An education expert who heads up a popular online K‑12 school is advising parents that they must be vigilant against government intrusion if they want to maintain control over their children’s schooling.
Alan Scholl and his wife, Doreen, have successfully homeschooled seven children over the past 29 years. In addition to that accomplishment, Scholl — sensing the need for a learning system that would empower parents to exit the public school bureaucracy and provide his and Doreen’s children with a solid classical education founded on both Judeo-Christian and Americanist principles — three years ago launched FreedomProject Education (FPE), a nationwide online K‑12 school that has exploded from 22 students in 2011 to over 600 at the beginning of the 2014 school year.
The impetus that motivated the Scholls to take their children out of the failing public school nightmare and begin their quest to school them at home with solid spiritual and civic values, is the same motivation that prompted Scholl to launch FPE.
That motivation has been predicated on the century-old battle that continues to rage for the hearts and souls of America’s children, Scholl says in a vital new FPE video entitled Who Owns Your Children?: The Dangers of Government as Parent (below). The conflict “involves two radically opposing views on parenting and education,” Scholl explains. Over time this battle, which has seen, variously, local, state, and federal governments chipping away at the authority of parents to determine how their kids will be educated and what they can — and cannot — learn, “has resulted in the damaging of education in America, as well as the co-opting of our liberties, our constitutional government, and many valuable elements of our American society.”
Scholl notes that several generations of Americans have witnessed the gradual conversion of what used to be a serviceable education structure into little more than a system of socialist indoctrination. “While many Americans are waking up to the truly sinister nature of what is going on,” he says, “the majority of citizens have no idea of what is happening to their children and this nation.”
The America that the Founding Fathers gave us — including the education system of our beginning forbears — was, to say the least, much different from the system under which Americans struggle today. “The system that gave us unprecedented prosperity and liberty served us so well for generations,” says Scholl.
Under the Founders’ philosophy, all Americans — children as well as adults — were seen as sovereign individuals made in the image of God. “Education in early America was a family affair,” he says, “designed by individuals parents for their children, and delivered largely by them. And even if it was administered outside the home, parents were intimately involved, not just in the teaching but in the curriculum itself.”
At the heart of that involvement was the conviction among a majority of early American parents that, in truth, God owned their children, and mother and father were stewards with the responsibility of ensuring a godly upbringing and training for a fruitful adulthood.
“From 1600 to about 1880 virtually every textbook used in American education quoted, referenced, or directly cited Scripture,” notes Scholl. That practice continued well into the 20th century.”
Over the past several decades, however, there has been a concerted effort to deny America’s Christian foundations, and to ban them from public education. And never has that effort been as aggressive as today. Quoting Noah Webster’s conviction (shared by literally all of his and succeeding generations) that the “principles of genuine liberty, and of the wise laws and administrations, are to be drawn from the Bible and sustained by its authority,” Scholl warns that the the Judeo-Christian principles that guided our nation for over 200 years “are being systematically outlawed today.”
While Founding Father John Adams advised that America’s constitutional Republic was created for “a moral and religious people, and is wholly inadequate for the government of any other,” in today’s government schools, observes Scholl, “Bible, prayer, and Christian thought and practice are either banned or severely denigrated.”
This denial of the Judeo-Christian foundations of education, so vital to American families for most of our nation’s history, has led to a meltdown of family values — and an increasingly overt assault on traditional families.
Scholl notes that an “overtly socialist/Marxist viewpoint has now become the new norm. It has been embedded in our culture, in our schools, and especially in our educational establishment. Statism, socialism, extreme nationalism, fascism, extremist environmentalism — are all first cousins of the same worldview, which denies God’s supreme role in our lives.”
And in this worldview “government is the primary educator — and ultimately the sole judge of what will be taught to our children,” he adds.
While some may assume the notion that government should have absolute authority over children is a fairly recent development, in the second half of Who Owns Your Children? Scholl lays out the nearly-100-year-old blueprint that has systematically chipped away at America’s Judeo-Christian foundations while slowly undermining the authority of parents to raise their children. Not surprisingly, at the center of the scheme from its earliest germination has been a steady stream of godless and socialist/collectivist education functionaries.
Scholl quotes John Dunphy, a close associates of John Dewey, himself an author and signer of the 1933 Humanist Manifesto and considered the father of modern public education, as declaring in 1983 that “the battle for humankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers that correctly perceive their role as proselytizers of a new faith.…”
Dunphy, whom Scholl describes as a ghost writer for Dewey, goes on to declare that the public school classroom “must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and new — the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism.…”
Arguing that this godless and destructive philosophy is the driving force behind America’s public school structure today — including the latest “Common Core” scheme — Scholl recalls the admonition from Abraham Lincoln that “the philosophy of the schoolroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.”
Scholl concludes his address with a challenge: “Ultimately, parents, you are going to have to take responsibility for your children, your grandchildren, and your great grandchildren, and begin to engineer the choosing of who will teach them and what they will be taught.”
He goes on to say, “I believe ultimately Common Core, the teachers’ unions, many of our public schools and school administrations must be dismantled over time and replaced with education controlled by the parents who are responsible for their children.”
