a word before we begin

I will not begin by telling you what to do with your children, because this booklet does not exist to hand you a rule. By the time you reach the last page I will not have given you a single thou shalt or thou shalt not about where your children go to school, because the Bible does not give you one, and I will not invent what God did not say.

What this is, instead, is a sober Christian examination of the modern education system, chiefly the one we have here in the West, held up honestly to the light of the Word of God. Not a parenting manual, though it will touch the choices a parent makes, but a clear-eyed and unflinching look at what this system actually is: where it came from, who built it and what they built it for, what it teaches, what it forms, and what it is producing. Because most Christians have never once been told any of it, and have simply assumed, the way you assume the ground under your feet is solid, that the school is a neutral and ordinary place where children go to learn their letters. It is not neutral, it was never neutral, and a Christian is called to examine the institutions of the age he lives in rather than to swallow them whole. So we are going to examine this one, and once you have seen what it actually is, what you do with that is yours to decide, but you will not be able to say afterward that you did not know.

Hear me clearly at the outset, because I mean it and I will not have it mistaken. It is not a sin to send your child to public school. There is no verse anywhere that forbids it, and I am not building you a new law. And this is not aimed at the single mother working herself to the bone to keep the lights on, nor at the family in genuine hardship who truly have no other option; God does not hold a parent to a choice they do not have, and wisdom itself works inside real constraints. This is written to everyone else. And the question for everyone else was never whether it is allowed. The question is whether it is wise. Those are two entirely different questions, and the whole trouble is that people keep answering the first one when God is asking the second.

And you may as well know who is talking to you. I am not a woman writing about a world she has only heard about. I was schooled just about every way there is: I spent time in a Christian school, I was homeschooled for the better part of my growing up, and I have sat in both a Christian college and, for longer, a thoroughly secular one. I have seen it from the inside, all of it. So I am not guessing.

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.

the prussian blueprint

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sources & notes

  1. Horace Mann, Seventh Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board of Education (Massachusetts Board of Education, 1843), his admiring account of the Prussian schools after his European tour; Mann championed the state “common school” on the Prussian model. For the Prussian origins of compulsory, age-graded, state schooling and its American adoption, see also Ellwood P. Cubberley, Public Education in the United States (Houghton Mifflin, 1919).
  2. John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education (Oxford Village Press, 2000), for a book-length treatment of this lineage; and the standard histories of the Prussian Volksschule, on state schooling built in the aftermath of Prussia’s defeat by Napoleon (from 1806–1807 onward) expressly to form obedient, orderly, useful subjects and soldiers. The design intent, discipline and uniformity and loyalty to the state, is widely documented and was openly praised by the nineteenth-century reformers who imported it.
  3. Frederick T. Gates, The Country School of To-morrow, Occasional Papers No. 1 (New York: General Education Board, 1913), pp. 6–7. Gates was business advisor to John D. Rockefeller and a leading figure of the Rockefeller-funded General Education Board (chartered 1903). The quoted lines are his own published words; the same passage is sometimes traced to the Board’s earlier “Occasional Letter No. 1.”
  4. Woodrow Wilson, address to the New York City High School Teachers Association, January 9, 1909, published as “The Meaning of a Liberal Education,” in The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Arthur S. Link (Princeton University Press), vol. 18. Wilson was then president of Princeton University.
  5. John Dewey was a signer of the original Humanist Manifesto (1933). On his view of the school’s social and formative function, apart from and in place of home and church, see Dewey, The School and Society (University of Chicago Press, 1899) and Democracy and Education (Macmillan, 1916), and his “My Pedagogic Creed” (1897).
  6. Gallup analysis for the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy, Assessing the Economic Gains of Eradicating Illiteracy Nationally and Regionally in the United States (2020), drawing on the U.S. Department of Education’s PIAAC data: roughly half of U.S. adults read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level (PIAAC itself cautions against strict grade-level equivalence). On the lowest-literacy share rising, see the National Center for Education Statistics, PIAAC Cycle 2 results (U.S. Department of Education, 2023–2024).
  7. U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, The Nation’s Report Card (National Assessment of Educational Progress), Grade 4 Reading, most recent administration: roughly one-third of fourth-graders scored at or above “Proficient,” and a substantial share fell below “Basic.” These are the federal government’s own published results.
  8. Ken Ham and Britt Beemer, with Todd Hillard, Already Gone: Why Your Kids Will Quit Church and What You Can Do to Stop It (Master Books, 2009), reporting survey research (conducted with America’s Research Group) on young adults leaving the church. Cited here as the author directs the reader to it, not reproduced.
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