Schools Are Religious
(or "What To Say When Someone Says that Schools Should Not Teach Religion")

Religion directs and shapes our lives.  It is not a question of whether people are religious; it is only a matter of which religion a person serves.  This religious orientation is often not acknowledged in our day; yet as God's creatures, we cannot escape this fundamental truth.  People may worship false gods, or they may worship the true God; but they will worship.  Someone's religion controls every school. 

We see the control of education being placed more and more into the hands of the civil government.  From their beginning, it was the purpose of the government schools to be a moral and social (religious) force.  One of the founders of compulsory public schools was Horace Mann.  He saw the goals of public education as promoting the socialization of diverse peoples.  Mann made the following prediction concerning the future of public education:  (note the religious language)

”The common (public) school is the institution which can receive and train up children in the elements of all good knowledge and of virtue and of morality.  This institution is the greatest discovery ever made by man...other social organizations are curative and remedial: the school is a preventative.  They come to heal moral diseases and societal wounds; [education will] make the physical and moral frame invulnerable to them.  Let the common school be expanded to its full capabilities and nine-tenths of the crimes in the penal code will become obsolete...men will walk safely by day; every pillow will be more inviolable by night; property, life, and character will be made safe; all hopes respecting the future will be brightened indeed."  [Common School Journal,  Jan., 1841, p.  15.]

The perfectibility of man by way of universal and compulsory government education promised a utopian future to the naive.  "Give us your children and we will repair the world." This clearly proclaims the religious goals of modern society for the government schools.(see note* below)  And even though the most determined opposition to any blending of religion_and education comes from the supporters of government schools, no school of any kind can maintain such separation.  Values-free education is a contradiction of terms because any hierarchy of values constitutes a religious system. 

Author/historian Herbert Schlossberg observes that education is a series of religious acts partly because the power of assumption is so great.  Assumptions are even more powerful than assertions because they bypass a persons critical faculty and thereby create prejudice.  Government sponsored education assumes God to be irrelevant to the educational process.  (When in actuallity, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge"- Prov 1:7).  These false assumptions are particularly beguiling because they appeal to one of our worst instincts - the desire to be fashionable or at least to avoid being associated with the unfashionable or unpopular (Idols for Destruction, 1983, p.  210).

The assumptions of modern public education concerning the nature of man, the function of the state, the nature of truth (and so on) are powerful.  They bring to our children a set of presuppositions that cannot escape being called religious.  Incredibly, Christians continue to sacrifice their children to this modern-day Molech we call the public schools.  This is a form of idolatry into which many have thoughtlessly entered.  Can you imagine the ancient, faithful Jews taking their children to be taught by the Levites on the Sabbath; and then handing those same children over to be educated by Canaanite schools the rest of the week?  Remember, it is not a matter of whether our children will be taught religion in school; it is only a matter of which religion they will be taught. 

* This is the well-documented theme of The Messianic Character of American Education, one of the many excellent books written by theologian R. J. Rushdooney