“A 2018 study of more than 8,600 tenure-track professors by Brooklyn College professor Mitchell Langbert found registered Democrats outnumber Republicans at 51 of America’s leading liberal arts colleges by a ratio of 10.4 to one. As important as bias on college campuses is, it’s only one piece of the puzzle. Much of the problem goes back much further, to K–12 schools, where only 27 percent of teachers identify as Republicans, according to a national survey by the Education Week Research Center. Not only are K–12 teachers more likely to vote for Democrats and favor left-wing causes, socialist ideas permeate nearly every aspect of government-run schools. From their earliest days, young students are taught by modern state curriculum standards to be cogs in the societal wheel rather than independent thinkers. The educational focus is often placed on performing well on standardized tests and memorizing facts, not learning how to make difficult moral choices or cogent arguments with classmates. In many public schools, teachers are outright hostile to conservative ideas and openly embrace radical left-wing positions like single-payer health care. Given the state of the current educational system, it’s not surprising that many young people identify with the collectivist principles of the far left and not with the rugged individualism that has been the foundation of American life for centuries. Our children aren’t being taught the same principles the American Founders were taught when they were kids; children today don’t even read the same books the Founders read. Is it any wonder then that they don’t think the same way John Adams and Thomas Jefferson did?” (“America’s Public Schools Have Become Socialist Indoctrination Factories,” Townhall, Jan. 28, 2019).
CONCLUDING NOTE: The main book that is not read in America’s schools today that was read in former times is the Bible. Prior to the 20th century, the Bible wielded a major influence in the lives of the vast majority of Americans regardless of religious affiliation or profession. The New England Primer, the most important textbook in America from 1690 to 1790, and which continued to be published until the 1930s, was filled with quotations from the Bible. The introduction to the 1900 edition said, “The New England Primer contributed, perhaps more than any other book except the Bible, to the molding of those sturdy generations that gave to America its liberty and its institutions.” Beginning in 1783, Noah Webster’s Blue-Back Speller educated generations of American children, selling nearly 100 million copies. It, too, was packed with quotations from the Bible. Webster’s 1828 An American Dictionary of the English Language, the nation’s most popular dictionary, was filled with references to the King James Bible. Webster’s influence on American education was so great that he has been called “The Schoolmaster of the Republic.” From 1836 to 1960, at least 120 million copies of the McGuffy Readers were sold, and they, too, had strong biblical content. William McGuffey was a Christian whose passions were “education and preaching the gospel.” By the use of the Bible itself and Bible-based textbooks, Americans of the 17th through the 19th centuries were steeped in Scripture from a young age, and this had a large influence on society even among the unsaved. In 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court ridiculously ruled that devotional Bible reading in public schools is unconstitutional. But before the Bible was removed from the public schools, it was removed, in a practical sense, from most churches and Christian homes.
(Friday Church News Notes, October 9, 2020, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143)