through the fire

chapter one

it was not always this way

The first thing you have to see, before anything else can come into focus, is that the whole apparatus you picture when you hear the word school, the rows of desks and the ringing bells and the children sorted by age into grades, is not how children have learned for most of human history. It is not the natural and timeless way of things that it pretends to be. It is a recent invention, and knowing that it was invented, on purpose, by particular people, for particular ends, is the doorway to everything else in this booklet.

For thousands of years children were taught mostly at home, and in the community, and by the church. They learned at their mother’s knee and at their father’s side, tied to real work and real life; they learned a trade by doing it, they learned their letters from whoever in the household or the parish could teach them, they learned the Scriptures from their parents as God had plainly commanded. It was woven into the fabric of ordinary living, and the family was the school, and it had been so since the beginning. Whatever its imperfections, and it had them, it was not a separate institution that took the child out of the home for the better part of every day and handed him to strangers.

The bells, the rows, the grades, the age-sorted batches moving down the line, none of it is ancient, and none of it is natural. It was built.

The thing we now call public school, the compulsory, state-run, age-graded, bell-driven institution, is barely more than a century and a half old. It has not always been this way. It was made, deliberately, at a particular moment in history, by particular men, to accomplish particular purposes, and those purposes are written down plainly in their own words, and we are going to read them. This is the point on which the whole booklet turns, so let it land before we go on. The system was not a good and neutral thing that soured over time. It was never neutral to begin with. It was engineered, from its first design, to do a certain work upon the child, and it is doing that work still. Once you know why a thing was built, you understand what it is doing, even now, even long after the men who built it are dead. The machine is still running the program it was given. So we go and find out who wrote the program, and what they wrote it to do.

chapter two

the prussian blueprint

The model did not begin in America. It was imported, and it was imported from Prussia, and where it came from tells you almost everything about what it was for.

In the early part of the nineteenth century, the American reformer Horace Mann, often called the father of the common school, traveled to the German states and came home enamored of the Prussian system of state schooling. He became its great champion, urging the states to adopt it, which in time they did. He did not hide where he had gotten it; he praised it openly in his official reports and held it up as the model America ought to follow, and the essential machinery, the compulsory attendance, the state control, the grading and ranking and ordering of children into age-graded classes, was borrowed wholesale from Prussia.¹

Now here is the part that matters, and you must not skip over it. Why had Prussia built such a system in the first place? Not, as we might imagine, out of a tender love of learning for its own sake. Prussia built its state schooling in the wake of military defeat, and it built it for a reason its own architects were candid about: to produce a population that was obedient, orderly, and useful to the state. Soldiers who would follow orders. Workers who would keep their place. Subjects who had been trained from childhood to submit to authority and not to question it. The Prussian school was, by design, a machine for manufacturing compliant citizens, and it was engineered to do exactly that, from the top down, by the state, for the state’s own purposes.

It was engineered from the start to manufacture obedient soldiers and compliant subjects. That was not a side effect. That was the design.

That is the blueprint Horace Mann brought back and laid down as the foundation of American schooling. Not a foundation laid for the love of truth. Not, at bottom, a foundation laid for the flourishing of the child. A foundation laid to produce a certain kind of citizen for the convenience of the state. And a building tells you what it is by the blueprint it was raised on. When you understand that the very frame of the thing was Prussian, designed to mold obedient and unquestioning subjects, you are no longer surprised by anything the building does. It is doing what it was built to do. And it was about to be handed to men who saw in it a use of their own.²

chapter three

not thinkers, but workers

The Prussian frame arrived in America just as the country was filling up with factories, and the men who owned those factories and funded the shaping of mass schooling had a purpose for it that they, too, were remarkably willing to put in writing. Their purpose was not to raise up thinkers. It was to produce workers.

Consider Frederick T. Gates, the business advisor to John D. Rockefeller and a driving force behind the Rockefeller-funded General Education Board, which poured enormous sums into shaping American schooling in the early twentieth century. In a tract titled The Country School of To-morrow, published by that board in 1913, Gates wrote down the dream in words so plain they need no interpreting.³

Read that again, slowly, and let it land, because a man is telling you, in his own hand, exactly what the thing was for. The people are to yield with perfect docility to the molding hand. They are not to be made into thinkers, scholars, scientists, writers, poets, or men of learning. The ambition, Gates goes on to say, is only to teach them to do, in a perfect way, the work their fathers did in an imperfect way. Not to lift them into thought. To settle them into labor, and keep them content in it. That is not education as you have imagined it. That is training, the way you train a useful animal, and the man who wrote it felt no need to hide it, because in his world nobody was going to object.

And he was not alone in saying it out loud. In 1909, Woodrow Wilson, then the president of Princeton, stood before a gathering of high school teachers in New York and said the quiet thing plainly.⁴

One small class to be educated and to rule; a very much larger class to be trained and to labor. That was said out loud, by a university president, in 1909.

There is the two-tier design, stated without shame by a man who would go on to be President of the United States. A small class to receive a real education, to think and to lead. And a much larger class, most people’s children, yours very possibly among them, to be fitted only to perform specific difficult manual tasks, and not to be troubled with the education of a thinking soul. That was the plan. And whether or not old Rockefeller himself ever spoke the line so often put in his mouth, that he wanted a nation of workers and not a nation of thinkers, it does not finally matter, because that sentence is simply the honest summary of the whole enterprise, and the men who built it wrote as much down themselves. The bells that move children from room to room on command, the sorting into rows, the training to sit still and respond to the signal and do the repetitive task, all of it is the factory floor, reproduced in miniature, to produce people comfortable on a factory floor. The building is doing what it was built to do. It is still running the program.

chapter four

whose world, and whose child

So the frame was Prussian and the purpose was industrial, but there was also a philosophy poured into the thing, a whole way of seeing God and man and the child, and it came from men who did not share your faith in the slightest. And you cannot pour one worldview into a vessel and pull a neutral one back out.

The towering figure here is John Dewey, more than anyone the philosophical architect of modern American education, whose ideas shaped the training of teachers and the theory of schooling for generations. And Dewey was no friend of the Christian faith. He was a signer of the Humanist Manifesto, a man who set human experience in the place where God belongs, and he saw the school quite openly as the instrument for forming the child into a particular kind of social being, a citizen shaped for the collective, and he saw it as doing this work in the place of, and apart from, the home and the church. The school, in this vision, is not a neutral servant helping parents do their job. It is a rival authority, formed to shape the child’s very soul in a direction the parents may never have chosen and often cannot even see.⁵

The school was shaped by men who did not share your God, to form your child’s soul in a direction you never chose.

Now set that against what the Scripture says about whose task it is to teach a child, because the contrast could not be sharper. God lays the education of children squarely and repeatedly upon the parents, and never upon the state.

Diligently, when you sit and when you walk and when you lie down and when you rise up; that is not the language of an occasional supplement to an outside institution. That is the language of a charge laid on the parent for the whole of a child’s life. The bringing up of a child, mind and soul, is a parental duty delegated by God, and the church has always understood it so. The modern arrangement, in which the state does the educating and forms the worldview and the parent is left to supplement around the edges with an hour here and there, is the exact inversion of the biblical order. It has taken the thing God gave to the parents and handed it to strangers, and taught us to call that normal.

And here is where it stops being theory and comes home to the kitchen table. You are handing your child, six hours a day, thirty hours a week, nine months a year, for thirteen years of the most formative season of a human life, to a roomful of adults you have never vetted, whose deepest beliefs you do not know, whose view of God and man and right and wrong is a mystery to you, and whom, if you are honest, you meet for perhaps ten minutes across a table on a single evening in the fall. You may know one or two of them. You cannot possibly know all of them, and you cannot know what is in their hearts, and you cannot hear what they say to your child when the door is closed and you are not there. You would not hand your child to a stranger on the street for an afternoon. But we have been trained to hand over the forming of their very mind, to strangers, for a childhood, and to feel nothing strange about it at all.

chapter five

six hours a day

Now to what is actually poured into a child in those six hours a day, because this is where the whole thing gets its teeth. And I want to be careful and precise here, the way a Christian ought to be, because there is a foolish way to talk about this that discredits the truth, and I will not take it.

Start with science, because it is where the confusion is thickest. There is a kind of science a Christian can affirm right alongside the atheist, the Muslim, the Mormon, anyone at all, and affirm gladly, because there is no worldview hidden in it. Drop a ball, and it falls, and every man of every creed measures the same rate of acceleration, because the ball does not care what you believe. The workings of physics and chemistry, the things you can test and repeat and observe happening right now in front of you, medicine, engineering, the whole vast realm of what can be measured, all of this is common ground, and the Christian has no quarrel with it and every reason to be thankful for it. That is one kind of science, and it is good.

But there is another kind entirely, and it wears the same white coat so that you will not notice the difference, and it is the one that matters most. It is the science of origins, of where everything came from, of where man came from, and this is not a thing anyone can drop and measure. No one was there. It cannot be repeated or observed. It is, by its very nature, a story told about a past no one witnessed, and the story you tell depends entirely on the beliefs you carry to it before you start. The man who has ruled God out before he begins must arrive at a universe from nothing and a man from the animals, not because the evidence marched him there, but because he closed every other door before he set out. And then he teaches it to your child, every single day, not as one account among others but as settled and unquestionable fact.

Operational science you can drop and measure, and every creed agrees. Origins is a story told about a past no one saw, and the story depends on the god you start with.

Now the Christian knows better, because he begins from the Word of God, which tells him plainly that in the beginning God created. Scripture does not hand us the exact mechanism, and it does not settle to everyone’s satisfaction the precise age of the earth, and I will not fight here over the parts the Bible leaves open. But it tells us, without the smallest ambiguity, the thing that actually matters: that God created, deliberately, on purpose, and that He made things fully formed and good and distinct, and did not merely watch them stumble upward over the ages. Creation was an act of a Person, not the outcome of a process with no one behind it. That is the headwater, and everything flows from it.

And do you see why it is the most important thing of all, and therefore the most dangerous to hand over? Because the very first truth the Bible establishes about a human being is that he was made in the image of God, set apart from the animals, given a soul, given dominion, made on purpose to know his Maker. And the origins story taught in the school does not merely differ from that; it destroys it. For if man clawed his way up from the beasts by accident, then he is a beast, differing from the animals only in degree and not in kind, and there is no image of God in him, no soul breathed in, no special worth, no fixed moral law written on his heart, no Maker to whom he must answer. Every other conclusion the age wants your child to reach, about human worth, about life, about sex, about meaning, about morality, flows from that one poisoned spring. Teach a child for thirteen years that he is a clever animal, and you have already decided nearly everything else he will believe. That is why it is taught as fact and not as theory. It is the foundation the rest of the building stands on.

And it is not only origins. Here is a small, real picture of how it works, worth more than a page of argument. I was listening not long ago to a pastor I enjoy from time to time, a good and thoughtful man, whose own children are in the public school, and a good one by every account, the sort of school with teachers the parents actually like. And he told how his children had come home one day and, in the course of talking about race, said to him, matter of factly, that slavery was a thing white people did to black people. They were not being foolish. They were not being rebellious. They were simply repeating, as settled fact, what they had been handed at the good school by the teachers they liked. And it is not even true. Slavery is as old as sin and as universal as the fall; it did not begin with any one people or any one color, but erupted among every people on every continent across all of recorded history, because the strong have always exploited the weak the moment they could, and that is a disease of the fallen human heart and not of any race. These evils were born of sin, out of the sinful heart, and they belong to all of Adam’s children alike; to pin them on one people is not history at all. But the child cannot tell the difference, because it came from the trusted adult at the front of the room, wearing the authority of the school.

You are not getting history. You are getting somebody’s ideology, handed to your child as fact, by somebody whose heart you do not know.

And that is the pattern across the whole of it, not only slavery and not only origins, but history taught through a frame that is often quietly hostile to the faith, and the reigning ideologies of the moment, about sex, about identity, about race and grievance, handed to children as settled and unquestionable truth, much of it engineered to divide them from one another rather than to teach them anything at all. It comes home in a thousand small sentences said matter of factly at the dinner table, and every one of them was formed in a place you could not see, by a person you do not know, and presented to your child not as an opinion to weigh but as reality itself. That is the most formative lie there is, the one that does not announce that it is teaching you anything, but simply hands you a whole world and calls it plain fact.

chapter six

by their fruits

Now if all of this were producing brilliant, well-taught, clear-thinking young people, someone might at least argue that the trade was worth it. But it is not, and here the case simply closes, because the system fails even by its own advertised measure, and it fails so plainly that its own defenders admit it. You do not have to take a Christian’s word that something has gone badly wrong. The world’s own numbers say it, and the world itself calls it a crisis.

Look at the plain figures, and remember these come from the government’s own measures, not from any preacher. By the most recent national assessment of adult skills, roughly 1 in 5 American adults scores at the lowest level of literacy, and by the analysis of that data done for a national literacy foundation, something on the order of half of American adults read below the level of a sixth-grade child. And it is not holding steady; it is sliding. The federal government’s own National Center for Education Statistics found the share of adults at the very lowest level of literacy had climbed to around 28 percent, up from 19 percent only a decade before. The numbers are going the wrong way, and quickly.⁶

More than half of American adults read below a sixth-grade level, and the numbers are getting worse, not better.

And it begins early, in the children still in the system right now. On the most recent national reading assessment, only about a third of the nation’s fourth-graders read at or above the level the test calls proficient, which means roughly 2 out of 3 did not, and a large share could not even reach the basic level. These are not fringe numbers from an axe-grinding pamphlet; they are the official results, published by the Department of Education itself, measuring the very system in question. And the wider culture, which has no Christian axe to grind at all, looks at these same figures and openly calls it a literacy crisis, an emergency, a catastrophe. On this, for once, the believer and the world agree completely.⁷

So put it together. Here is a system that consumes the better part of a child’s waking life for thirteen years, and swallows staggering sums of money, and after all of it a great many of its graduates cannot comfortably read. A thing that produces such fruit, after so much time and so much treasure, is not a good thing that is merely stumbling. Either it is broken beyond belief, or, and this is nearer the truth, it is succeeding quite well at its actual purpose, the one Gates and Wilson wrote down, of producing a compliant and minimally-equipped populace, while failing utterly at the purpose it advertises. By their fruits ye shall know them, said the Lord, and the fruit of this tree is bitter.

And that is only the fruit you can count. There is another harvest that does not show up on any test, and it is the one that should most concern a Christian parent, the quiet falling-away of the young from the faith they were raised in, formed over those same thousands of hours in a place built on a worldview that was never Christ’s. If you want that documented at length, go and read the study called Already Gone, by Ken Ham and Britt Beemer, which lays out with hard numbers where this long road tends to lead for the faith of children brought up in the church. I will not reproduce it here; I only point you to it. But keep it in view, because it is the fruit that lasts into eternity, and it is falling from this same tree.⁸

chapter seven

through the fire

Now I have to say the hard thing, and I am not going to soften it, because it is true and because the softening of it is exactly how it keeps happening. So take it plainly.

There was a sin in the Old Testament that God hated with a particular fury, and it was the sin of the parents of Canaan, who passed their children through the fire to the god Molech. They laid their sons and their daughters in the arms of an idol and gave them up to be consumed. And here is the thing you must understand about why they did it, because it is the whole point. They did not do it because they hated their children. They did it because they wanted something. Molech was thought to give prosperity, security, good harvests, success, the good life; and the price of the good life was the child. You handed over what was most precious in order to get what you wanted. That was the trade. That was the horror of it.

They did not give their children to the fire because they hated them. They did it to get the good life. That was always the trade.

So here is the question this whole booklet has been walking toward, and I will ask it without any cushion at all. What are you passing your children through the fire for? I do not mean it as a mere figure of speech. I mean: what is the thing you are getting in exchange for handing them over? For a great many families, when you strip away the language of necessity and look honestly, the answer is the second income that was never really needed for bread, but for the bigger house, the newer cars, the vacations, the nicer things, the lifestyle. The child is handed to the system so that the parents can have the life. And that, when you say it plainly, is the old trade in modern clothing: the most precious thing, given up, to get the good life.

And I will draw the line clean, because it matters and because I promised I would. There is a real difference between necessity and want dressed up as necessity, and God sees the difference even when we would rather not. The mother who truly has no other way, who is genuinely doing what she must to survive, is not the one I am speaking to, and God does not lay on her a burden she cannot carry. But she is not most people. Most of the families who plead necessity could, if they were willing, reorder their lives, live on less, give up the toys and the upgrades and the second income spent on comforts, and keep their children. They are not doing what they must. They are choosing what they want, and calling it what they must, because the honest word would convict them. And the honest word is worth more to your soul than the comfortable one.

I am not telling you that you are sacrificing your children. I am telling you to sit with the question, honestly, before God, and to answer it as a person who will one day give an account for the children He lent you. What are you passing them through the fire for? If the answer, underneath all the excuses, is the good life, then you already know something you did not want to know, and knowing it is the first mercy. There is still time to choose differently. That is why I have told you the truth, plainly, and refused to soften it. Not to wound you, but because the fire is real, and I would have you pull your children back from it while there is still time.

chapter eight

if we could do it

I will end by telling you a little about the people who raised me, because I have been asking hard things of you, and it is only fair that you know I am not asking anything my own family did not live.

We were poor. I do not mean we were careful with money; I mean that by the plain measure, for a family of our size in the place where we lived, we were under the poverty line. Take that however you wish, but do not miss it, because everything I am about to say stands on it. We did not have the second income spent on luxuries, because we did not have luxuries. And my parents, who could have used every dollar two working incomes would have brought, did not do that. They made a different choice, and it cost them, really cost them, in things given up and comforts never had. I went to a Christian school for a time, and even then it took real doing; part of the cost was carried by what little income we had, and the rest, the part we still could not cover on our own, was quietly made up by a grandparent who helped so that we could go. And for the better part of my growing up I was homeschooled. And there is a detail there I want you to sit with, because it undoes the most common excuse of all. Part of that teaching was carried by a parent who was not whole, who was already carrying a heavy burden of their own, and who had every earthly reason to say the task was beyond them. It was not that they had everything to give. It is that instead of their limits becoming the reason the children were handed off to someone else, their limits became the reason they took up the teaching themselves. The thing that might have been an excuse, they made into a calling. And when it came to college I made my own way through, on scholarships and on loans, because there was no family money waiting to pay it. That is the truth of where I come from. I sit today in a very different place, a good deal more comfortable than the home I was raised in, and I have not forgotten a single hard year of it.

My parents made real sacrifices. But the thing they refused to sacrifice was me.

Here is why I tell you. My parents sacrificed a great deal to raise their children the way they believed they ought to be raised. But look closely at what they sacrificed, because it is the whole of the matter. They sacrificed comforts. They sacrificed income, and ease, and the nicer life they might have had. They put those things into the fire. What they would not put into the fire was their children. They gave up the good life to keep us; they did not give up us to get the good life. And that, in the end, is the only question this whole booklet has been asking, turned around and answered the right way: not what will you sacrifice your children for, but what will you sacrifice for your children.

So if we could do it, poor as we were, poorer than most of the families who will ever read these words, then I will say to you plainly what the arithmetic says: for most of you, the we cannot afford to was never quite true. You could. It would cost you something, perhaps a great deal, the house and the cars and the second income and the life you have gotten used to. But you could. And so, for most, it is not that you cannot. It is that you have weighed the child against the comforts and chosen the comforts, and dressed the choice in the language of necessity so you would not have to see it for what it is.

I will not say to you that you are sacrificing your children. I have said all along that this is not a matter of sin and that I would lay no law on you, and I keep my word to the last line. I only lay the truth in front of you, all of it, the history and the design and the fruit and the fire, and I let you sit with it. You are free. You were always free. But understand the law that governs a free choice, because it governs every choice you will ever make, and there is no escaping it. We make a thousand choices a day, and every last one of them sows a seed, and every seed comes up as something, sooner or later, whether we watch it grow or not.

That is the plainest law there is, and it holds over all of life, over the small choices and the large. Most of our choices fall mainly on ourselves, and touch others only lightly. But this one is not like most, and it is worth seeing exactly why it stands on higher ground. For here you are not choosing only for yourself. You are choosing on behalf of another soul, a person made in the image of God and set here for a purpose, whose whole forming you have been given to steward for a few short years. The seed you sow in this is sown into an image-bearer, and it comes up in a human being, over a lifetime, and often you will not see the harvest of it for years, long after the sowing is done and the choice can no longer be unmade. That is what lifts this above the ordinary thousand choices of a day. Not that the rest do not matter, but that here the field is a child’s soul.

And this is why, from the first page, I have said it is not finally about sending or not sending, but about being wise, for the Lord Himself told us to be wise as serpents and harmless as doves, and there is only one way to be that. It is to keep learning, to keep your eyes open, to have access to the truth of a thing so that you can weigh it with a sober mind. Wisdom is not a hunch and it is not a feeling; it is what grows in the person who actually knows what he is dealing with, and refuses to choose in his sleep about things that matter. That is the whole reason I wrote this: not to make the choice for you, but to put the truth in your hands so that you can make it soberly, with your eyes open, as a wise steward and not a sleeping one. So sow with a clear mind, and know that you will reap, and that the child will reap alongside you. You are free to choose, and you cannot claim you did not know, and you will one day give an account, not to me, but to the God who lent you the child and asked you, above every other thing, to bring that child up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.