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"Let My Children Go": A Christian Exodus from Government Schools? by Steven Yates

Friends,

This is a long essay but quite well written and enlightening.  The section on the history of public education is really insightful, pointing up the gradualism approach of socialists and statists who would have us believe that we, the citizens, aren't quite capable or qualified to determine what is good for ourselves or our offspring.  It's worth the time to read and think about this, even if you don't have children in the system.

kathy lyons

A.

In an era when many freedom-believers of various shades and stripes often bemoan how terrible things are, it is always refreshing to encounter someone who has a definite plan and the will to pursue it. That someone is E. Ray Moore, who founded and developed the Exodus Mandate Project (formerly known as Exodus 2000) under the auspices of his Frontline Ministries based in the Columbia, South Carolina area. Exodus Mandate, like the name suggests, proposes something no one has previously attempted on any large scale: inspiring a mass departure on the part of Evangelical Christians from the government-controlled "public school" system  or, as Moore frequently calls it, Pharaoh's school system.

Moore is calling for something more radical than mere reform. Government schools, he maintains, cannot be reformed. Moreover, they have an origin that differs markedly from what the Framers wanted, and from the beginning were on collision course with the principles of a Constitutional republic. Finally and most importantly, government schools violate Biblical principles that place responsibility for educating children on the family, not the government. Moore recently told me: "We believe that from Scripture and theology, God gave education to the family with assistance from the Church, and that the State has no legitimate authority over what we call K-12 education."
He added, "The State is in fact violating God's law. You can't reform something that shouldn't exist." In his opinion, we should not be surprised that government schools, in addition to their failure to educate, have nurtured attitudes and points of view resolutely hostility to Christianity and Christians. Moore therefore argues on Biblical and not just on political and economic grounds that instead of trying to reform government schools, Christians ought to abandon them in favor of private Christian schools and homeschooling.

E. Ray Moore has an educational background and career trajectory perfectly suited to his vision. He graduated from The Citadel with a B.A. in political science and went on to earn M.Div and M.Theol. degrees from Grace Theological Seminary in Winona Lake, Ind. Since then he has been involved in pastoral ministry for almost 25 years, as a congregational pastor, a U.S. Army Reserve Chaplain (Lt. Col., Ret.), and then as a director of a Christian ministry. He was in the Gulf War, where he won a Bronze Star Medal. He and his wife Gail Pinckney Moore, from Charleston, South Carolina, successfully homeschooled their own four children from 1977-1994. The Moores were among the first few dozen pioneering families in homeschooling (it is hard to know how many families were homeschooling then).

The Moores' children are now grown. Their successes validate the skills and methods of their parents. Their oldest son was both Regimental Commander and Valedictorian at The Citadel; he is now an attorney in Columbia. Their second son is a youth minister in a SBC Baptist Church. Their daughter is a writer and copy editor for The State newspaper in Columbia. Their youngest son is a college freshman also preparing for the ministry. With these powerful credentials and successes under their belts, the Moores were selected as South Carolina Parents of the Year for 2000 by the Parents Day Council.

B.

Exodus Mandate grew out of a Goals 2000 briefing in Washington, D.C., that Moore attended in 1997, presided over by Phyllis Schlafly of Eagle Forum and Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill). Sponsoring groups included the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, the Home School Legal Defense Association, the Heritage Foundation, the Christian Coalition, the American Family Association, the American Association of Christian Schools, the American Conservative Union and Traditional Values Coalitions, as well as Eagle Forum. The main topic was the danger posed by Goals 2000, and the School-to-Work agenda, for faith and freedom. There was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth and calls for "conservative reform of the public schools," but as Moore described the meeting to me, "These people had no real plan except to try and repeal Goals 2000 legislation."

He left that meeting determined to formulate a plan. The result was Exodus 2000-a name chosen as a deliberate counterpoint to Goals 2000. Exodus Mandate-the name was changed in January, 2001-became an organized effort to withdraw several million Christian children from government schools. According to the Exodus Mandate vision statement, "Exodus Mandate is a Christian ministry to encourage and assist Christian families to leave Pharaoh's school system (i.e., government schools) for the Promised Land of Christian schools or homeschooling. It is our prayer and hope that a fresh obedience by Christian families in educating their children according to Biblical mandates will prove to be a key for the revival of our families, our churches and our nation." In other words, the Exodus Mandate plan, like the name suggests, is to solve the problems of Goals 2000 and other such agendas by taking as large as possible a number of children out of their reach.

Moore first publicly announced his plans during the week of the Promise Keepers meeting in October, 1997. Then he began organizing a volunteer network, first in South Carolina where Exodus Mandate is based (here in Columbia), and then in other states. Since its beginning, Exodus Mandate has received favorable coverage in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, the Dallas Morning News, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the State. Even the Southern Baptist Convention has given Exodus Mandate more than a passing look. Christian radio, obviously, has been instrumental in bringing Moore's ideas to a wider audience: Moore has done hundreds of interviews on radio networks and has been heard on over 4,500 radio stations across the country. He has worked with Marshall Fritz of the Alliance for the Separation of School and State and the Nehemiah Institute. Exodus Mandate has been endorsed by Dr. D. James Kennedy, pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church and President of the internationally known Coral Ridge Ministries, which has an audience of several million people monthly. Exodus Mandate has also received support from major Christian leaders such as Dr. Jerry Falwall of Liberty University. Recently, Moore outlined the Exodus Mandate strategy on Beacon Hill in Boston, participating in a forum entitled "Can Christians Continue to Use the Public Schools?" As this article appears, Moore will have been Keynote Speaker for the Christian Home Educators Network in the State of Maryland, addressing that group's 2001 Convention (June 8-9). "It is my belief," he told me, "that a fresh obedience by Christian families concerning the education of their own children according to Biblical mandates will prove to be a key to the revival of our churches, our families and our nation."

C.

Understanding Moore's case against government schools calls for a brief excursion into their history. Originally, during the first 220 years of colonial and then U.S. history on the North American continent, there were no state-controlled "public schools." All education was basically private-in the hands of families, churches and local communities. There was some tax subsidy for New England schools at the city level. Puritan New England had no concept of separation of church and state, but their schools were not unlike our Christian day schools of today. The town schools were basically church schools. Home schools and dame schools were common. (Dame schools were small, private schools with one teacher, or dame, hired by a small group of three or four rural families to educate their children.)

Government schools are not mentioned in either the Declaration of Independence or the U.S. Constitution. There is no evidence of Constitutional room for any federal role in education-whether to set up and run "public schools" or regulate other people's schools. In 1786 (the year prior to the Constitutional Convention), the State of Virginia passed what became known as the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. It disestablished the Church of England, and this did away with "public churches" there. Thomas Jefferson wrote: "To compel a man to furnish contributions for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves or abhors is sinful and tyrannical." While the Statute dealt with churches, the same kind of argument could be made for schools, which in Virginia were all private and church run. In other words, "public schools" were not a part of any original American educational model. They were not consistent with what was believed by the majority of the Framers. The government-run K-12 school system is a fundamentally renegade educational model-illegitimate in a Constitutional republic.

Taking over education is a major temptation for those who want power. There were early warning signs. Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, was sympathetic to the idea of government schooling as necessary to produce responsible citizens. The Prussian government in Europe was already developing a highly centralized state-controlled educational system. It stressed not intellectual development but obedience and subordination to the collective life of society run by the state; it compartmentalized ideas into "subjects," and divided up the day into "periods" to create constant interruptions and discourage sustained thought in any single area. It wasn't long before this model came to the attention of would-be education elites in this country, who found it extremely attractive. The word kindergarten is Prussian, not English, and expresses the Prussian idea of cultivating children, as in a garden. This offers evidence of the grip the Prussian model eventually exercised.

Government schools did not begin to catch on here, however, until around 1840 when Horace Mann began to develop what was then called the common-school movement. Mann was a Unitarian, based at Harvard during the period when Unitarians came to control that institution. He had been to Europe and had studied the Prussian model. As such, he believed in the redemptive power of the state, and in its capacity to create and run "common schools." He provided the bridge from the Prussian model to the state-run government school as it finally developed. Mann's influence led to the first state-government controlled educational system, in (where else?) Massachusetts. The idea quickly spread to other states in New England, and then to other parts of the country.

By the final quarter of the 19th century, government schools had become dominant. They had already taken over in the North, and were imposed on the South during the Reconstruction period. Many leaders of various Christian denominations inveighed against them, sensing danger in turning over education to government. Leading theologians such as Archibald Hodge, R.L. Dabney, Gresham Machen and later, Gordon Clark, all tried to warn the various Christian communities of their times about government schools. Hodge wrote, "I am sure as I am of the fact of Christ's reign that a comprehensive and centralized system of national education, separated from religion, as is now commonly proposed, will prove the most appalling engine for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief and anti-social nihilistic ethics . which this sin-rent world has ever seen." The issue was debated by Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Lutherans and others. The Catholics had long since formed their own schools in response to what had been one of the rationales for state-run schools: converting the children of immigrant Catholics to Protestantism.

Moreover, the Morrill Act had been signed into law by Abraham Lincoln as a wartime measure (his predecessor, James Buchanan, had vetoed it on Constitutional grounds), creating a network of federally funded "land grant" colleges. The previous conception of a college was of a place where liberal arts learning was stressed, the purpose being to produce thinkers and leaders. The purpose of this new higher educational model was not education in the liberal arts but the production of skilled workers. This is reflected in the fact that most were originally called "A & M" (agricultural and mechanical) colleges; some of them still are. Initially these institutions lost enormous sums of money, with many forced to close their doors. Few members of the public believed they were needed. But eventually they, too, caught on. Increasingly run as one branch of secular government, "public schools" at all levels were ripe for a large-scale takeover by a thoroughly materialist philosophy of nature and secular view of society, with all the political and economic mischief to which these are vulnerable. When John Dewey appeared as one of the voices of Progressivism shortly before the turn of the century, the takeover began.

D.

John Dewey is one of the best-known figures in the history of American philosophy and education. In philosophy, he is usually grouped with the so-called pragmatists (a label finally rejected by that movement's supposed founder, Charles Saunders Peirce). In education, of course, he founded the so-called progressive education movement. Although considered a quintessential American philosopher, the three main influences on his thought were all Europeans: G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin. Dewey became a socialist who wanted to see a radical transformation of American society. He essentially agreed with Marx's well-known remark that "philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however is to change it." He saw the government schools as the primary vehicles for bringing this transformation about. From Darwinian evolution he borrowed the idea that progressive change was a natural state of affairs, that a socialist society was more highly evolved than a capitalist one, and so would be inevitable even if it occurred without the kind of violent revolution classical Marxism had predicted. The core principle here is the materialist one that what we call reality is just physical reality. Christianity is mythological, therefore, because God does not really exist. In the universe so conceived, the foundations of morality because a serious problem. No one could discover higher moral principles than the "good of society," personal pleasure and self-esteem, etc. Various forms of ethical relativism and subjectivism became fashionable. In practice, however, what was "good for society" was eventually to be determined by cliques of scientific "experts" who were just beginning to explore technologies of behavior.

In this context, the "public schools" began to develop around the idea that the purpose of education is to "socialize" children-to enable them to fit into a changing society, one where there are no objective religious or moral truths, only the truths of natural science. Dewey rejected the idea that knowledge is valuable as an end in itself. He believed that what counted was problem-solving, and that children should "learn by doing," by being given projects to work on. Dewey's early experiments, in the early 1900s, were abject failures. Students didn't learn anything. Progressive education nevertheless slowly gained ground, helped along by Dewey's growing stature as a professional philosopher of education. Dewey had taught at the University of Chicago and at Columbia University. He had written a number of well received articles and books with names like Democracy and Education, Experience and Nature and The Quest for Certainty. He became the first president of the American Humanist Association and co-author of the first Humanist Manifesto. By the 1950s, his progressivism had become the dominant philosophy of education in academia, and it soon became dominant in the "public schools." By the 1960s, it was supplemented by the feed-them-if-they-cry philosophy of Dr. Benjamin Spock (also a socialist), author of the celebrated Baby and Child Care which advocated giving children whatever they wanted to make them happy. Finally came the rising influence of pioneer sex researcher Alfred Kinsey. Sex education reared its head, and as a product of science without objective morality, the Kinsey model merely delineated the possibilities of sexual experimentation with no Biblical or familial restraint.

E.

Even assuming that the government school was a viable concept to begin with, these philosophies ruined its embodiments within a generation. By the 1970s, the effects of Dewey's progressivism, Spock's ideas on child-rearing, and Kinsey-style sex-ed were becoming evident with the rise of a generation whose members saw themselves as entitled to pleasure, happiness and security-however these were to be furnished. Consider the drug culture. Whether one believes consciousness-altering drugs should be legal or not, students who were "educated" to believe that their only purpose in this life was to obtain personal pleasure, the security of a well-paying job, etc., with religious observances (if any) limited to Sundays, experienced a void in their lives. Many filled this void with drugs. Others filled it with sex-of every variety. Soon, we began to hear of epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases such as herpes and, eventually, AIDS.

Students' measurable cognitive achievements, meanwhile, had begun to slip relative to those of other advanced nations. The first major warnings were sounded in 1983 with the major study A Nation At Risk. The facts and figures have been well documented. More and more, we have seen the ascent of education for self-esteem: good feelings about oneself as the barometer of educational success. The Outcome Based Education movement stressed what "educationologists" call the affective domain, which emphasizes expressing feelings, doing group work, obtaining group grades, cooperating, etc., over mastering cognitive skills, working individually to achieve, competing and thinking independently. American students at all levels consistently report that they feel very good about themselves, even though many are now graduating from high school and even college without basic writing or mathematical skills or any understanding of science, much less knowledge of this country's founding principles or historical development. The response of the federal government to the increased illiteracy of American students has been predictable: pumping ever more taxpayer dollars into the government-school system. Our government schools are now among the best funded in the world. Yet if we go by the results, there is no evidence of a relationship between the amount of money thrown into "public schools" and genuine educational accomplishment. Rather, what the increasing failure of "public schools" suggests is an educational philosophy that is wrong through and through, from its foundations upward.

During the 1990s, the period of the meteoric rise of political correctness, matters have of course gotten worse. Teaching white children to hate their race and reject their heritage because (some of) their ancestors owned slaves, teaching boys to hate their own masculinity, are all just part of an increasingly intellectually bankrupt and politically corrupted package that has literally destroyed the innocence of millions of children. This package includes components scaring them out of their wits with aggressive propaganda for hard-left environmentalism, using "global warming" as a focal point. This transforms them into good little recyclers of waste paper, cans, etc., under the ludicrous assumption that this would have an impact on a large scale climactic phenomenon that may not even exist. More and more, government schools openly promote homosexuality as normal and acceptable-the now-infamous tracts Heather Has Two Mommies and Daddy's Roommate, written for the lower grades, are cases in point. Children, it should go without saying, have not developed the cognitive skills to identify and evaluate the claims implicit in these agendas. This makes them age-inappropriate (to use the official jargon). One need not have a Ph.D. in education to figure this out, either; what it takes is common horse sense.

Even more troublesome is the more recent School-to-Work agenda. This movement, a product of the Clinton Regime, stresses the vocational side of education more than ever. According to its advocates, education is really just glorified job training, with the training beginning as early as kindergarten. School-to-Work ideology encourages rote conformity and training for the work force, while discouraging independent inquiry and abstract thought. The purpose of this movement is clearly to turn out the human-resources equivalent of manufactured products that can service the global economy-"droids" for the New World Order. Such products don't need to know about the Bible, the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, of course.

F.

According to Marshall Fritz of the Alliance for the Separation of School and State, we can isolate four basic errors in "public school" philosophy. These are presented clearly in the video Let My Children Go, which Moore wrote and which was produced by Jeremiah Films. First, there is paternalism, the idea that responsibility for education can be shifted from the family to a governmental entity, and that this somehow improves society. This undermines parents and the family. "We have to get back to the root of good education, which is parental love and responsibility, not politicians trying to acquire power." Second is compartmentalism, the idea that life is divided up into separate compartments (church, home, school, etc.), so that God is taught about on Sundays, but not on any other day of the week. "This is crazy," says Fritz. "We want the teachers to be instructing the children in morals. We want them saying, No hitting, no cheating, no lying." We can look at government schools, observe the violence, the cheating, the lack of discipline, the blatant political agendas, and so on, and see textbook illustrations of the fact that nobody has ever discovered a practical basis for morality outside of the internal constraints created by a strong religious tradition. Third is the idea that welfare works: the idea that children have a "right" to an education at the expense of taxpayers. "We need to return to the American idea that responsibility works, and get away from welfare in education," says Fritz. Fourth is the idea that socialism works. Government schools fit the socialist model right down the line. Fritz describes "government ownership and administration of the means of production" as exemplified in the government school model. Instead of continuing to employ this failed system, "[w]e need to return to the quintessential American ideal that freedom works."

One may look to the Columbine massacre, on April 20, 1999, as embodying the direction to which the materialistic and compartmentalized philosophy of "public education" has been heading. Moore has called Columbine a "watershed event," triggering "a deep sense that there is something badly wrong with our public school system." Columbine, of course, was the bloodiest of a string of school shootings that took place during the middle to late 1990s. Statisticians will try and reassure us that such events as students bringing weapons to school and gunning down their classmates are rare. This misses the point. As recently as 30 years ago, such events were not rare. They did not happen at all. Period. Students might have worried about getting caught smoking in the bathrooms or with marijuana in their lockers; they did not worry overly about their personal safety. And they did not attend schools with metal detectors on the front doors, or with police patrolling the hallways. One would have to be blind, finally, to miss the metaphysical and theological as well as cultural implications of the Columbine killings. After all, there is abundant evidence that Christians were singled out by the two killers, whose personal websites revealed hatred of Christians and Christianity as well as fascination with Nazi themes (April 20 is Hitler's birthday, after all), Satanism, the occult, violence, cruelty and suicide. Their spare time was spent listening to heavy metal rock bands such as Marilyn Manson, whose songs incorporate such themes. The Columbine shootings did not happen in a cultural vacuum. Nearly all of the above mentioned Let My Children Go was made before that horrible event, but as Moore observes, "If you were to look at the speakers through the video, you'd think they knew all about Columbine."

The responses to the Columbine killings illustrate educational bureaucrats' preference for cosmetic to substantive solutions. Their "zero-tolerance policies" have led to ludicrous results such as children being suspended or expelled from their schools for bringing knives to cut their food or for pointing a finger and saying, "Bang, bang, bang." Apparently a child does not even need a physical object to violate the new rules; all he need do is pretend. This dovetails nicely with the politically correct code which penalizes mere thought-and employs its draconian measures on first graders! These are only the more visible illustrations of how government schools now confront their problems. (Closely related zero-tolerance drug polices, of course, do not prevent bureaucrats from turning children into zombies with government-approved drugs such as Ritalin.)

G.

The question all believers in freedom, Christian or otherwise, are most often asked (and most often ask themselves) is, What can we do? The question is particularly acute in light of our limited resources:it is also common horse sense that with fewer resources you can do less. Pharaoh's schools and the large teachers unions are all in bed with a centralized system manifestly hostile to both Christianity and genuine freedom (the kind that recognizes and accepts moral responsibility). They have at disposal a huge machinery that permits them to extract resources from taxpayers. We have none of that-nor should we want it, obviously. This means, however, that we will never have the bottomless pit of wealth available through (for example) the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations that have been bankrolling leftist projects for decades.

But we don't have to be stymied. There is still is a responsible course of action that can be pursued. One can choose to get out of the sphere of influence of a corrupt and unsalvageable system. That is what E. Ray Moore is advocating regarding government schools. As he metaphorically puts it, "Why fight the mosquitoes when you can drain the swamp." "Public education" is a bad system. It cannot be reformed, and we shouldn't try. Moore points out that every attempt to reform "public education" over the past 20 years has ended in failure. What we should do instead is remove our children from its clutches, and take them out of Pharaoh's school system. The problems of government schools are "terminal," Moore told the Washington Times, "and the quicker Christian people realize it, the quicker they'll be able to take action."

The references to "Pharaoh's school system" illustrate another strategy of Moore's that believers in freedom of whatever stripe need to pursue: seizing the moral high ground by appealing to powerful and evocative images. No movement has ever succeeded without doing this. (The left understands this very well and has been exploiting it for decades.) Down to its very name, Exodus Mandate invokes one of the most powerful visions found in the Old Testament: that of Moses standing alone before Pharaoh in the Book of Exodus and commanding him to "Let my people go!" Following these words, in one of the most moving accounts of all time, an entire people was led out of bondage in Egypt and toward freedom in the Promised Land.

According to Moore, moreover, taking children out of government schools fulfills a Biblical mandate. God, according to the Scriptures, assigned responsibility for education to the family, not to the government. Deuteronomy 6:7 says, "Thou shalt teach [these words] diligently unto thy children." (See also Ephesians 6:4 and Matthew 28:18-20). With the assistance of churches and other religious organizations, Christian parents should undertake the responsibility for the education of children, whether singly or in small, church-affiliated Christian schools. "Perhaps the renewal of our culture could be as simple as the Christian church renewing its obedience to the Biblical mandate," Moore said recently.

Of course, some readers might be asking: what about those who are not Christians? What does Moore's proposed exodus offer non-Christians? One may observe again that no one has been able to discover-or invent-a nontheistic view of education or society that has proved to be workable. Although materialist-leaning philosophers have spent centuries trying, their results simply cannot command the allegiance of anyone except handfuls of academic intellectuals. But never mind this now. Even an atheist can look at the government schools, follow the commentary triggered by events such as the Columbine shootings, and see that something is wrong. Even atheists, presumably, want their children in schools that are safe (and free of police patrols in the halls and metal detectors at the entrances), and which actually educate their children. There is nothing preventing non-Christians who are uncomfortable with the Christian emphasis of Exodus Mandate from pursuing their own version of the same strategy. I, for one, would not stand in their way.

The homeschooling movement is one of the fastest growing independent educational movements in the country; private Christian academies, too, are on the upswing. What E. Ray Moore doing is reaching out to churches and denominations and working to equip them with a Christian model of education that will result in still more schools being set up and run through churches as well as in homes. But the project has a long way to go. Moore estimates that roughly 80 percent of all the children of Evangelical Christians are still in the grip of Pharaoh's school system.

Having spent a rewarding morning discussing the matter with E. Ray Moore, I am convinced that Exodus Mandate's effort to get children out of "public schools" may soon become the most significant of our time. There are other battles, of course, such as the one over abortion. But what if we raised a generation of children who simply did not see abortion as a live option. Imagine such a generation, freed from government schools as small children and either homeschooled or educated in private Christian schools. During their teen years, its members would be free of drugs. Their moral compass would equip them to resist the temptations of premarital sex. They would never be in danger of being shot by a crazed classmate. Finally, they would graduate with a firm grounding in the Bible and in this country's founding principles, as well as knowing some science and having acquired some technological know-how. By the time they reached their 20s, say during the 2020s, their best and brightest will already have begun taking the lead in reversing the cultural, moral and intellectual decline of this country, as well as shrinking the reach of the federal leviathan. Their priorities would be pleasing God and supporting political leaders who pledge obedience to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Businesses may find themselves seeking them out; their employers will have far less worry about being cheated or stolen from. And their new hires will be far better, far more able employees than the drones the "public schools" had been turning out.  The latter, having failed all competitive tests, will soon be on the way out.

Moore believes that if these children were to leave Pharaoh's schools and head for the Promised Land of private Christian schools or homeschooling today, this would do more to undermine political correctness, secularism and materialism than any other strategy one could pursue. In my opinion, he is onto something. Christians-and any non-Christians who are serious about reversing the political and cultural rot we have fallen into during this past half-century-should consider what Exodus Mandate offers, and not waste any more time getting organized. This is the sort of movement that, once it takes off, could quickly be seen as a major threat to the educational bureaucracy and the powerful teachers unions. There is no doubt that it will meet with opposition down the road: rather like any effort pursued independently of the Omnipotent State. Standing up to the potential hostility will require organization as well as faith (Hebrews 11). But the potential payoffs make it worth the risk. "We have seen the benefit that this kind of education has had on our own family," Moore concluded. "My family and I have been over in the Promised Land for 24 years, and now, I'm calling on my fellow Christians to come over and join us. It is a good land, flowing with milk and honey."



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