Have you ever worried that our public school system might be designed to produce homogeneous students who conform to an approved set of standards or beliefs – that it in fact might even become an instrument of tyranny? I was reading the excellent book The Vanishing American Adult by Ben Sasse (on which I will have more to say at a later time), where one portion examines how our public education system developed and what it was designed to do. His whole analysis is worth considering, but here, I want to look at a 1930s lecture Sasse quoted from. J. Gresham Machen’s The Necessity of the Christian School, is worth reading in full, but here I’ll focus mainly on the aspects and ideas Sasse highlighted – which aren’t specific to Christian schools.

First, though, a disclaimer: This lecture is a bit of a blast from the past, something from a very different age, so it has very different concerns. At the time, Machen was very concerned with the rise of public schools and the negative consequences he believed they would have on America and its education. While public schools were only beginning their expansion in Machen’s time, from our perspective, public schools are a fact of life – it’s hard to even imagine American life without them. It’s interesting to take a step back into Machen’s time and view things from a different perspective.

C.S. Lewis famously wrote this about the merits of reading old books:

Every age has its own outlook. It is especially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books…. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes.

We should look at Machen’s lecture with that in mind – while he may not have gotten everything right, his perspective and concerns are worth examining.

Machen in part addressed tyranny

Machen, who spoke in 1933, started off by noting the rise of tyranny around the world at that time:

We are witnessing in our day a worldwide attack upon the fundamental principles of civil and religious freedom. In some countries, such as Italy, the attack has been blatant and unashamed; Mussolini despises democracy and does not mind saying so. A similar despotism now prevails in Germany; and in Russia freedom is being crushed out by what is perhaps the most complete and systematic tyranny that the world has ever seen.

But then he argued that we were seeing the same thing (albeit with different intent) in the massive growth of centralized bureaucracy in the United States:

But exactly the same tendency that is manifested in extreme form in those countries is also being manifested, more slowly but nonetheless surely, in America. It has been given an enormous impetus first by the war and now by the economic depression; but aside from these external stimuli it has its roots in a fundamental deterioration of the American people. Gradually the people have come to value principle less and creature comfort more; increasingly it has come to prefer prosperity to freedom; and even in the field of prosperity it cannot be said that the effect is satisfactory.

The result of this decadence in the American people is seen in the rapid growth of a centralized bureaucracy which is the thing against which the Constitution of the United States was most clearly intended to guard.

Here, he’s arguing that as our society increasingly values comfort, we focus more on creating a vast centralized bureaucracy to ensure our needs are met, even if at the expense of liberty:

It is true, the attack upon liberty is nothing new. Always there have been tyrants in the world; almost always tyranny has begun by being superficially beneficent, and always it has ended by being both superficially and radically cruel.

To a large extent, we’ve seen this shift to centralized bureaucracy come from BOTH major political parties in the last few decades. At one point, Republicans tended to prefer small government, or at least retaining state and local control, though recent decades seem to have changed that. Machen’s concern was that this centralized bureaucracy poses a threat to liberty.

Machen was concerned with the rise of public schools, especially when they might be mandated

Machen’s concern in his lecture was partly with the rise of the public school system and some states’ requirements mandating public school attendance at the expense of other educational options. He felt this posed grave threats to individual liberty and might allow the state to tyrannically control the country by indoctrination rather than force:

That tyranny is being exercised most effectively in the field of education. A monopolistic system of education controlled by the State is far more efficient in crushing our liberty than the cruder weapons of fire and sword.

Later, he also adds:

On the contrary, the only way in which a state-controlled school can be kept even relatively healthy is through the absolutely free possibility of competition by private schools and church schools; if it once becomes monopolistic, it is the most effective engine of tyranny and intellectual stagnation that has yet been devised.

His concern was partly with what worldview would drive public education. Without competition, state-run schools or public schools would, he feared, ultimately serve to ensure that people believe what the state wants them to believe and are the type of people the state wants them to be.

Part of Machen’s worry was that education implies a value system, but we disagree even there

Machen worried that education by necessity involves distinguishing what is good and valuable from what is evil and wrong. But as we see in so many areas today, we have profound disagreements in our society even over the nature of good and evil. Machen writes:

In the first place, we find proposed to us today what is called “character education” or “character-building”. Character, we are told, is one thing about which men of all faiths are agreed. Let us, therefore, build character in common, as good citizens, and then welcome from the various religious faiths whatever additional aid they can severally bring.

He goes on to explain that deriving our ideas of “good character” from human experience (the only foundation it can have outside God’s law) inevitably leads to a feeble morality that can do nothing to restrain human desires in the long run.

He concludes, then, that:

For that reason, character-building, as practiced in our public schools, may well prove to be character-destruction.

Christian truth extends beyond just one aspect of life

Machen also spends some time looking at how religious instruction might have a place alongside the public school system – e.g. by allowing students to leave school at specific times for religious instruction – but expresses some concerns about how that could work in practice. More importantly, though, he notes that such ideas ultimately try to divide life into separate spheres of “religion” and everything else. Christian truth, though, applies to all of life:

But what miserable makeshifts all such measures, even at the best, are! Underlying them is the notion that religion embraces only one particular part of human life. Let the public schools take care of the rest of life – such seems to be the notion – and one or two hours during the week will be sufficient to fill the gap which they leave. But as a matter of fact the religion of the Christian man embraces the whole of his life. Without Christ he was dead in trespasses and sins, but he has now been made alive by the Spirit of God; he was formerly alien from the household of God, but has now been made a member of God’s covenant people. Can this new relationship to God be regarded as concerning only one part, and apparently a small part, of his life? No, it concerns all his life; and everything that he does he should do now as a child of God.

Some of you may recognize this idea; it’s the same idea Nancy Pearcey addresses in her book “Total Truth”. We often divide life conceptually into different areas, such as the secular versus the sacred, and treat religion as something which applies only to the sacred portion of life. The Bible, however, paints a very different picture, with Jesus as Lord of all of life, not just the religious portion thereof. Machen’s point, then, is that religious instruction outside of school will fail to present this unified view of life that the Bible gives us.

Machen was also concerned about the implications of focusing too much on equal opportunity

Machen also worried about what he called the fallacy of equal opportunity; he thought that while providing equal opportunity for everyone through public education seems a noble goal, this really would end up amounting to not very much opportunity at all:

But what shall we say about this business of “equal opportunity?” I will tell you what I say about it; I am entirely opposed to it. One thing is perfectly clear – if all the children in the United States have equal opportunity, no child will have an opportunity that is worth very much. If parents cannot have the great incentives of providing high and special educational advantages for their own children, then we shall have in this country a drab and soul-killing uniformity, and there will be scarcely any opportunity for anyone to get out of the miserable rut.

I remember seeing this myself when I was a homeschooled teenager; one of my good friends was a bit younger and had a reputation as a terrible student as he entered the public high school system, which I couldn’t understand because he was extremely gifted, yet he poor to terrible grades in his classes and had a reputation for causing trouble. Eventually, he began calling me so I could teach him vector calculus (over the phone) because he needed it for coding up a ray-tracer (to generate high quality graphics) for the computer game he was writing. After that, I started to understand his problem. He was so bored in school that he didn’t invest any significant effort in his classes. He needed far more advanced classes, at the college level, to challenge him and pique his interest. In his case, “equal opportunity” meant he couldn’t excel and develop his abilities.

Machen also argued about the evil of uniformity; that when one is, for example, manufacturing automobiles, uniformity is a great thing, but not so much when it comes to education. Different people need different things:

There should be, it is said, a powerful coordinating agency in education, to set up standards and encourage the production of something like a system. But what shall we say of such an aim? I have no hesitation, for my part, in saying that I am dead opposed to it. Uniformity in education, it seems to me, is one of the worst calamities into which any people can fall. … But what is good for a Ford car is not always good for a human being, for the simple reason that a Ford car is a machine while a human being is a person. Our modern pedagogic experts seem to deny the distinction, and that is one place where our quarrel with them comes in. When you are dealing with human beings, standardization is the last thing you ought to seek. Uniformity of education under one central governmental department would be a very great calamity indeed.

This approach was certainly what failed my friend, and I’ve seen it fail many others as well. We’re very different individuals, differing in gifts and abilities, strengths and weaknesses. As I’ve written before, this means we have different roles in the church but more broadly, presumably it means we have very different roles in society. Should we really rely on a standardized education to serve the vast array of different members of our society when people are so different?

In any case, I think Machen’s article is worth carefully considering, partly because it provides a very different perspective on some of the issues facing our society today.