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One must not underestimate the influence of education and the media. “Train up a child in the way he should go” has its counterpart, and the devil implements it.

In education in early America, the overtly Christian “New England Primer” was used in New England, which is estimated to have sold upwards to 3,000,000 copies from 1700 to 1850. This reader was used in what now would be 1st grade, and was introduced in 1690 and taught many children how to read for 200 years, until 1900. The Alphabet was taught with Bible verses that began with each letter of the alphabet. Lessons had questions about the Bible and the Ten Commandments. An example of the Primer is, A = In Adam’s fall, we sinned all. B = Heaven to find, the Bible mind.” (The Honorable Judge Robert Ulrich Chief Justice, Missouri Court Of Appeals, Western District; http://www.shalomjerusalem.com/heritage/heritage19.html)

In addition, approximately half of all American children (beginning in 1836 to approx 1930) learned from the “McGuffey Reader,” of which 122 million copies were published (during a time when the population was much less than today, and books were passed on more). This was an advanced teaching system for it’s time, written by a man who later became a Presbyterian minister, a work which earned him the title, “the Great Schoolmaster of the Nation.” He exalted the Lord Jesus Christ, and used the Bible more than any other source. It became a unifying force in American culture, instilling basic Christian-based morality, giving America a common value-laden body of literary reference and allusion, (Cranney, A. Garr, “Noah Webster and William Holmes McGuffey: The Men and Their Contributions to Reading”) and “a sense of common experience and of common possession”. (Historian Henry Steele Commager) McGuffey Readers were used widely in America until just after World War I.

The first elementary schools also taught Christian morality, and even the Unitarian “the Father of the Common School,” Horace Mann (May 4, 1796 — August 02, 1859), who became Massachusetts Secretary of Education in 1837, not only understood the impossibility of separating education from religious moral beliefs, but held that it was lawful to teach the truths of the general Christian faith, asserting that the “laws of Massachusetts required the teaching of the basic moral doctrines of Christianity.” Mann, who supported prohibition of alcohol and intemperance, slavery and lotteries, (http://www.famousamericans.net/horacemann) dreaded “intellectual eminence when separated from virtue”, that education, if taught without moral responsibilities, would produce more evil than it inherited. (William Jeynes, “American educational history: school, society, and the common good,” p. 149, 150) Mann stated that “it may not be easy theoretically, to draw the line between those views of religious truth and of Christian faith which is common to all, and may, therefore, with propriety be inculcated in schools, and those which, being peculiar to individual sects, are therefore by law excluded; still it is believed that no practical difficulty occurs in the conduct of our schools in this regard.”To critics who were alarmed at the concept of secular schools, he assured that his system “inculcates all Christian morals; it founds its morals on the basis of religion; it welcomes the religion of the Bible...,” but he did exhort that Bible reading be without comment to discourage sectarian bickering. (Mann, Twelfth Annual Report for 1848 of the Secretary of the Board of Education of Massachusetts. Reprinted in Blau 183-84.

Considered second to Mann in his schooling endeavor was Henry Barnard, who was raised in a deeply religious family, and saw his involvement in education “as part of the providence of God”. Like the majority of Americans, he believed that democracy and education went together in “the cause of truth—the cause of justice — the cause of liberty— the cause of patriotism — the cause of religion.” (Jeynes, p. 154)

While America was blessed by Christian educators and those that overall upheld the teaching of Biblical morality, the devil also has his disciples, and one was named John Dewey, head of the Teachers College at Columbia University from 1904 to 1930. He also taught in Peking University in China, and after that in Turkey. After he returned to America, in 1933 he signed (along with 34 prominent Americans) the Humanist Manifesto, which he helped to author. The first manifesto talked of a new “religion”, and referred to humanism as a religious movement meant to transcend and replace previous, deity-based religions. This was the Americanized version of the Communist Manifesto (sadly written by a soul with a root of bitterness, Karl Marx, and through which many were defiled: cf. Heb. 12:15).

Humanism in America is partly credited to a Unitarian preacher named Charles Potter who created the First Humanist Society of New York in 1929. A year later he penned “Humanism: A New Religion. In this declaration he boldly declared, “education is thus a most powerful ally of Humanism, and every American public school is a school of Humanism. What can the theistic Sunday-schools, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?”

Dewey became the father of modern American education, and he and his disciples worked to change the basic moral belief system that undergirded the moral educational system, in which [when the Engel v. Vitale case was decided] an estimated 75% of the school systems in the South had religious services and Bible readings (Colliers 1961 Yearbook p. 224). Rather than implicitly and often explicitly recognizing that God and the Bible were the ultimate authority on what was right and wrong, Dewey wrongly believed that it is the State that ultimately determines morality. Replacing the transcendent proven source of true liberty and it’s necessary limits (the Bible) with the social engineering of secular humanism, allows a nation’s school children to be indoctrinated with an ever morphing morality, which progressively calls evil good and good evil. In 1962 (in Engel v. Vitale) and in 1963, (in Abington versus Schempp) respectively, officially sanctioned prayer and devotional Bible reading were outlawed by the U.S Supreme Court in America public schools. This decision, coming over 170 years after the First Amendment was adopted (Dec. 15, 1701), essentially claimed a new “revelation” on what the Founders meant by it. Fisher Ames, the founding father who offered the final wording of the First Amendment, wrote an article for a national magazine in 1801, protesting the increasing marginalization of the Bible in the classroom, arguing, “Why then, if these new books for children must be retained, as they will be, should not the Bible regain the place it once held as a school book?” (Fisher Ames- Bible in the classroom. Notices of the life & Character of Fisher Ames; Boston: T.B. West & Co. 1809 pp. 134-135) What has followed these two decisions, which came at the beginning of the sexual revolution, has been a series of church-state cases in which the court has often been been closely divided, with, in the words of one Court observer, “contradictory principles, vaguely defined tests, and eccentric distinctions.” While the American schools system enabled rich and poor to obtain free or affordable public schools, so that Oscar D. Robinson, the principal of the high school in Albany, New York, declared that “the famous simile of the educational ladder, with its foot in the gutter and its top in the university, is in this favored country no poetic fancy,” it is increasingly evident that the gutter is now much in the schools, with higher education being noted for rampant sexual promiscuity and the promotion of the manifestly destructive liberal philosophies behind it, along with inflated grades, and the marginalization of core subjects. (Walter E. Williams, professor of economics at George Mason University: “What Will They Learn For Your $50,000?”) More here: http://peacebyjesus.witnesstoday.org/CauseEffect.html