The View From 1776

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This article is scheduled for publication in the forthcoming RepublicanVoices website newsletter.

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Vast changes have occurred in the way education is viewed in the United States.  What our founding fathers regarded as essential to education is now largely relegated to the category of superstitious ignorance and unscientific value judgment.

That is hardly news.  But, for those wishing to recover elements of past values, it is important to understand the great currents that have caused us to drift away from our original moorings.

The direction in which those currents have been pushing us for roughly 150 years is limitation of the rights of private property and something approximating socialistic egalitarianism.  Thomas Jefferson, the putative founder of the Democratic Party, is an icon for those who see progressive democratization of politics as the guiding light of American history, a process that liberals deem necessary if society is to move toward socialism.  Their assumption is that the masses, given adequate one-man-one-vote ballot-box power, will simply take from the rich what is their rightfully due.

Ironically their icon Jefferson benefited from the wealth accumulated by his father under the Adam-Smith style of laissez-faire economics prevailing when our nation began to take shape.  Jefferson’s wealthy planter father had no formal education, but determined to provide a full classical education for his son.  Learning Latin and Greek in order to study classics of Greek, Roman, Continental, and English philosophers and historians constituted the platform upon which Jefferson composed the Declaration of Independence, of which he later wrote that it was not intended to be a novel theory or to express never before heard ideas.  It was, he wrote, merely the expression of understandings common throughout the colonies, based upon the ideas of Aristotle, John Locke, and other worthies.

It must be noted, in addition, that our earliest colleges – among them, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton – where John Adams, James Madison, and others of our Founding Fathers studied were instituted expressly to educate Protestant ministers of the Gospel.

It is thus fair to say that the education of our Founding Fathers consisted, to an important degree, in gaining understanding of the Bible and the classical political theories and history underlying our Judeo-Christian heritage.

The first turning of the tide occurred not long after the Declaration of Independence, with the French Revolution in 1789, which ushered in the paradigm of history as an evolutionary progression, from primitive superstition, to spiritual religions, and finally to the presumed golden age of science. 

The hallmark of the new era was rejection of all the elements that had constituted Jefferson’s education.  In the new, scientific age, men were to look no higher than to contemporary intellectuals as the source of all truth and knowledge.  Councils of intellectuals, having identified the fundamental ills of society, so they presumed, could prescribe completely new political and social structures to bring benevolence, harmony, and increased productivity to the world.

The result, contrary to naive, ivory-tower expectations, was a 19th century punctuated by wars and revolutions, including Napoleon’s military conquest of most of Western Europe.  Spurred by French aggressions, renascent German nationalism led to Bismarck’s founding the German Empire in the 1860s.  Along with this came the rise of German universities, with their systematic and thorough scholarship.  German science – physics, chemistry, and medicine – became the best in the world.

In elite Eastern universities in the United States it rapidly became essential to have studied in German universities and to have earned a PhD if one wished to have prospects for academic advancement.  The opening of Johns Hopkins University in 1876 gave tremendous impetus to this phenomenon.  Johns Hopkins was consciously modeled upon the great German universities and emphasized graduate level research and publication of studies based on the secular and materialistic ideas of French socialism that had come to characterize the new, presumably scientific age.  Older universities like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton began to feel the tug of the tide and drifted steadily away from their Christian anchorage.  By the first decades of the 20th century, they forthrightly described themselves as secular universities.

German educational concepts remain the primary tidal force in our education today.  In addition to scholarship that emphasized research of original documents by students working in seminars with professors, German emphasis upon thoroughness and competence led to the formation of specialized, professional colleges within the universities.  Until the late 19th century, most doctors and lawyers learned their professions by private study and apprenticeships.  By the 20th century, the elite universities had established medical schools, law schools, and other professional schools.

The negative side of this was specialization itself.  It is hardly surprising that, in comparison to a Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, or Jay, few graduates of highly specialized professional education have comprehensive understanding of the broad sweep of history, religion, and philosophy that made the world as it is.  The educated man of our fathers has become the narrowly specialized man who, outside his own field, has opinions, but seldom knowledge.

Doctors must of course digest such a mass of technical data that expecting a statesman’s understand of world events, in addition, is unrealistic.  Lawyers, however, are a different matter. 

Alexis de Tocqueville, when he wrote “Democracy in America” in 1832, noted that, more here than in Europe, lawyers tended to become legislators.  This he saw as a healthy phenomenon, because lawyers, at that time, were the guardians of tradition who understood more clearly than the average citizen the importance in our history of the rights of private property and the essentiality of individual responsibility to obey the law and to redress damages to the rights and property of others. 

The best law schools still inculcate the ability to reason clearly and to apply the theory, as well as the precedents, of the law, which necessarily requires delving into history and the philosophical theories of the times when legal precedents were established.  The difficulty is that the theory of the law has been pulled by the currents of socialism in the opposite direction from the orientation of the Constitution in 1787.

Law schools like those of Harvard and Yale have to a frightening extent taught recent generations of lawyers the so-called critical studies thesis that there are no independent standards of right or wrong.  According to critical studies theory, the history of the law is simply imposition of power by ruling elites, and the lawyer’s function is to reinterpret the law to favor the proletariat by imposing social justice.  This necessarily entails abandoning the Judeo-Christian traditions of our Founding Fathers, as well as declaring America’s history to be a chronicle of crimes against the proletarian masses.

In the social sciences and education, the PhD consists too often of learning the mechanics of researching and documenting everything written about some very limited, and often inconsequential, subject suggested by a faculty advisor.  This process scarcely fits the newly minted PhD to understand the implications of the utopian doctrines urged upon him by his liberal-socialist professors.

In recent years social studies specialization has descended into the ludicrous, with feminist studies, black studies, queer studies, and similar doctrines, which on the whole produce monomaniacally narrow understandings of human society and the great historical events that have shaped it.  Students immersed in such sadly limited study programs seldom travel beyond a formulaic belief that the educational ethos of our founders was simply oppression by Dead White European Males.

A student who has no knowledge that Christianity was the sole foundation of Western civilization that arose from the ruins of the Western Roman Empire is not likely to understand the intimate and essential connections between political liberties fought for in 1776 and the individualistic religious heritage of English Protestantism in the colonizing of British North America.  In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such students, in the normal rebellious spirit of youth, eagerly absorbed Nietzsche’s reports from Europe that God was dead.

The result has been students’ steady conversion to the doctrines of secular and materialistic socialism, which was being merchandised as science.  A student, however bright, who has labored intensively and exclusively to master his profession and who believes entirely in the efficacy of modern science, has no reason to question his professors’ advocacy of French and German political theories of socialism.  We need not wonder at the mind-set of graduates from specialties like feminist studies, black studies, or queer studies.

Before the 1950s this atheism and agnosticism spread little farther than the grandparents of today’s Eastern liberal establishment, primarily because, until after World War II, only a tiny portion of the population attended colleges. 

Rapid growth of industry and expansion westward in the 19th century after the Civil War offered ample opportunity for economic advancement and limitless needs for workers.  Few families could spare their children from the work force to education beyond high school, and even fewer had the financial resources to send their children to college.  At that time, however, states began to pass laws making some level of high school education compulsory.

Secular materialism began to spread to public education in high schools across the nation after Columbia University’s Teachers College was founded in 1887.  There the socialism of John Dewey was a driving force behind the idea that Darwinian evolution had proved that there is no God, no right or wrong, merely the struggle for survival in a continually evolving world.  After the 1917 Russian Revolution, faculty members in Columbia Teachers College became cheerleaders for the Soviet educational system, of which Lenin said the task was to teach young people to hate their parents and what they stood for. 

Prominent professors in Columbia Teachers College wrote that the mission of education was to socialize American society.  As Columbia graduates fanned out across the nation, becoming heads of other schools of education and heads of state departments of education, the idea of Progressive education to instill the new secular emphasis became the widely accepted standard. 

By 1933, with the advent of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the first gestures by the Federal government toward funding and shaping public education, we were already well on our way to ignorance concerning the history and traditions of the founding of the United States.

The GI Bill after World War II provided the finances for a vast influx of young people into our colleges. From that time, the ratio of youth attending college has risen from less than 10 percent to something in the 70 percent range.  Along with added competence for success in the workplace, this has produced a nation of people, most of whom have been exposed to the secular doctrine of socialism. 

It is this explosion of college populations that led, first, to the student anarchy of the 1960s and 1970s, and now, to the virulent anti-Americanism too frequently heard on college campuses.  John Dewey’s ideas of “education for democracy” have allowed teachers to produce generations of robotic students who, cut off from the great spiritual traditions of the Western world, find life’s meaning in the emptiness and secularity of sit-ins, mass demonstrations, and destruction of private property owned by “capitalists.”

The future hardly looks promising.  Public education in the elementary and high schools has, with limited exceptions, become very rudimentary.  All of it has been based in recent decades upon textbooks deliberately distorting American history and advocating the secularity of socialism.  After the Federal government became in the 1960s a major source of funding for public education, its councils of socialistic educators were in a position of authority to set standards for what was to be taught, and schoolbook publishers rapidly fell into line.  Earlier and better textbooks were replaced with ones that, in addition to distorting history, are too frequently peppered with factual errors in science as well.

With each new generation we are drifting farther away from our original harbor, into a befogged and stormy sea.

Most students entering college today lack the foundation of knowledge required to do college-level work.  Consequently, fewer college students opt today for the hard subjects – engineering, physics, chemistry, and mathematics.  More and more head for social work, government service, and teachers colleges, the soft subjects that require little knowledge of the real world and little hard work and discipline.  Such students, with no comprehension of history, philosophy, or religion, emerge from college intent upon tearing down the remnants of Western civilization and building a “caring” socialistic society modeled upon what their teachers tell them the Soviet Union was intended to be. 

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