list of the things and events which the teacher can control.”
Thorndike saw the mind as a functioning of the human organism in adapting to its environment. His work did much to overthrow tradition introspective educational psychology. His stimulus–response (S–R) was widely accepted and made possible a ‘scientific’ understanding of education. Thorndike is, however, remembered primarily for devising methods of testing and measuring children's intelligence and their ability to learn. His reasoning was that anything existing did so in some amount that could be measured as in all physical sciences. Where mind and body are one it follows that human nature ‘can be made material for quantitative science.’ Thorndike did give some ground to heredity, saying that human beings differ enormously at birth due to their ancestry. Furthermore, environmental influences he felt were often exaggerated, as they were not constant for any two people.
ALL MEN ARE GOOD BY NATURE
We now turn to another line of thinking that has influenced modern education. Even at the time of the Enlightenment, not everyone cared anything for scientific thinking and so they strode off in a different direction. This is illustrative of the many contradictory strands within today’s progressive education. The Genevan thinker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), believed man to be essentially good but that he is corrupted by external influences. Salvation lies in following his own nature, his own impulses and appetites, and in allowing his natural humanity to blossom and find completeness. By the 1770s what is known as the Romantic movement flourished all over Europe and in Germany it was the ideal of die schöne Seele – the beautiful soul – that became central. Rousseau’s ‘big idea’ was that everything was good as it came from the hand of God and Nature, but all things deteriorate in the hands of men. External laws and customs corrupted the natural man. Abolish marriage and there can be no unfaithfulness; abolish the monarchy and wars will cease. Evil is between men not within them and can be traced to the church, government, monogamy, schools, even eating meat. Yet surely, these evil institutions that have so ‘polluted’ us have been founded by other men who must then have evil within them? Romanticism here falls into contradiction.
Rousseau’s ideas have made as much impact as any on current progressive education. Because man is essentially good, let us follow nature! The conflict lies not within man but with that imposed upon him from without. There must be a rejection of all that impedes or is contrary to the goodness of our human nature. In 1762, Rousseau published Emile, a classic guide to education according to nature. Using the literary form of a fictional biography of an orphan boy, Rousseau explains that he wants to ‘form’ a man of nature. In this ‘forming’ all traces of civil society are to be eliminated from the boy’s experience. A tutor is appointed to see that nothing interferes with the spontaneous development of the faculties of the child. Let the boy be guided by nothing else but the impulse of his own intelligence. The boy is to find his own way, to use his own powers of observation and experience. There is to be no instruction. This nonsense still prevails in many classrooms today. Children must discover for themselves. Emile was not to see a book until he reached the age of 12. He must learn astronomy by looking at the stars. If he smashed a window, let him learn from experience that the rain gets in! This is probably one of the most nonsensical doctrines in the world of education and it has done more to deprive children of the good teaching they deserve than almost anything else. Such methodology works only in the pages of storybooks. The rule is that a child should be allowed to follow the impulses of nature. Surely this is asking for trouble should the teaching of Scripture turn out to be true and Rousseau’s notions misguided? King David’s confession is to be preferred to the ramblings of this Swiss cuckoo!
“Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.” (Psalm 51:5)
Or what of the words of the apostle Paul?
“For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwelleth no good thing.” (Romans 7:18)
“The Old Masters: how well they understood,” muses Auden in one of his poems. He was speaking here of suffering and tragedy and draws attention to the painter Brueghel’s Icarus. On the theme of innate wickedness the poet could have well drawn our attention to the cruelty inflicted by children on each other in the same artist’s picture Children Playing. Rotten on the inside means rotten deeds on the outside. The verification of this truth is met with on a daily basis by teachers in the classroom. In Scotland alone, according to figures gathered directly from local authorities independently by the country’s leading newspaper, there are 34 attacks on teachers every single day of the year. Because the figures are so bad, the Scottish executive no longer publishes them saying ‘the data is unreliable’! How long must the longsuffering people of Scotland put up with this nonsense? Bad behaviour is blamed on the teacher, the external influence, and not on the child. A ‘toolkit’ for teachers on teaching the very dubious concept of ‘emotional literacy’ and issued in 2005 explains that a teacher shouting at a misbehaving girl to ‘get into your group or you’ll be sorry’ is to blame for the pupil’s bad behaviour (Sunday Telegraph, 27 November 2005). Someone has been drinking too deeply at the wells dug by Rousseau.
If the natural inclination of the sodomite is towards other men, who then can accuse him of evil? He stands justified. But then, if the impulses of the child-abuser are towards little children is this not also good? Surely, all that is required is the consent of the child? Is there not an inconsistency here? Shall we not extend this principle to the robber to rob, the rapist to rape, the killer to kill, who then can accuse them of doing any wrong? This view of human nature expressed by these ‘radicals’ stands in complete opposition to the teaching of the Bible. It assumes the essential goodness of men and the perfectibility of human nature. The Bible teaches the depravity of human nature and the impossibility of any change without the saving grace of Christ. There is in the Christian Gospel the possibility of change, humanism condemns all men to remain always what they are. Paul answers his own question:
“O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord.” (Romans 7:24-25)
According to Denis Diderot (1713-1784), another of this philosophical camp, only those commands should be issued that are going to be obeyed. The child will act according to nature and a command given against nature will not be obeyed. The chaos brought about by this poppycock can be witnessed in the schools of our land on a daily basis. This is precisely the problem, children continually act according to their nature, which the Bible tells us clearly is sinful. The doctrines of Rousseau and Diderot persist despite being evidently false. The liberal theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, said of the goodness of human nature,
“…no cumulation of contradictory evidence seems to disturb modern man’s good opinion of himself. He considers himself the victim of corrupting institutions which he is about to destroy or reconstruct, or of the confusions of ignorance which an adequate education is about to overcome. Yet he continues to regard himself as essentially harmless and virtuous.”
“ The way of a fool is right in his own eyes” (Proverbs 12:15). The soul has gone, sin has gone, and with them all need of a Saviour.
“There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.” (Proverbs 14:12)
Writing in 1930, John Dewey named the American educator, Colonel Francis Wayland Parker (1837-1902), as the ‘father of the progressive educational movement’. Parker came from a religious family line, five members of whom had been ministers. His educational theories, as we might expect, are therefore often expressed using religious terminology. This is a common trait in Romanticism, compare Blake’s poetry, and unless we realise at the outset Parker is talking about something remote from biblical truth, we can be easily deceived. Strip away this religious wrapping and we find his gospel of freedom and group activity has survived to this day. He threw out all rote learning whether of spelling or arithmetic. Spontaneity and self-activity were to be central. The individual development of each child was a copy of the evolution of the human race itself: “the way we teach our children will determine the fate of mankind.” There are some differences, but also many echoes of Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’.
“The child is born a savage, but he rapidly ascends step by step, by love and works of love, up through all the rays of blessed sunshine! Up and up, to eternal light, and the everlasting truth, and the eternal God. …Every child is a born worker… There never was a lazy child born in God’s busy world… The child is a lover of humanity… There never was such a thing as a selfish child born – they grow selfish later. …Feed the lambs of God, and the gates of glory shall be lifted up, and the King of Glory shall enter in.” (in National Educational Association Journal of 1889)
The whole motive of education is “the motive presented in the life and words of Christ; the motive of making one’s own life and character of the greatest possible benefit to mankind.” This motive has nothing to do with Christ, and is founded on a reversal of what the Bible says about human nature.
Parker laid stress on the centrality and ‘divinity’ of the child.
“God made the child His highest creation, He put into that child His divinity, and that this divinity manifests itself in the seeking for truth through the visible and tangible.” (Talks of Pedagogics, p.7)
This natural divinity is to find unfettered expression in free activity. “The spontaneous tendencies of the child are the records of inborn divinity” (Talks of Pedagogics, p.18). Again, remove the religious covering and we are left with 20th century existentialism, truth expressed as anarchic freedom. ‘God’ may have been dispensed with since Parker, but not the ideas. This realisation of the divine nature can only be restricted by the bumbling ineptitude and ignorant intervention of adults in the form of the teacher. ‘Discipline’, ‘reward and punishment’ are all dirty words. They constitute external inducement and coercion and are the death of spontaneity. Punishment is bad enough but rewards encourage selfishness. Selfishness is brought about, according to Colonel Parker, by imposing authority on the child, whereas unfettered egoism brings out the divine in the child! Freedom is education and education is freedom.
G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924) was born in Ashfield, Massachusetts. Raised on a farm, his parents were Congregationalists. Encouraged into the ministry by his mother – he was a preacher for a short while – he used the occasion of his studies to get away from the farm and continue with his education. He turned to philosophy then to psychology. Hall gained the first Ph.D. in psychology at an American University under William James in 1878 at Harvard. He then went to Leipzig to study with Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) (a man we meet again in our second article). Returning to the USA, Hall taught for a short while at Harvard, but moved to Johns Hopkins in 1881. He moved to Clark University when it opened and stayed there until his death. One of his students was John Dewey.
Hall is known as the father of the child study movement. He linked child development with evolutionary theory, in particular he was influenced by Haeckle’s idea that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’. Hall thought that the recapitulation of evolution by the embryo was also true from birth to maturity. The child repeats the evolution of the human race in its various stages of development.
No intellectual demands should be made on a child until eight years old. Before the onset of youth when rationality emerges, learning is by play. The child compares to ‘primitive man’ in evolutionary theory with low intellectual ability. The line between man and animals must be eradicated; they are even our elder brothers. A child is thus, because of the evolutionary process, closer to its animal past than its human present. It is this animal past that all men share. In a child instinct is more reliable than reason. Children must not be forced to learn, but their interest aroused and gently led. Hall was a true Romantic believing the
“love of nature and of children is the glory of manhood and womanhood, and the best of all civilisation.”
(in National Educational Association Journal of 1896)
There was no such thing as original sin in this world of his. Sin was not inherited, could not be, so all wrong was due to environment, which includes other people. This has given rise to the oft-quoted dictum: there are no bad children, only bad parents. So it is that each generation in this evolutionary process is better than the previous one. Rousseau: “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains” (The Social Contract, I, 1). These shackles must be thrown off, youth is destined to rebel. Yet the progress is backward not forward, back to the primitive roots of mankind.
UNITARIANS AND THE DAWNING OF A NEW AGE
With the new science, the new ways of looking at man and the world in which he lived, the 18th century was filled with hopes for the dawning of a new age. The revolutions in France were seen as precursors of a new world order yet to come. The French Revolution brought with it no Golden Age, but instead a Reign of Terror followed by Napoleon and a generation of war between France and England.
The words of Miranda in Shakespeare’s The Tempest::
“How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!
To which Prospero responds:
'Tis new to thee.”
(The Tempest 5:1:183-184)
Such hopes, based as they are on a belief in the essential goodness of mankind have a long if fatal pedigree. The dawning of a new age was thought to be within reach, if only education could be brought to the people.
Many, although not all the social radicals at that time were Unitarians, also sometimes called ‘dissenters’ (meaning they were not members of the Church of England). Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), the discoverer of Oxygen was a lapsed Calvinist who eventually turned to Unitarianism. The significance of the Unitarian movement in educational reform both in the UK and North America right through until the end of the 19th century should not be underestimated. Their input was significant.
Priestley entered the new liberal nonconformist Daventry Academy in Northamptonshire. Whilst there, he read through David Hartley's Observations on Man (1749). Priestley was deeply influenced by Hartley's views of human perfectibility through good education. In 1755 Joseph Priestley became a minister at the Presbyterian Church at Needham Market. Three years later he moved to Nantwich in Cheshire. Priestley also opened a small school where he developed his ideas on education. He was especially interested in exploring how science could improve the quality of human life.
Unitarians were generally sympathetic to the revolutions in America and France and Priestley was no exception. He was made an honorary French citizen but shunned by many in England seeing that his homeland was at the time at war with France. Opposition to him and his revolutionary opinions was fierce and resulted in his house in Birmingham being razed to the ground. Consequently, he fled to London and from there he emigrated to America. His confident hope of a new age, a ‘New Jerusalem’ was based on the new theory of human nature.
“Whatever was the beginning of the world, the end will be glorious and paradisiacal beyond what our imaginations can now conceive. Extravagant as some people may suppose these views to be, I think I could show them to be fairly suggested by the true theory of human nature and to arise from the natural course of human affairs.”
The first Unitarian Church in England was founded in 1774. Around half the Unitarian Churches in England were once Presbyterian. More Presbyterians defected to Unitarianism than out of any other English denomination. In the first half of the 19th century, defections to the Unitarians came from among the Congregationalists. In 1851, of the three million plus protestant nonconformists around 37 thousand were Unitarian. Joseph Priestley in the 18th century did much to promote their cause before emigrating to America. Their congregations sprang up largely in the industrial towns cities and towns and enjoyed the support of many prominent citizens and families such as Josiah Wedgwood, and the Nettlefold and Chamberlain families in Birmingham.
Horace Mann (1796-1858) is still regarded by many as the father of modern schooling. He had a stringent religious upbringing. His family belonged to the Congregational Church of which Rev. Dr. Nathaniel Emmons was minister. Emmons was an exponent of ‘New Light’ Calvinism. Congregationalism in America at the time was drifting in many different directions. The situation was far from clear-cut and involved many issues. Onto this scene strode Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), revivalist preacher and president of Princeton University. Edwards preached his own distinctive message and moved away somewhat from the more traditional ‘reformed’ doctrines. His followers were called ‘New Lighters’ and the traditionalists ‘Old Lighters’. The ‘Old Light’ ministers were divided into those who held to more traditional doctrines and those who were assuming a more liberal position.
By 1805 Harvard had relinquished orthodoxy and eventually became a bastion of Unitarianism. Later men built on this foundation, particularly at Harvard. The effective preacher, William Ellery Channing (1780-1842), did much to promote Unitarianism. At this time universalism – all will be saved in the end – was taken on board by Unitarianism. Between the years 1817 and 1840 around one hundred Congregational Churches became Unitarian. Massachusetts was worst hit. In Boston all but two of its four Congregational Churches became Unitarian. Many within the congregations remaining harboured Unitarianism.
As is often the case, the disciples carry the teaching further than their master. Such was true of the followers of Edwards. This was to lead to the ‘New England Theology’. The move away from Calvinism continued. Emmons himself taught that not only are sinners not associated with Adam in their guilt, but we cannot receive from him a depraved nature because he did not have one – “there is no morally corrupt nature distinct from free voluntary exercises.” Despite this, Horace Mann testified that Emmons
“…expounded all the doctrines of total depravity, election, and reprobation, and not only the eternity but the extremity of hell torments, unflinchingly and in their most terrible significance, while he rarely if ever descanted on the joys of heaven, and never, in my recollection upon the essential and necessary happiness of a virtuous life.”
It was the accidental death of his brother that finally tipped the balance for Mann. He said of himself that up until this point at the age of fourteen, he had been a ‘gullible student’ of such teachings. He immediately suspended his Calvinist beliefs refusing to accept that a Creator could be so cruel as to send sinners to hell.
It is safe to conclude that Horace Mann was challenged by the Christian Gospel and that ultimately he refused it. This seems to have been a similar pattern for many educational and social reformers at that time. Horace Mann became a lawyer and joined the First Parish Unitarian Church of Dedham, Massachusetts in 1823. The first case in his newly opened practice was on behalf the First Parish Congregational Church of Milton. They wanted to remove their minister because he refused to open his pulpit to other ministers of Unitarian persuasion. Mann won the case. In doing so, he clearly appears not only to have turned his back on the truth but also declared himself an enemy of the Gospel.
Elements of the ‘New Light’ theology seem to have been taken over in a revised form by the new radical reformers. It was inevitable that with downgrading of the biblical teaching on human depravity, it would be eventually replaced by, at the very least, an inclination of the human heart to do good. The postmillennial hopes of Jonathan Edwards, the New Age that would ‘probably’ begin in America, doubtless fed into the utopian dreams of the new educational reformers. Horace Mann believed the Christian’s millennial hope was to be realised through education.
“…which – so far as human agency is concerned – must be looked to for the establishment of peace and righteousness on earth, and for the enjoyment of glory and happiness in heaven.” (Life and Works, IV)
By the end of the 19th century the Unitarianism of Priestly was all but extinct as a philosophy and Hartley was not included in any philosophy curriculum. The Unitarians running Harvard had embraced the Scottish philosophical school of ‘Common Sense’. Unitarianism at the turn of the century increasing lost ground to secular humanism, which is hardly surprising. The philosopher, Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), was brought up in Unitarianism and remained so persuaded until the age of 15 when he forsook it. The Unitarian ‘god’, such as he was, became for many, surplus to requirements and was displaced by secular humanism.
The economist, Adam Smith, suggested that the ‘intelligent and instructed’ were more ‘decent’ than others. Bentham claimed evil grew from ignorance. Despite detractors such as Herbert Spencer the influence of Benthamism was proving too strong to resist both in Britain and on the Continent. As early as the 1830s the aim of education was seen to be the perfection of human society through the ‘science of education’ (J. S. Mill). Utilitarians were well represented and successful in parliament. As early as the 1830s their spokesman in parliament, John Roebuck (1801-1879), sought to show the house why government should provide a general education for the people, the reason he gave was the reduction of crime. William Cobbett opposed Roebuck’s Education Bill of 1833 claiming on the contrary that crime in England was increasing as education as spreading. Speaking to the house:
“If so, what reason was there to tax the people for the increase of education.”
Then most insulting of all – the idea was French! Many were also aware of how education was being used in Napoleonic France as a means of indoctrination. He continued:
“It was nothing but an attempt to force education – it was French – it was a Doctrinaire plan and we should always be opposed to it.” (from Hansard 1833, Vol XX. Cited by West, pp. 131 & 135)
Mill and his friends under the banner of ‘educational reform’ began to call for legislation that would deliberately and consciously shape a new society. Utilitarianism using its novel apparatus of ‘social engineering’ through ‘scientific legislation’ would secure the liberation of the masses through specially designed state educational institutions. Teaching people to be happy would reduce violence, mischief and political unrest. Roebuck and his fellow utilitarians believed that only they could achieve this end.
The ‘romantics’ as much as the utilitarian ‘scientists’ looked for a Golden Age, and sought to build on earth their New Jerusalem. According to the French thinker, Helvetius (1715-1771), education could accomplish everything.
“Education makes us what we are…The science of education may be reduced perhaps to the placing a man in that situation which will force him to attain the talents and virtues required of him.” (A Treatise on Man)
If education is the whole of life, then his environment, the society and government which control him are all part of the picture. Moral education is just a management of the environment, as Rousseau taught in Emile. If the environment in which children grow up can be changed, if malevolent influences can be neutralised from wherever they may come, then in a generation or two evils will wither and be seen no more. Let reason rule and a Golden Age will appear. The human mind is the real source of progress and is the guarantee of a perfect society.
It is easy to mock such aspirations from a distance without realising some of the doctrines that gave rise to them are still with us. There is the rejection of history, the desire to wipe the slate clean and begin again. Institutions and traditions of the past have corrupted human nature. We must concentrate not on eradicating the evil within men but in the environment in which they live. There is nothing more 21st century than that! Men are evil because they are locked into the past. Man is good and can reach a state of perfection by changing human institutions – or in the case of anarchy, by destroying them. As the state of perfection is reached so more and more of these institutions disappear.
A ‘RIGHT’ TO AN EDUCATION
Article 28 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child stipulates the recognition of ‘the right of the child to education’ making ‘primary education compulsory and available free to all.’ Paragraph 3 of that same article obliges the signatories to facilitate access to scientific and technical knowledge and modern teaching methods’.
Horace Mann believed in
“…the existence of a great, immortal immutable principle of natural law, or natural ethics, – a principle antecedent to all human institutions, and incapable of being abrogated by any ordinance of man, – a principle of divine origin, clearly legible in the ways of Providence as those ways are clearly manifested in the order of Nature and in the history of the race, which proves the absolute right to an education of every human being that comes into the world; and which, of course, proves the correlative duty of every government to see that the means of that education are provided for all.” (Life and Works, Vol. IV p.115 f., 1891)
We must not forget that Mann’s background and that when he speaks of ‘divine origin’ or ‘Providence’, he is not speaking of the God we encounter through the Bible. According to Mann, the child has an inalienable right to education and its provision is the duty of the state.
This ‘right’ is grounded in ‘natural law’. The origin of the idea of ‘natural law’ is obscure, but it emerged in Greek philosophy, in particular in Aristotle. It then passed in to Roman philosophy and lawmaking through Cicero and from thence into Western thought and justice. Heraclitus of Ephesus (c. 500 BC) thought that when men saw wrongs done they were disturbed and passed judgement on what they had seen. In so doing they were invoking a law. This may not be a written law. Nevertheless, by the act of passing judgement men show themselves committed to an idea of justice. This law is said to spring out of the constitution of human nature and is common to all men. The Stoics of Mars Hill fame believed men should live according to Nature. There is within man an essential goodness or notion of goodness according to which we all should live. This takes no account of the verbal revelation to man in Scripture. Nature is the will of God. Of course, again God is soon left out of the picture leaving only ‘Nature’. There are then certain inalienable rights for us all grounded, not in Scripture, but in Nature. Nature, not God, then becomes the source of all law. The laws of Nature are fixed and cannot be changed, not by anyone, not even by God Himself. The origin of law is fixed in Nature; it is Right Reason. The statement that ‘all men are created equal’ is a principle that cannot be demonstrated as being true by any science, but only by that intuitive reason that all men have in common. Some evangelicals believe that the rule for Christians is the Bible whereas the rule for non-Christians is a separate ‘natural law’ within them. We need the Bible for our spiritual lives and ‘right reason’ for everything else. This position is a mixture of Bible and paganism.
There have always been those who deny all idea of a universal moral law. The denial of a higher law, divine or natural, leaves us in the hands of him who is best able to force his will upon us, might over right. Law is not right because it is forced upon us, but because it is an expression of true righteousness. Such righteousness can be found only in the being of God. There is no ‘right reason’ outside God to which He must conform to be a ‘reasonable’ God. God’s reason is revealed in Scripture and our reasoning begins there and not with that which comes to us to us from outside us through our sensory organs (cf. Locke, et al). There are no universal principles or moral laws outside God or above God to be apprehended by ‘right reason’ or conscience or anything else.
Governments may today force education upon all children by pointing out natural rights; they may impose it because we cannot resist; they may insist upon it for reasons of their own self-interest – to keep themselves safely in power. International law and international criminal courts, in the absence of any binding written statute, call upon natural law, natural justice, and human rights to justify themselves. All pay homage to natural law and natural rights derived from it. John Locke went a step further than most severing the link between law and rights, believing the latter could stand alone apart from the rule of law. He opened the door to revolution. This is why today many who care most about rights, care little about law. Everyone has rights and will cast aside law to secure them.
In the educational world, the ideas of Horace Mann are still taken as read. He believed that it is not original sin as the Bible teaches it ruling in the heart of men, but natural law. Naturally the child will have a sense of delight and duty. Crime and evil come about because of the failure to educate, failure to utilise this law within. Because duty and delight are natural to children, rewards and punishments are superfluous. Indeed, parents who give rewards and punishments pervert their children. In the place of our accountability towards God we are given natural rights. The teaching of the Bible is thereby turned on its head. Mann abhorred punishment for it excited fear and “fear is a most debasing, dementalising passion”. The Bible says: “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10). Rewards and punishment imply an external authority and accountability rather than natural rights.
Instead of being responsible, the man with ‘rights’ is owed something by God, parents, the government, and everyone else. Furthermore, if something goes wrong ‘rights’ have been violated and someone else is to blame! If there is to be any punishment at all it must fall upon parents for depriving children of their ‘right’ to an education and ultimately God will be blamed for making me what I am and letting things happen to me! Horace Mann was opposed to any idea of parental or divine punishment, but made an exception for the state! Here he was insistent. Compulsory education must involve the accountability of parents and implicitly, sanctions or punishment.
Mill is renowned for being the champion of 19th century liberalism and his essay On Liberty (1859) remains a standard text today. Coercion is generally viewed as bad, although it may be resorted to on occasions as the lesser of two evils. There was a deep-seated conviction that certain areas of an individual’s life ought to remain free of interference, as government has no business there. However, Mill defended intervention intended to ‘prevent harm to others’. His definition is wide, but includes the more obvious things such as physical injury, offences against decency, but even injury to good manners. In addition he included failing to perform ‘assignable duties’. The proper education of children was a duty ‘assigned’ to parents. Both Mill and Roebuck believed that power of the parent over the child was delegated by the state – certainly not by God! The neglect of the development of a child’s mental faculties amounts to harm and cruelty. Each child is said to have a ‘right’ to at least a minimum of education. Parents cannot withhold this right.
For the Christian believer, the bringing up of children, which includes their education, is the solemn responsibility of parents for which they are accountable not to the state but to God. Education is not a right of the child but a responsibility of parents. Children are a gift of God over which we must watch and take care. This duty does not lie with the church; it does not lie with the magistrate in the form of the state. To teach, govern and guide children is to control the future, all governments know this. It is the mark of a godless anti-Christian culture to take these powers from the parents. We are to render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar, but are under no obligation to surrender to him that which is not his to claim.
The responsibility for education must rest with government according to Mill. This is discussed in his Principles of Political Economy.
“The uncultivated cannot be competent judges of cultivation. …Education, therefore, is one of those things which it is admissible in principle that a government should provide for the people.”
Despite this, Mill at times had his doubts and was fearful lest government control of education establish ‘a despotism over the mind’. Roebuck was less fearful declaring in parliament that it was his intention “to make the education of the people a matter of national and not merely individual concern”. Mill whilst agreeing with compulsion believed that control should be exercised through the enforcement of public examinations rather than through the Benthamite centralised political control proposed by Roebuck. In both cases it was government pulling the educational strings.
In the wake of the philosophy of ‘rights’ will always follow the diminution of choice and freedom and must ultimately end in tyranny. Choices are made for us and we are forced to comply. The choice
is a clear one. We accept the tyranny imposed by government or embrace self-responsible liberty. Gresham Machen, the Princeton theologian, made the following observation early in the 20th century:
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