It certainly is off-putting to hear a statement like the above title of this essay. Most people take offense to such a line. Sadly, most people care more about the fact that it is offensive rather than the fact that it is true. This is the problem.

In secular humanist society, the public school is a sacred entity. Read the following quote by a John Dunphy very carefully:

I am convinced that the battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity that recognizes the spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being.

There teachers must embody the same selfless dedication of the most rabid fundamentalist preacher, for they will be ministers of another sort, utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever subject they teach, regardless of the educational level — preschool, daycare, or large state university.

The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new — the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism, resplendent in its promise of a world in which the never-realized Christian ideal of ‘love thy neighbor’ will finally be achieved.

John Dunphy is no one, but after 32 years in the public schools, I learned he is nearly everyone. At the highest levels of education, this is the plan. It is a fervent religious endeavor to worship the state and the public schools have been morphing into John Dunphy’s vision since the days of John Dewey. 

One of the great tricks in transforming society through education is to reduce the human person to a mere animal. It took decades, but I discovered that modern methodology leaves the faculties of the intellect and free will primarily untreated.

The manipulation of these two soulful faculties depends upon their unwitting use, but the overt focus is a denial of both. Ask the question in the modern classroom “does objective truth exist?” and “is there an objective moral standard?” Even if these are unasked questions, implicitly they are both answered in the negative and if you press a teacher, they will generally reject both truths.

In the early twentieth century, the grandfather of American education John Dewey, asserted an educational program that assumes humans are purely material beings. His influence leaves the modern school with social pragmatism as the highest concern. John Dewey, an experimental psychologist and material atheist, didn’t concern himself with immaterial realities, like the soul.

In his scheme man’s highest capacities were diminished to the periphery and now in the public school they are left unconsidered, if not artifacts of “white supremacy” and other forms of bigotry. The philosophical cultivation of the mind is reduced to the material concerns of the lower sciences and the power of free will is relegated to determinism. We can see and understand this deformation in the constant discussion of “structures” and “victimhood.” 

I don’t know about you, but I  was rather confused in my first few years in the classroom. As a 5 year old, I was distinctly aware of a spiritual desert-like climate in kindergarten that  persists through all ages of schooling in every classroom I have ever been in. This fact is obscured by “fun” activities, self-esteem building, lunch, PE and the social situations in schools. I was bored stiff in all my years of school, and when it comes to curriculum and instruction, if people are being honest, so is everyone else. Most children are truly burned out by 3rd grade, so the distractions in the schools are made more intense and intentional. 

When I accidentally became a teacher, I did not want to be in charge of a spiritual desert, so I began a search for meaning right away. I discovered a truth. I began to notice a profound difference in my students’ disposition towards literature when I exposed them to the true Greek Myths, as opposed to the deformed Greek myths in our text books. I caught a glimpse of a flicker of a flame in the souls of many who encountered delight in the ancient Grecian tales. Seeking an understanding of that flame, I began to take a long hard look at the myths myself and that sparked a fire in my heart and mind that would forever prevent a return to the vacuous American textbooks.

My odyssey began over 3 decades ago. It has taken me immeasurable efforts and no small amount of God’s graces to discover what has gone so terrible wrong with modern education. It is not enough to simply state the truth, I invite anyone who is interested to begin to ask the right questions and then to commit to making truth the end of our quest.

After that, we must do the real soul work to mine the inner and outer landscape to discover the deepest roots of the truths of reality, which take the form of first principles properly understood.