I'm delighted to be here, and I see a very eager class today. And I'm sure you've learned a lot until now. But the area that I've been asked to cover is the history of public education in this country. And I don't know how many of you have read my book, Is Public Education Necessary? How many have read it? Well, good, then you have an idea of what I'm going to be discussing. I strongly suggest that you do get the book when it's becomes available shortly. It will be published by the Paradigm Company, the same company that published NEA Trojan Horse and American Education. The interesting thing about that book was I had originally intended to write a critique of contemporary education and I thought it would be a good idea to start the book with a kind of summary of how public education got started in this country. And I thought that I could devote a single chapter, the first chapter of that book, to the origin of public education. And the question that I wanted to answer was why did the American people turn to the government to become their educator? Why did the American people give government the responsibility of education when they were so freedom-loving? It was so contrary to what had gone on prior to that period. Certainly it was, there's no mention of education in the Constitution. We had the freest education system in the world. And certainly we had the best educated people in the world. So why, what was it that made the American people turn to government? Turn over education to the government? So that the government would own and operate the schools in America. Well, I thought that I could answer that question very quickly, but it took me four years of laborious research. And by the time I was through, I had 12 chapters just on the origin. And I decided to... that that in and of itself would make a good book, so I have the book published with the same original title, Is Public Education Necessary? But that book only covers public education from the origins, its colonial origins, up to about the 1840s in this country. The NEA book really picks up where the other book left off and brings the story down to the present. But I discovered in doing this historical survey that American education can really be divided into three very distinct periods. The first period, beginning with the colonial days, goes to about, I'd say, 1820 or 1830 at the very latest. And I call this period, this first period, the Calvinist period. Why do I call it the Calvinist period? Because at that time, most Americans still believed that the The spiritual content of education was very important. Much more important than any secular content. In other words, because they believed that the purpose of life was to glorify God. That's the way people thought in those days. The purpose of life was to glorify God and therefore an education should be built around that idea. And the original schools that were founded in this country were basically religious institutions. They were founded that way because that was Calvin's idea of what education was about. You know, this country was founded basically on the ideas of John Calvin. And there's a very interesting pamphlet that I picked up the other day entitled, The Influence of Calvin and Calvinism Upon the American Heritage. And there's no doubt in my mind and in the minds of many other scholars, particularly Reverend Rush Dooney, that If there hadn't been a John Calvin, there would have never been a United States of America as we know it. Certainly not the way, certainly there would have never been an American Revolution because John Calvin was quite distinct from Martin Luther in his view of government. You see, Luther did not see the church as really being separated from the state. He saw them more or less as one. And he made an arrangement with the princes, the German princes, whereby they would become the heads of the churches in their principality. So there was a very close cooperation between Luther and the state, or the government. And when Luther created schools, there was this idea that they would also serve the the polity of the community now Calvin came from an entirely different tradition of course he was born some years later Luther preceded him but Calvin fled from France as a refugee he was persecuted by the French king and therefore he understood the power of the state to persecute religion and he had no love of the state per se when he settled in Geneva of course Geneva was a republic was not a monarchy and Because he was persecuted and his idea was that the church should be independent of the state He maintained that idea of independence from the state The church would influence the state but remain completely independent of it That's interesting that The first reforms Calvin wished to see introduced in Geneva concerned the Lord's Supper, church, praise, religious instruction of youth, and the regulation of marriage. Calvin did three things for Geneva, all of which went far beyond its walls. He gave its church a trained ministry, its homes an educated people who could give a reason for their faith. and the whole city and heroic soul which enabled the little town to stand forth as the citadel and city of refuge for the oppressed Protestants of Europe. So you have that tradition of the Protestants being a persecuted, the Calvinists being a persecuted sect in Europe. And of course, the reason why the Calvinists came to the United, or came to the colonies, to the New World, was because they wanted to create an uncompromising Bible commonwealth, in a place where they could. Now I'm sure that there are Christians in this country today who would love to do the same thing, if only they could find some continent, some uninhabited continent, and they'd leave all this garbage behind in the United States, you know. But unfortunately we've got to stay, we have nowhere to go unless somebody wants to find a pleasant planet somewhere else, but the Lord has not ordained another world for us he's given us and put us in this world we were made for this this particular planet and so we shall have to make our way here but you can see what I mean that they were separative the Puritans they did not like what Queen Elizabeth they didn't like the the brand of Christianity that Queen Elizabeth espoused and they felt that the Anglican Church was too hierarchical the Queen was the head of the church they wanted an independent church and they wanted a commonwealth in which God was sovereign and God's law was supreme and so they came here. Now what kind of schools do you think that people like that would create in a commonwealth like this? No sooner had they gotten off the boats and as you know Plymouth was settled in 1620 but the real, the really important settlement took place in Boston which was settled in around 1630 And by 1635, you had the creation of Harvard College. Now here in the middle of the wilderness, a settlement of perhaps about 5,000 Christians at the time, Puritans, Calvinists, they were already teaching Latin, Greek, and Hebrew to the future leaders, particularly the ministers, because to them, The Bible was central, and of course these were the languages of theological literature and of the Bible. Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. These were very important to understanding the Bible. And in 1647, the legislature of Massachusetts enacted a law, what is known as the first public school law in America. I know that whenever you pick up a history of public education in this country, they always start there. They always say, well, the Calvinists started it all. But this is what the law said, this is what they wanted. This is the reason why they created these schools. What they did was create community schools. And the reason they said was this, and I quote it incidentally in If Public Education is Necessary, so when you get hold of that book, you'll have the full quote. It's on page 273 of your book, The Christian History of the Constitution of the United States, if you want to read it along with me. It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the scriptures as in former times, by keeping them in an unknown tongue, that is, the scriptures were not published in the language of the population, they were written in a language that the population could not read either in Latin or in Greek, so that in these latter times, by persuading from the use of tongues, that so at least the true sense and meaning of the original might be clouded and corrupted with false glosses of deceivers to the end that learning may not be buried in the graves of our forefathers in church and commonwealth the lord assisting our endeavors and then the uh their quote ends it was therefore ordered that every township containing 50 families or householders should forthwith set up a school in which children might be taught to read and write and that every township containing 100 families or householders should set up a school in which boys might be fitted for entering Harvard College. Harvard was started first, but then they realized they needed preparatory schools for Harvard. And that's why they passed this law requiring the community to set up school, but you will see they were for a religious purpose. And it's interesting that they refer to Satan It being one chief project of that old deluder Satan to keep men from the knowledge of the scriptures. Of course it is Satan's goal is to separate man from God. He's been working at it ever since the Garden of Eden. To separate man from God. And he's done a pretty good job. If you look at the history of the human race. He did such a good job that God had to flood the earth. And then of course when after the flood And God made a covenant with Noah, he said he would never do that again, giving the human race a second chance. And of course the rainbow, which is now being used by the New Age as their symbol, but the rainbow of course was the symbol of the covenant between God and Noah, that he would never again carry out such an awful catastrophe. God has tried to reconcile himself with man. He's tried to bridge the gap that was created in the Garden of Eden. And so he finally reached Abraham, chose Abraham, and chose the Jewish people as his means of once again establishing a relationship with the human race. And then of course, so he formed a covenant with Abraham and the chosen people. And of course, with the coming of Christ, then the covenant was extended to all of mankind. You can see a very, very clear plan in how all of this, in God's way of reconciling itself with the human race. And every, every foot of the way, Satan is always there, fighting to prevent human beings from reaching God and trying to separate those who have a relationship with God trying to separate them because where does Satan want us all to be? He wants us all in hell and he gets an awful lot of people in hell and but that has been his that has been his goal so it's interesting that the founders of the first public schools in America were so aware of that that they said it being the one chief project of that old deluded Satan to keep men from the knowledge of the scriptures therefore we must have schools to make sure that the youngsters know the scriptures The interesting thing today is that Satan owns the public schools in America today because religion has been completely removed from them. He's taken over. But getting back to that early period, that will come later on when I discuss the present. But back in those days, that was the reason. They wanted to make sure that the youngsters had a sufficient religious upbringing. And so the schools were basically Calvinistic in their nature and in their purpose. because men believed that the purpose of life was to glorify God. Well, it's interesting that at Harvard University, it wasn't quite a university then, but at the college, it did not take very long for Satan to begin doing his work among the intellectuals. Interesting that that's where Satan finds the most fertile field within the schools, among the intellectuals. And it was at Harvard that the Unitarian heresy began to arise. And as a matter of fact, the Great Awakening, who is the famous leader of the Great Awakening? No, no, not Whitfield, Jonathan. Oh, Jonathan Edwards, yes. Jonathan Edwards, in fact, was a reaction to the liberalization of the clergy. And he brought a much stronger brand of Calvinism. to America in the 1740s, which provided the basis for the revolution in this country. It was Jonathan Edwards' brand of Calvinism that gave the emotional impetus to the revolution. But Harvard had its first liberal president, believe it or not, in around 1700. So that the Calvinist commonwealth was under attack from the very beginning. The schools, gradually private schools began to replace some of the public schools because they weren't terribly efficient. And as the colony grew and commerce and there were different denominations coming into New England, you had more private schools being founded than the so-called community or common schools as they were known. Well, the Unitarian heresy is very important to understand because it really is the beginning of American liberalism. What was it that the Unitarians did not like about Calvinism? What of course they did not like was Calvin's view of man. That man was innately depraved, that he was the fallen creature, fallen in the garden and of course was a flawed to praise character and of course in Catholic theology it's known as original sin but Calvin's view was much stronger because he had he didn't he never minced words the beauty about Calvin is that he was absolutely honest and forthright and he had no particular love for the intellectuals because he was one of them himself he had spent all of his life in universities and he knew exactly what they were like And he loved to cut them down to size, you know. He knew about, he knew their pride. He knew this intellectual pride and he knew what it did to people. And so he told it like it is. What human nature is like. Of course he didn't have the benefit of seeing Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot and a few other choice human beings. But he would not have been surprised. He would not have been surprised by Joseph Mengele. He would have said, well, there you are, that's human nature. When you separate man from God, and he thinks he's God, he's capable of the worst atrocities and barbarisms. And Joseph Mengele came from a good German family. He went to the university. He had all the advantages of German culture and civilization, and yet he was just as barbaric as any savage. perhaps even more so because he had that brilliance and cleverness to do what he did. But Calvin's view of human nature went against the Unitarian grain. First of all, they didn't like the idea of sin. And you can understand why. Sinners don't want to be told that they're sinning. And they decided that Christ was not divine. Now it's interesting that they denied the divinity of Christ. They said he was a great teacher. I don't know how an imposter can become a great teacher or a liar. I've never read anywhere where the Unitarians were ever questioned on that point. Well, if Christ is such a great teacher, how come he's an imposter? After all, if he is what he says he is, he is divine. But they decided that Christ was not divine. They decided the man was not innately depraved, that he was innately good. that he was in fact perfectible. And that Calvin's views of human nature were almost a libel against the human race. But after all, man was simply, this was a How would you say a wish fulfillment? If you tell a man that he's evil and depraved, he's going to act evil and depraved. If you tell him he's wonderful, that he's basically good, perfectible, he'll be good and perfectible. And so what they did was they decided to get religion out of the school, to get Calvinism out of the school. Now I would venture to say that basically the Unitarians were hypocrites who used religious rhetoric really to just undermine Christianity in general, that they were basically headed toward atheism. That their brand of Christianity simply does not hold water. And the pay dirt was when Emerson made his speech at Harvard University, his famous speech to the Divinity School, which so scandalized even conservative Unitarians, who thought he had gone too far, because he just about said that, you know, it's all a lot of... the Old and New Testament is just a lot of mythology, and then he went off on this pantheism. That was the new wave of the future pantheism, imported from Germany. Hegelianism, imported from Germany. Well, it was the Unitarians who started the public school movement. It's very interesting. I began, when I was doing research on that, on how the movement for public education got started, I came across all kinds of names of people, organizations, but I didn't know what the common denominator was until I began to piece all of these people together. And it turned out they were all Unitarians. So obviously what had happened was this. The Calvinists believed in salvation through God, through Jesus Christ. The Unitarians decided that salvation could only be attained through education. Because even though they denied that man was innately depraved, they still had to deal with the problem of evil. Why does man do the evil things he does? What is the cause of evil? Well, they said the cause of evil is ignorance, poverty, and social injustice. Those are the causes of evil. So if we get rid of ignorance, then we can get rid of poverty, and once we get rid of poverty then we will have eliminated social injustice, we will have a perfect society, no reason for people to be evil. And that would be the means of human salvation, of human perfectibility, and so they said Obviously we've got to get rid of this religious training that tells people that they are innately depraved and that their only salvation is through Jesus Christ. And this is exactly what they did. They proceeded to create a public school system that would be secular or non-sectarian. They couldn't go completely over into a secular education. First they had to go into a non-sectarian, a kind of watered-down Christianity with which everyone could agree. Now at the same time that the Unitarians were preaching their new brand of salvation, something else was going on in Europe. A man by the name of Robert Owen, the founder of socialism, the father of socialism, I thought that he had come up with the most revolutionary idea of all time. He said that man had absolutely no responsibility for the creation of his own character. He said all of it is environmental. He said you can train a child to be a demon or an angel. He said children are plastic. There's no such thing as innate evil. innate depravity, that you can train people to be as you want them. He furthermore said that religion was the cause of all of our problems, of all the evil in the world, and our competitive capitalist system was also the cause of evil. So he decided that a communist system, a totally secular communist system, would solve all of humanity's problems. You'd have total happiness for everyone. But he said you've got to start with the little kids in the schools because that's where it's at. You have to start molding them very young. You have to get them away from their parents because their parents have this horrible influence, particularly religious influence. And first you've got to get them away from their parents. And so he preached this in New Lanark, Scotland, where he had his weeding plant. He was a textile manufacturer. It's interesting how so many of these industrialists become communists. But in any case, he believed in it. He believed in it so strongly that he eventually sold his plants and devoted his entire life to promoting communism. Well, he came to this country in 1826 or so to set up the first communist colony, the first secular communist colony in the world. He wanted to prove that it would work. And the only place where he could do that was in the United States of America. There's no other place where he could do that. So he came to the United States and he went to Indiana and he bought a property that had been owned by the Rappites. The Rappites were a religious communal group, a religious group of German origin who had settled in Harmony, Indiana on the Wabash River. And he bought that property and created his secular, atheistic communist colony called New Harmony. Well, it attracted a tremendous amount of attention in the United States. Unitarians were particularly interested in it. And of course, he attracted a lot of intellectuals, a lot of academic people. And the colony lasted all of two years. It was a complete failure after two years. And the reason he gave for the failure was that even though you may believe in communism, If you've been educated under the old system, you simply cannot adapt yourself to communism. You simply cannot become a good communist because your early training has spoiled you. And incidentally, that's one of the reasons why the Marxists believe in killing off all of the older people, the people who cannot be regenerated and re-educated. It's one of the reasons they go in for the elimination of the bourgeoisie, and they mean extermination, what they mean is the way Pol Pot did it. In any case, after two years he decided that since people educated on the old system would never become good communists, therefore, the communist movement, the socialist movement, should concentrate on education. Get involved in the public school movement, and create public schools in America so that the children, from the very beginning, could be trained to become socialists. And so he joined with the Unitarians in pushing the public school movement. But because the Owenites, as they were called, because they were atheists, and had gotten such a bad reputation in this country, which was basically a religious country, because if any of you have read Alexis de Tocqueville's book about that very same period, you will understand that de Tocqueville was astonished by the depth of religious faith in this country. As a matter of fact, he said the only reason why the American people have so much freedom is because they are restrained by their faith. They don't go around murdering, not because the laws tell them not to murder, but because of their own religious faith. In other words, what the talk was telling us, that the reason why Americans have so much freedom is because they have so much self-control. And where does that self-control come from? their basic religious faith. Well, in any case, so what happened? The Owenites wanted to get involved in the public school movement, but they could not do it overtly. They did it overtly, but they had no influence overtly, so they went underground. And so as early as 1829, you have underground communist cells in the United States. This is before Karl Marx. Karl Marx, I think, was in knee pants at the time. So before Karl Marx was even around, the Communists had already created underground cells in this country to bring about the public school movement. And let me quote to you a passage. And how did I find that out? This was a very interesting discovery on my part. I was doing research on it and I came across a very interesting man by the name of Orestes Brownson. Orestes Brownson has an interesting history himself. He started out as a Presbyterian, and then he went into Universalism, then to Socialism, then to Unitarianism, and he finally wound up as a Catholic. But it's interesting why he went into Catholicism, because at that time, At that time, Protestantism was going haywire in the United States. All kinds of crazy sects were being created, and he felt that the only religion that had any sense of authority was the Catholic Church, and that's why at that time he finally became a Catholic, and he wrote a wonderful book called The Convert. I highly recommend it. But in it he said, he wrote, now he had been recruited by the Owenites, and he had been a member of that underground organization. And he wrote about it years later, and I came across this simply by going through his work with a very fine-toothed comb. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack, but then finally I found it, and this is what he writes. He said, but the more immediate work was to get our system of schools adopted. He's talking about the Owenites. To this end, it was proposed to organize the whole union secretly. very much on the plan of the Carbonari of Europe, of whom at that time I knew nothing. The members of this secret society were to avail themselves of all the means in their power, each in his own locality, to form public opinion in favor of education by the state at the public expense, and to get such men elected to the legislatures as would be likely to favor our purposes. how far the secret organization extended I do not know but I do know that a considerable portion of the state of New York was organized for I was myself one of the agents for organizing it so you see the Owenites were working on an underground level to organize the public school movement the Unitarians were working above board but the Unitarians would have nothing to do with the Owenites because the Owenites were considered beyond the pale with their atheism well by the time we get so By the 1830s, you had the Unitarians and the Owenites pushing for public education. The Unitarians wanted this because that was man's means of salvation through education. The Owenites wanted it because if you're going to create socialism, you've got to get the kids into these secular schools, away from religion. You have to start training them earlier. Well, how were the Protestants brought in on this? What convinced the Protestants to go along with this public school movement? Well, also at about that time, the 1830s, something was occurring which greatly alarmed the Protestants of America, and that was the massive immigration of Catholics into the United States, particularly from Ireland and Germany in the 1830s and 40s. This alarmed the Protestants to the point where they decided that maybe they'd better jump on this public school bandwagon. They would take it over. they could take it over, you see, and protect America from the Catholic influence. They actually believed that the Pope had a plot to take over the United States, and there were a number of books written by very well-known American clergymen, Protestant clergymen, on that whole subject. Lyman Beecher, Calvin Stowe, and others wrote books on the on the so-called Protestant menace, I mean the Catholic menace. And so they decided to join the public school movement. Without them, the public school movement would have never gotten off the ground because it had fierce opposition from the Calvinists. The only people who opposed the whole public school movement were the die-hard Orthodox Calvinists who saw that the elimination of religion from education was too dangerous. Now, the interesting thing about this is that when the Catholics came to this country, they at first thought, gee, free public education, what a wonderful idea. And they said, let's have public Catholic schools. Well, of course, this conflicted with the Protestants' goal. The goal of the Protestants was to create Protestant schools whereby the Catholic children could be proselytized into Protestantism. Well, the Catholics saw through this almost immediately. And they decided that they wanted nothing to do with the Protestant schools. First they tried to get the government to support Catholic public schools, but then the legislatures objected because they said, well, if we have Catholic public schools, We'll have to have Presbyterian public schools and Lutheran public schools and congregational public schools so we can't have any sectarian public schools. The public schools must be non-sectarian. And so finally the Catholics realized that they would not get anywhere and they would have to create their own schools. This is what one of the Catholic spokesmen said in the 1850s about the common schools. To give you an idea of how aware they were of what these schools would become. They said, so far as Catholics are concerned, the system of common schools in this country is a monstrous engine of injustice and tyranny. Practically it operates a gigantic scheme for proselytism. by numerous secret appliances and even sometimes by open or imperfectly disguised machinery, the faith of our children is gradually undermined and they are trained up to be ashamed of and to abandon the religion of their fathers. It was bad enough that this was all done with the money of others, but when it is accomplished at least in part by our own money, it is really atrocious. It is not to be concealed or denied that the so-called literature of this country the taste for which is fostered by our common schools, and which is constantly brought to bear on the training of our children, is not of a character to form their tender minds to wholesome moral principles, much less to solid Christian piety. In general, so far as it professes to be religious, it is anti-Catholic, and so far as it is secular, it is pagan." So that's what the Catholics said about these public schools in the 1850s, and that's why they created their parochial schools, which of course became an outstanding system of schools until just recently, probably maybe 30 or 40 years ago. They were quite good. But I'll tell you that what I hear of recent development in the Catholic schools is that they've gone all the way to humanism. The present parochial school system has been completely taken over by humanists. In fact, the Catholic Education Association held its It's a convention in St. Louis in April. And who do you think was the star speaker there? You think it was an emissary from the Pope? You think it was an archbishop of some kind? No, it was Carl Sagan. Mr. Evolution was their chief speaker. So we know where they're at, they also have been taken over by the humanists. But for quite some time, the parochial schools were really outstanding schools as far as the academics are concerned and certainly as far as the Catholic religion is concerned. Well, the Protestants got on board, but their joining of the movement was really conditional. And it's very important to be aware of this because they knew, they knew that secular education or non-sectarian education had its dangers for religion. They were quite aware But this was a dangerous path to take. As a matter of fact, they discussed it, and they formed a committee to investigate this whole business and to report back to the association, the General Association of Massachusetts, which represented the Protestant denominations in the state. The committee filed its report in 1849, And this is what that report said. It said, first of all, they did go along, they decided to go along with public schools, but this is how they put it. The benefits of this system, that is the common school system, in offering instruction to all are so many and so great that its religious deficiencies, especially since they can be otherwise supplied, that is by Sunday school and church, do not seem to be a sufficient reason for abandoning it and adopting in place of it a system of denominational parochial schools. If, however, we were to recommend any system to take its place, it would be that of private schools formed by the union of evangelical Christians of different denominations in which all the fundamental doctrines of Christianity could be taught. It is, however, a great evil to withdraw from the established system of common schools the interest and influence of the religious part of the community and of course you hear that same argument today Christians should not leave the public schools because we've got to maintain that that interest and influence of the religious part of the community on the whole it seems to be the wisest course at least for the present to do all in our power to perfect so far as it can be done not only its intellectual but also its moral and religious character now then they added a very important proviso which everyone seems to have forgotten, but this is it. They say, if after a full and faithful experiment, it should at last be seen that fidelity to the religious interests of our children forbid a further patronage of the system, we can unite with the evangelical Christians in the establishment of private schools in which more full doctrinal religious instruction may be possible. So there you are. They went into it provisionally. Conditionally. And what you're seeing today is a fulfillment of that. Parents are taking their children out of the public schools and putting them in Christian schools. Christian churches are forming schools all across America. They're doing exactly what these people would have done had they lived long enough to see the damage that is being done. So it's happening naturally now. I'm sure that the Christian churches that are doing this, that are creating Christian schools, have never read this report. but they're doing it because they realize that the public schools have had a, it has been given a full and faithful experiment, and it has, and it has been a total and complete failure. Total failure. So they realized that, they knew what they were doing, but they were so concerned about the Catholic invasion, as they call it in this country, and they didn't know to what extent it would continue and what it would lead to, that one could understand their fears, but nevertheless it had very profound consequences for the United States. Now, there was another important philosophical movement going on in the world that's also very much, very pertinent to the public school movement. That is the growth of the Hegelian movement in Europe. Hegelianism. Hegelianism? Okay. First it's the German philosopher Hegel. So you have Hegelianism. Now who was Hegel? Hegel was a very influential German philosopher. who along with the various religious liberals in Germany who were going through the Bible tearing it apart and you know and deciding it was all mythology Hegel decided that wanted to create a new view of the universe he decided that Christianity was just a passing phase in man's spiritual development and that really there was no such there was no God out there there was no man with a beard sitting on a throne in heaven. In other words, there was no objective real God separate from mankind. He claimed that all of the universe was God in the process of perfecting himself. That's what God was, the entire universe in the process of perfecting itself and that human beings was the highest manifestation of God on earth particularly the human intellect was the highest manifestation of God on earth and in a sense he deified man I have a wonderful quote in my book I'm sorry that I forgot to bring my book as public education necessary but I have a marvelous quote from the various critics of Hegelianism who pointed out that it was even more dangerous, Hegelianism was more dangerous than atheism because atheism simply denied the existence of God while Hegelianism deified man made man into God but in any case Hegel said that since man is the highest manifestation of God then man's power as institutionalized by the state was God on earth And that's where you got the idea of the state being the supreme law. The state being God, through the Hegelian philosophy. Now, that was a philosophy created in Germany. How did it get over to the United States? Well, how do you expect? Through Harvard University. That's how it got here. Through the intellectuals, the Unitarian intellectuals, they loved it. Can you imagine these intellectuals, the pride, puffed up, feeling that now they are as God? What a beautiful new view of the world. And of course, the Hegelian philosophy said that here is the universe, which is God in the process of perfecting himself or itself or whatever it is. And that this process, what is the nature of this process? It is the dialectic. It is the thesis, the antithesis, engaging in some kind of a conflict and then creating a new thesis or a synthesis. which then becomes the new thesis, which gets into conflict with the antithesis, forming a new synthesis, and this is the process of progress. So that actually the whole idea of the progressive movement stems out of this idea of the dialectic, this historical inevitable method whereby God is perfecting himself and man is perfecting himself. Hegel taught that man was getting better and better, morally better and better through this process, through this dialectical process. And of course, he imagined that there was this world spirit. It's all very mystical. And there's a good deal of Eastern mysticism in it because the Hindus believe in something like it. I don't know if they believe in the dialectic part of it, but certainly the whole dialectic idea comes from the Greeks. That's not new. The Greeks also believed in some kind of a, this constant struggle. Now, Hegel's dialectic was brought over into this country and our top educators became Hegelians, were Hegelians. And that's why the public school movement was really in the forefront of the development of statism in this country, that is of the state, the supreme law being the state. over that there is no such thing as God's law. You see, in the Pantheist system there is no such thing as God's law. The state law is God's law, according to the Pantheists, according to the Hegelians. So you see all these strands that were working in the United States to get us away from the original Calvinist idea of man, man's life, the purpose of his life being to glorify God. The purpose of man's life became to glorify man. To glorify man and his state. So you had a switch. The early period, the Calvinist period, which was basically private, even though you had the common schools. But then you had so many private academies. That mentality of the American people was still grounded in the notion that man's purpose on earth was to glorify God. Now it's very important to understand that our political documents written by the founding fathers were all written during the Calvinist period when they believed in the innate depravity of human nature. As a matter of fact, that's the reason why we have the kind of constitution and government we have because there was such a profound distrust of human nature and of man's capacity for evil and tyranny. that it was decided that the best form of government would be that in which power was reduced with as many small pieces as possible, so that you couldn't have one great tyrant take over. And that's why we have our division of powers, you know, the legislature, the judiciary, and the executive, and we have the states and counties. But the constant breakup, and of course representative government, the breakup of power, And of course, the constitutional guarantees, the constitutional restraints to prevent men from going beyond, in other words, beyond the certain limits in their behavior. So our government is based on the Calvinist view of man. Man is innately depraved, cannot be trusted with power. Well, along came the Hegelians who said, man is not innately depraved. They said, as a matter of fact, if you free him, from the restraints placed on him by the Bible, he is capable of unlimited good. See, another complaint that the Hegelians and the Unitarians and all these others had was that God was not very just. Because after all, he made some people smart and some people dumb, some people rich and some people poor, some people beautiful and some people ugly. You know, God is not very just in how he dishes out things. Man is capable of creating a much more just world. Man's justice is much better, can be much better than God. And that's the whole, that's where you get the whole, that's where egalitarianism comes from. That notion that man is a much better dispenser of justice than God. So you had all of these ideas impinging on the minds of men in this country. So that by the time you have your public schools in place, and then of course you have the decision on the part of the educators. If they were going to have public schools, what kind of public schools were they going to have? They decided to model theirs on the Prussian public schools. The schools in Prussia. Which had been created on the basis of the Hegelian idea that the state is supreme. Now how were the Prussian schools run? They were highly centralized. highly regulated, you had seminaries for teachers, teachers were trained by the state, the state owned the training institutions for teachers, the state owned the schools, the state decided on the curriculum, the state decided everything. Centralized, controlled, truant offices, graded classes, the whole bit. You see, the common schools in the Calvinist period were town schools, they were community schools. and they were run by the community. They chose the books, they picked the teachers. There was no central authority over them. They were very much like the congregational churches. The Calvinist churches were independent institutions and so were the schools. There was no central authority. But with the adoption of Hegelianism by the Unitarians and the Olanites, and also by some, by many Protestants, to them a centralized school system was the centralized controls centrally chosen textbooks, etc. All of this was a result of the new Hegelian philosophy that was taking over America. And this Hegelian period lasts from about 1830 to about the 1890s. So you have your Calvinist period, from about 1650 through 1830, and then you have your Hegelian period. Here the purpose of life was to glorify God, here the purpose of life is to glorify man and his institutions, his faith. And then beginning in 1890s, we begin the Progressive period. And that is up to the present. It's very important to understand the genesis of American liberalism begins really with the Unitarian heresy. The Unitarians took over Harvard College. And I consider really this a very important The Unitarian Takeover of Harvard, 1805. The Unitarian Takeover of Harvard really begins the liberal period in this country. That is, the takeover of the education of the institutions of higher education in this country by the liberals begins in 1805. that new world view. Humanism stems from the Unitarian takeover. It began that far back. Because the Unitarians basically are the humanists of today. They started with a man-centered view of the world. Even though they, you might say they were nominally monotheists, But their rejection of the divinity of Christ indicates that they really were basically atheists. On the way to atheism, they wouldn't do it all in one step. But in any case, it starts in 1805. Yale remained a strongly Calvinist institution until the 1840s. Yale falls in about the 1840s or 50s, around that time. I'd say 1850s. Yale went away. of Harvard and then of course Princeton was probably the last to go Princeton I think lasted until World War I but Harvard had such an important influence over the rest of the institutions of higher learning in this country because Harvard graduated so many people and all of these men went to different parts of the country they became leaders in the public school movements in different parts of the country it was also in the 1850s in the middle of the Hegelian period 1857, where the NEA was founded. National Education Association. Now why was that founded at that time? Because they believed in the Prussian system. They believed in the Prussian system. They wanted a national education system in America, like the Prussians. But you see, ours was divided up to states. and so they decided that by simply getting the educators together you could create a kind of national consensus in America and so you would have the beginning of a national system of education and they called for a department of education at the very first organizational meeting they wanted a department of education with cabinet status at that time because they wanted the same thing the Prussians had the Prussians had a minister of education so The NEA wanted a Department of Education. Now, it's interesting to note that during the Calvinist period, while you had common schools in New England, the common schools were mainly in New England, you had also many private schools. And then you had homeschooling. You had homeschooling. Who was homeschooling in those days? George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln. At this point in our history, parents had the unalienable right to educate their children at home. Nobody even questioned a parent's right to educate their children at home. It was unquestioned. It was assumed that parents could do a good job. And in those days, of course, parents were very capable of doing it. In fact, you had to know how to read and write before you went to school. Isn't that interesting? You were expected to know how to read and write before you went to school. Now, there were also what were known as James schools. And these were, I would say, like child care. Some lady would open her home to half dozen, a dozen children in the neighborhood would teach them how to read and write at the age of six or seven and then when they were ready to go to school they would either go to school or continue being tutored. But tutoring certainly was a very common way of teaching children in those days. Private tutors. The common schools were mainly in New England and the states to which a New England is migrated, and New England is migrated across northern New York State, up into Michigan, over into Ohio, and those areas. And they brought with them the idea of the common school, that is a school run by the community. You had a tremendous variety of educational forms there. The first, you don't get your first compulsory school attendance law until 1850. So 1850, you have your first compulsory school attendance law. In Massachusetts. And the rationale for that was, well, there were a couple of kids who were, you know, roaming the streets, and they're going to grow up to be ne'er-do-wells, and so we've got to get them off the streets. That was the rationale for that. Nobody assumed that that law abrogated the individual's right to educate their children at home. That was considered an unalienable right. Very important point. Unalienable rights. This is another part of the Calvinist legacy. Unalienable rights. Where do unalienable rights come from? Right. And they're stated very clearly in the Declaration of Independence, as you know, all men are created equal and they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So our unalienable rights come from God. Unalienable rights are rights that cannot be taken away by the state. By their very nature, they're unalienable. Now when the founding fathers Well, they didn't give us their own, but they certainly put it on paper, put it in a form that human beings could understand it, Americans could understand it. When they announced that we had unalienable rights, of course, King George was not too happy about it. And he didn't particularly hand them to us on a silver platter and said, you know, well, you can have your independence since you're such nice people, nice guys. Now they had to fight a long war of six years before they could fulfill that declaration of independence. The declaration further states that the purpose of government is to secure the unalienable rights of its citizens. That is the sole purpose of government. To make sure that the citizens can exercise their unalienable rights. That's the purpose of government. So God is supreme, our unalienable rights are derived from God, and the purpose of government is to secure these rights for human beings, so that men can glorify God. Now by the time we get to 1850, you have your first law that's going to begin to undermine the unalienable rights of a lot of people, but I think by then these the psychology and the philosophy of our educators was already sufficiently corrupt or sufficiently corrupted by Hegelianism and the new philosophy, the new statism that would make most people unaware that their unalienable rights were being undermined. I don't think they were aware of it. As a matter of fact, what happened during the Civil War was that An awful lot seemed to happen during the Civil War that escaped the notice of people. The preoccupation with the war prevented an awful lot of changes to take place in the philosophy of our people and the philosophy of our intellectuals that we were not aware of. It's interesting that when we're taught American history, we're usually taught the political events. We're taught about the wars, We're taught about inventions. We're taught about, you know, the Erie Canal and the invention of the steam engine and the Civil War and then the Spanish-American War and the muckrakers and the rise of the great industrial empire. But we're never taught about our intellectual history. What was going on in the minds of Americans? In the minds of the intellectuals, and yet that history is I would say probably far more important than any other aspect of our history. But you see what was happening to religion during this time. Here your Calvinist orthodoxy was strong, God is sovereign. In the Hegelian period you had a tremendous undermining of religious faith in this country. But what was happening? While the Unitarians, our intellectuals, were going liberal, were liberalizing the Protestant sect. And I'm sure that most of you are aware that today virtually all of your major Protestant sects might as well be Unitarian. I wonder how many of them actually believe in the divinity of Christ. But it was during that period, now how come the United States didn't go down the drain during that, since the intellectuals were so completely taken in by this liberalism? Well, it's because the constant influx from Europe of Orthodox people with much stronger religious faith. They kept, you know, filling in the gap. And that's what really prevented the Unitarians from totally secularizing America. Totally eliminating God from the United States with the constant influx of more religious people from Europe who came from, who didn't have the university education. But there you have the tremendous undermining of the Protestant faith, of the Protestant sect takes place during that middle period. A slow, it's a slow process. But nevertheless it was taking place because of those changes in the philosophical ideas among Americans. Now, the Hegelian period, this period of course was characterized by high literacy. Why? Because to read the Bible and to know Latin and Greek and Hebrew, you really had to be quite, you had to know your language. So the Calvinist period is characterized by very high literacy. And literacy was very high in this country. All you have to do is read the newspapers and documents written at the time. Even read the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. You realize what vocabulary was in those days, how people enjoyed wonderful, complex, verbiage and sentence structure and all of that. Now the Hegelian period was also characterized by high literacy, but there was a very interesting shift. They did study Greek and Latin, but what do you think they read? They read the pagan classics. Now the shift was away from the Bible to the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Romans and the Greeks, and while all of that was very good and all of that was quite enlightening Certainly our religious faith began to our knowledge of the Bible began to suffer But it's also interesting that during all of these periods you will find religious revivals taking place within the country You have Jonathan Edwards during the middle of during the 1840s I know there was a during the Hegelian period there was a particularly strong religious revival And then, of course, the famous Moody, who was very strong. During what period was Moody particularly strong? I'm not sure. It was World War I, around that period, when Dwight Moody created those great revivalists. Yeah, yeah. During the war, probably, during that war. So it's kind of a seesaw, but the intellectuals were rarely involved in those religious revivals. The religious revivals were for the plebeians. They were for the... for the, you know, just for the people, but the educators kept going on their merry way toward damnation. Now, so we have a high literacy period and a high literacy period during the Hegelian. Also, this was a period in which they adapted all of the Hegelian techniques of school discipline. The classrooms, the orderly classrooms with the seats bolted down, the desks bolted to the floor. It wasn't so bad. I went to such schools. They were all right, you know. Very orderly. Punctuality. Because man's... there was a tremendous... Hegel stressed the importance of intellectual development since man's intellect was the highest manifestation of God on earth. Therefore, it had to be developed. It was a very... important to develop man's intellect. Hegel was a very interesting man. I suspect that the reason why Hegel developed his philosophy was because as a German he was very jealous of the notion that the Jews should be the chosen people. He wanted the Germans to be the chosen people. And so his entire philosophy, the bottom line of it is that the Germans are really the superior and the chosen people. They are the ones If you read his philosophy, he invents all of this, I believe, in order to prove to the world that the Germans were basically the master race of the chosen people. Now, of course, during that period, the communist movement started. The Communist Manifesto was written in 1849. The Communist Manifesto. Now, where did they come from? Well, they took some from Owen. They took all of Robert Owen's ideas about religion and communism. And they also took the dialectic. They liked Hegel's dialectic. They thought that was wonderful. But they said, look, there is no big this is not there. This world is not one big spirit. There is no such thing as spirit. There is only matter in motion. That's when the materialists took over. So then they created what was known as dialectical materialism. How many people here have heard of dialectical materialism? All right, you've heard of it. Dialectical materialism. All they did was that they took Hegel's dialectic, which they considered to be the process, the historical process whereby man progresses, And they simply said, there is no spiritual matter out there. There's no such thing as the great spirit out there. There's only matter in motion. So it's matter that is involved in this dialectic. Man is matter. Everything is matter. And all of this constant clashing, this constant battle that's going on between the thesis and the antithesis, creating a synthesis. This is the constant struggle going on in all of history. And therefore, progress is the result of constant struggle and battling. And that's why the communists believe in perpetual struggle. And that's why the communists are always having liberation wars and terrorism and takeovers. They never rest because they feel that they are in the forefront of this dialectical materialist process. That's what a communist is. A communist is someone who says, well, look, if this is a natural process, why don't we sort of help it along? become the leaders of it. And because then we can hasten it. So that they decide that they are going to create this clash between the thesis and the antithesis. And this is what they've done all the time. If you read the works of the communists, they're always talking about the dialectical process, the process. They're always talking about the inevitability, the historical inevitability of communism. that the human race is marching toward communism. That's the way they put it because this is the process whereby it's all happening and as they say it's happening without even our, you know, help but we're going to help it along, we're going to make it happen faster. And that all occurred in 1849. Now you can see that what was being done to undermine man's faith in God during this period, the assault, the tremendous assault being waged against religion during that period. And of course, as materialism grew and industrialism grew, and man was beginning to feel his might and his power, he was quite taken with himself. And so he was glorifying man during that period. It was wonderful to glorify man. But yet this nation was still a pretty religious country, considering if you would consider the morality of the country. Yes, there was a decline. It wasn't the morality of the Calvinist period, certainly. But compared to today, it certainly was a much more moral period. Now it's interesting that as America grew, as America grew from town to town, you know, the settlements went westward. All of these towns, because they brought their Bibles with them and their churches with them, were able to create civilized communities in the middle of You know, the prairies all over this country. Because basically the Constitution kept this country Calvinistic in its political structure. So we basically have a Calvinistic structure that has been chipped away very badly. It's almost unrecognizable today. But nevertheless, there's enough of it there to have protected our freedoms up to this point. In other words, why has the United States lasted this long? Why has the Constitution endured this long? Because, well, Americans enjoy their freedoms and they realize that without that Constitution, it would all go down the drain because we've seen what happened in Europe. We've seen what's happened in other parts of the world. I will discuss the progressive period in the second period, I'll go into more detail in there. But now as far as unalienable rights, so here we have to, this is where we've got to be most concerned with what's happened to unalienable rights. We move from, now what was happening in Europe as far as the Hegelian period goes? You had the creation of these monster states, that then engage in all kinds of horrible wars. You could not have had the Franco-Prussian War, the World War I, unless these states all believed that they were supreme to glorify the state. And all of those nations were glorifying the state. What was happening to Christianity in Europe? Christianity had lost out. Germany was no longer Christian. Germany was pantheistic. Germany was Hegelian. So that when people say that Well, how could Christians do what they did in Germany? Christians didn't do what they did. The Christians, there weren't, the few Christians that were still around certainly didn't favor Hitler. But Hitler reverted back to pre-Christian paganism through Hegelianism. Hegelianism opened the way to pre-Christian paganism. As a matter of fact, during the Hegelian period, probably the most representative artist in all of Germany at that time was Wagner. And what are the Wagnerian themes? They're all the pre-Christian pagan myths. You see, Germany was so puffed up in its pride by this new Hegelian religion that put man as God, that exalted man as God, that it really infected the entire German nation. Churchgoing practically disappeared in Germany. Sundays became days for pleasure and total lack of religion. France went the same way. England held back a little further because the Calvinist influences in England and Scotland were still strong. It seems that the Calvinist influences were strongest in the English-speaking countries. that's where because John Knox had studied in Geneva and had brought back Presbyterianism to Scotland and of course there's always been a very strong Calvinist influence in England after Calvin and so the English-speaking countries still maintain their Christianity while Germany went the way of Hegel and France became rather atheistic, Marxist, Socialist and of course Italy the same. And these were nations, even though they had strong Catholic churches, the Catholic church, it was religious fervor was rather lacking. And that's why the communists were able to make such tremendous inroads in nations like Germany, France, Italy, etc. All of that was going on during that period. In our country here, we were so Immigration was pouring in from all parts of the world. The public schools were doing a decent job in those days of simply turning out fairly well-educated individuals who could read and write. Penmanship was good. The McGuffey readers were being used throughout the country. There was still a strong religious influence, particularly in the smaller cities, smaller towns. So the Protestants, while the top men were Hegelians, There were many ministers involved in local schools. There was a, I would say, a fairly high spiritual content in public education at that time, in the Hegelian period. Not as much, you know, there was a constant fight about how much of the Bible you could use in the schools. I remember when I was going to school in 1931, our principal in the assembly read the 23rd Psalm at every assembly. That was the only Psalm he read. But at least it was better than no Samana and it was a great Samana, tremendous influence on me. It takes so little religion, really. So it was a very mixed picture during that Hegelian period. But then you had the decline of private schools, the decline of private schools during the Hegelian period, the decline of home tutoring, the more reliance on the state, the more reliance on the government. And as people began to rely more on the government for education, then the idea began to arise, well, why don't we rely on the government for other things? Once people get used to the idea that government can do such a great job in education, then it's easy to decide that government can handle other things as well. Well, I guess I can stop now and then I will continue into the progressive period after the break.