An Old Word on Modern Education

Robert Lewis Dabney

Robert Lewis Dabney (March 5, 1820 – January 3, 1898) was an American Christian theologian, Southern Presbyterian pastor, Confederate States Army chaplain, and architect. He was also chief of staff and biographer to Stonewall Jackson. His biography of Jackson remains in print today.

Read his booklet on education here.

2 June, 20212 June, 2021

For the Sake of the Children, Keep the Schools Closed

“Chris Selley: Doug Ford has seriously harmed Ontario’s school kids. Now he has to fix it

Premier Doug Ford wants a ‘consensus’ among experts on the question. That’s a bit like asking Canadians to agree on a favourite colour”

This article is correct in calling out the fact of massive sadness and depression among young people, and by placing the blame upon governments and their enablers. This has been a disaster.

Where it misses the point, by far, however is the insistence that children are depressed to the point of suicide because they are not in school. Children have seen every major family gathering cancelled, missed birthdays and holidays, all under threat of arrest.

Kids don’t really know the nuances between criminal behaviour and bylaw infractions. They are told they could be responsible for the sickness or death of loved ones if they hug or even visit. They’ve seen their parents’ stress through job loss, loss of joy in living, loss of future plans.

There is plenty of depression and sadness to go around when schools are in session. This article perpetuates the myth that school provides essential socialization. Children should be much happier to be with family than they are in school, but the family is under state-induced stress to a level that hasn’t been experienced in many years. We are entering a new dark age, and the children know it.

Children see the absurdity of social distancing and mask theatre. They have been fed fear, and submission to the fearful, to a toxic level. Children see that there is something wrong with the hypocrisy of governments that either reward or punish behaviour based upon group identity. They are keenly aware of basic unfairness.

None of this will be solved by reopening the schools, especially if their teachers treat them like germ infested vermin. The teachers’ fears will be clear.

This article also skirts over the matter of toxic ideology in the school system.

Ideologically, the authority over the family assumed by modern educators is merely evil at best. The state-run and separate schools submits the interests of the family to that of the school, the “co-parents” of the child, so that the child is taught that the normal family isn’t the norm, and kids are bullied into accepting the unacceptable: transgenderism and same-sex marriage. But these two examples are but illustrations of the larger problem of a pretended neutral and secular education system. Marxist economics and Critical Race Theory must be added to this list as well.

No Christian child should be made to feel ashamed of their faith, but this is the intent of the curriculum in many cases.

All education indoctrinates—that is normal. But what is wicked is when it is done without any admission on the part of the educators that they are doing so. Modern state-run education operates from an explicitly anti-Christian worldview. In the name of inclusion, diversity, and secularism, state schools claim an objectivity and neutrality that cannot exist. Education is never neutral. So with the authority of the system comes the authority to declare Christ to be dethroned. The modern education system is a meta-narrative that explains all else.

To fight this depression, we must stop (today) doing the things to their world that brings it on. They need to know that they are safe at home, and that schools will not contradict, demean, and defeat the values they are taught at home. Their parents need to know that they can plan for their birthday and holidays. Children need to know that they can drop and see grandma without fear of bringing her death.

It is already assumed that a child as young as 12 can consent to transition from their sex to one that will never be their sex. This is with the school’s encouragement and intervention, and without parental knowledge or consent. How can parents be certain that an injection will not be administered to their child without their permission?

Sending kids back to school right now, given the above, is a ticket to their long-term and certain misery.

23 January, 2016

The Frustration of Modern Education

“Our work as educators would be hopeless and futile if we engaged in it on the principle of synthesis discussed above. But what joy it is to know that Christ has come to save man and his culture! The first Adam by his sin refused to undertake the cultural mandate given him. When he was told to subdue the earth he would not do so as unto God his creator. But the second Adam undertook anew what the first Adam, and all men with him, failed to do. Now then, we who are saved by grace, we who have by the Spirit of God been born from above, need not beat the air. There is for us a true synthesis of all things in Christ. And we may offer this Christ to all men that they too with us might escape the futility and the absurdity, the immorality and the blasphemy, of seeking to synthesize what by their very sinful act they are all the while destroying. The task of educators who do not educate in and unto Christ is like the task of Sisyphus as he rolled his stone to the top of the hill only to see it roll down again. If the facts of the world are not created and redeemed by God in Christ, then they are like beads that have no holes in them and therefore cannot be strung into a string of beads. If the laws of the world are not what they are as relating the facts that are created and redeemed by Christ, these laws are like a string of infinite length, neither end of which can be found. Seeking to string beads that cannot be strung because they have no holes in them, with string of infinite length neither end of which you can find; such is the task of the educator who seeks to educate without presupposing the truth of what the self-attesting Christ has spoken in the Scriptures.”

Cornelius Van Til, Essays on Christian Education (The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company: Phillipsburg, NJ, 1979).