In Part One, we saw that the goal of universal literacy grew out of the Reformation: no longer could a man rely upon his priest to tell him what to do to be saved; everyone needed to be able to read the Bible for himself to work out his own salvation (Phillip. 2:12). Its Reformation roots have been forgotten, but the goal of universal literacy is accepted by all nations.
In Part Two, we saw how public education in America began as a Protestant Christian project, from the 1636 establishment of Harvard College, whose initial motto was “Truth for Christ and His Church,” to the 1647 “that old deluder Satan” Act in Massachusetts. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 provided for public education, and stated, “Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”
In Part Three, we saw how Western intellectuals adopted humanism, and how this was manifested within mainline Protestantism as theological liberalism, which rejected the substitutionary atonement, the six-day creation, and all the supernatural elements of Christianity. Liberalism reduces Christ from Savior to moral example, and reduces Christianity from a religion to a humanistic project of civic and self-improvement.
In this fourth installment, we will discuss how theological liberalism steered public education away from its Christian roots toward humanism and secularism, and how the Frankfurt school radicals brought us the Marxist educational system we have today.
A Revolution in American Education
In 1905, John Dewey was hired as a professor of philosophy at Columbia University Teachers College, a position he held until 1930. He was without question the most influential shaper of our modern school system. He wrote 37 books and published 766 articles in 151 journals. He is called, “the Father of Modern Education.” The National Education Association (NEA), the nation’s largest teachers’ union, made Dewey its honorary president for life.
Dewey was also an outspoken proponent of humanism and socialism, and he believed that teachers should use their positions of authority in the classroom to advance “progressive” or Leftist ideas: “I believe it is the business of everyone interested in education to insist upon the school as the primary and most effective instrument of social progress” (which he believed meant moving away from Christianity toward humanism and socialism).
Dewey was not subtle about his ideological preferences:
“The old dogmas of religion have largely lost their power…There is no room for fixed and final dogmas in the life of the mind… The hypothesis of God as a person cannot be maintained.”
“The true and primary source of knowledge is not in revelation but in observation and reason.”
(Apropos of that last quote, the acceptance and institutionalization of observational and experimental science is a product of the Protestant Reformation. It is also a fact that Darwinism is not based upon observation and reason, but rather upon the application of atheistic presuppositions.)
In 1933, Dewey became one of 34 signers of The Humanist Manifesto. Humanists agreed that the universe was “self-existing and not created,” and affirmed that “modern science makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values.” The manifesto argued that “the time has passed for theism,” and suggested that mankind “alone is responsible for the realization of the world of his dreams,” an explicit appeal to Leftist utopianism.
A New Religion for Modern Schools
When one studies the life of works of John Dewey, it soon becomes apparent that theological liberalism and Dewey’s project of humanism in the public schools are joined at the hip. To give one example, liberal Unitarian theologian Charles Francis Potter established the First Humanist Society of New York, and he recruited Dewey to serve on its board. Potter was then invited to give lectures at Columbia Teachers College urging the teachers-in-training to abandon their “dependence upon supernaturalism.” Potter wrote:
“Education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism, and every public school is a school of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday school, 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 teachings?”
Far from wanting religion removed from public education, Dewey wanted to replace Christianity with a new civic religion of societal salvation by human effort, which is essentially theological liberalism. One year after signing the Manifesto, Dewey wrote, “A Common Faith.” Dewey’s proposed new civic religion would offer “all the elements which give the religious attitude its value” without the need for a “supernatural and otherworldly locus.”
Dewey also called upon society to abandon its belief in moral absolutes. In contemplating the influence of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, Dewey wrote, “Philosophy forswears inquiry after absolute origins and absolute finalities. Nature has no end, no aim, and no purpose. There is change only, not advance towards a goal.” He contended that Darwin’s theory must “transform the logic of knowledge, and hence the treatment of morals, politics, and religion.” This marked a radical departure from millennia of Judeo-Christian philosophy, which viewed education as the pursuit of unchanging and eternal truths.
An Early Champion of Marxism in America
Dewey wanted to replace America’s free enterprise system with centrally planned socialism. In his writings, he repeatedly advocated for the “social control of forces and agencies,” and he contended that his vision for America could “be attained only as control of the means of production and distribution is taken out of the hands of individuals.” He wrote: “We are in for some kind of socialism, call it whatever name we please, and no matter what it will be called when it is realized, economic determinism is now a fact not a theory.”
At this time, in the 1920s and 30s, many Western intellectuals were open to the theories of Karl Marx (the Communist Manifesto is the fourth best-selling book of all time). John Dewey, Upton Sinclair, Bertrand Russell, Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood), and Roger Baldwin visited the Soviet Union, returning to the West to sing the praises of the Soviet system.
Dewey traveled to the Soviet Union to study its model of public education, later referring to it as “nobly heroic” and “more impressive than my command of words permits me to record.” One Soviet education official stated that, “Dewey comes infinitely closer to Marx and the Russian Communists” than any other theorist in the West.
In 1937, Dewey formed the “Dewey Commission” to inquire into the Soviet Union’s charges of treason against Leon Trotsky, a Bolshevik revolutionary with whom Stalin had had a falling out. After hearing a great deal of evidence, the commission affirmed that Trotsky “never recommended, plotted, or attempted the restoration of capitalism in the USSR.” But despite Dewey’s assurances that Trotsky was a good communist, Stalin had him murdered in Mexico City in 1940—with an ice axe.
Dewey’s colleague and protégé, George Sylvester Counts, who taught at Columbia University Teachers College from 1927 to 1955, traveled to Soviet Russia several times. He urged the United States to embrace Soviet communism. Like Dewey, he described a society so beautiful that “few can contemplate it without emotion.” In 1939, Counts was elected to serve as president of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second largest teachers’ union.
Counts called on teachers to use their classrooms to bring an end to the American experiment of capitalism. He wrote:
“The day of individualism in the production and distribution of goods is gone. The times are literally crying for a new vision of American destiny. The teaching profession, or at least its progressive elements, should eagerly grasp the opportunity which the fates have placed in their hands.”
Counts sought to “reconstruct” the nation upon the principles of Marx and atheism. In his famous pamphlet, “Dare the School Build a New Social Order,” he explained that teachers were responsible for shaping attitudes, tastes, and even imposing ideas on their students. He urged teachers to be less frightened of public accusations of indoctrination, writing:
“You will say, no doubt, that I am flirting with the idea of indoctrination… And my answer is again in the affirmative…. Only the most stupid and unenterprising can fail to perceive the promise of power which the school holds out to those who would organize its curriculum.”
A few years ago, I noted with alarm that the elected head of the America Library Association, Emily Drabinski, was an open and avowed Marxist, but the problem of Marxism in American education has roots going back a full century.
The Frankfurt School and Cultural Marxism
In the 1920s, several Marxist Jews, including Felix Weil, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Theodor Adorno among others, established a school with the anodyne name of, “Institute for Social Research” in Frankfurt, Germany. They were chiefly concerned with finding ways to spread Marxism in Western societies whose working classes were prospering and had little interest in Marx’s crackpot economic theories or in violent revolution.
After Hitler came to power in 1933, Germany was not a good place for a Jew, much less for a Jewish Marxist theorist, so in 1934, John Dewey arranged for the “Frankfurt School” to re-convene at Columbia University Teachers College. With financing from the Rockefeller Foundation, Dewey arranged for the most important professors in the Frankfurt School to take positions at top American universities, including Cal–Berkeley, Princeton, and Brandeis, but the largest number were settled at Columbia.
Although John Dewey facilitated the Frankfurt School invasion of American academia, they were far more radical than he was. They realized that in America they would need to soft-pedal their communist ideology for a while but the strategies and tactics they developed for undermining America and deconstructing the pillars of Christian civilization were diabolical and devastatingly effective.
The cultural Marxists’ best weapon has turned out to be what Max Horkheimer named “critical theory.” Critical theory views everything—art, literature, religion, sex, the family, economics, etc.—through the Marxist loupe of oppressed and oppressor. Frankfurt School Professor Jürgen Habermas, who studied under Horkheimer, wrote that critical theory was invented to foster “political disappointment at the absence of revolution in the West.” Critical theory has since given birth to myriad branches of cultural Marxism, such as critical race theory, gender theory, feminist theory, queer theory, and intersectionality.
This Marxist worldview, which, again, interprets every aspect of life and civil society within the paradigm of supposed oppressed and supposed oppressor, now pervades our education system. In 2021, as nearly every measure of academic performance was declining, the NEA vowed to concentrate on overthrowing, “empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.”
It can hardly be a surprise, given their Marxist schooling, that patriotism is at a low ebb among Generation Z. Two-thirds of “Zoomers” opine that America is an “unfair society,” and 40% believe that our Founders would be better described as “villains.” Max Horkheimer’s plan has worked to perfection: about half of Generation Z are in essence Marxist revolutionaries.
Herbert Marcuse, another Frankfurt Schooler, urged students to build revolutionary political coalitions from various minorities and “outcasts.” During the violent student protests of 1968, the FBI identified “Marx, Mao, and Marcuse” as the three men most responsible for radicalizing American students.
Like Marx, Marcuse did not neglect the destruction of the family and the Christian sexual constitution. He advocated for “polymorphous sexuality” and the normalization of all forms of sexuality and gender roles. He became known as the “philosopher of sexual liberation.” Pope Paul VI condemned Marcuse for fostering “disgusting and unbridled” eroticism and “animal, barbarous and subhuman degradations” incompatible with civilization.
In an essay entitled, Repressive Tolerance, Marcuse told his followers to gain power and then blacklist conservatives, showing “intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.” He wrote that a proper society would, “deny free speech to the chauvinists.” The tactic of shouting down speech on college campuses was pioneered by Marcuse and his followers; it has now become routine for Leftists on American campuses (which now includes almost all of the administrators as well as the students and professors) to prevent, through violence or threats of violence, Christians and conservatives from speaking on university campuses.
Marcuse and his disciples began what today is called, “cancel culture.” It started in academia: there is no semblance of ideological balance or fairness in American higher education; the percentage of conservatives in American education is now approaching zero. One study found that 40% of the top liberal arts colleges do not have a single Republican or conservative on the faculty.
Herbert Marcuse’s Marxist cancel culture has now overspread the confines of academia, and threatens to obliterate the most important norms of American society. Politically motivated criminal prosecutions, once rare, are now routine in “blue” jurisdictions that are dominated by Marxist political establishments (e.g., the District of Columbia, Colorado, New York, Illinois and California). As we have had frequent occasion to note, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Department of Justice have been weaponized against conservatives, Christians, and pro-lifers.
The widespread and lavishly funded campaign to criminally prosecute, or at least disbar, attorneys who represented President Trump violates the most sacred values of the legal profession. Such politically motivated prosecutions and bar “discipline” are certain indicators that the bar associations and much of the judiciary has been taken over not by “liberals” but by far-Left Marxist radicals.
Clearly, American education has been left to the “professionals” for far too long. Our haywire education establishment is now threatening to destroy our society and way of life.
Summary
Our public school and university system was established to promote the gospel of Jesus Christ and inculcate the truths of God’s Word, starting with the 1636 establishment of Harvard College and the 1647 “That Old Deluder Satan” Act. Our founders encouraged Christian influence in education. For over two centuries, from 1636 to the mid-19th Century, not a single college or institution of higher education was established in America except by Christian ministers or some Christian denomination.
From the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries, as liberalism displaced Christianity within mainline Protestantism, public education slowly made the same change from Christianity to a program of personal and societal improvement through human effort. John Dewey and other pioneers of “modern” education flirted with Leftism, but their humanistic educational program was still recognizably American and non-revolutionary.
Dewey’s generation of humanist educational theorists was gradually displaced by the Marxist radicals of the Frankfurt School, whose ideas, through the efforts of Herbert Marcuse, Saul Alinsky, and others, began to subvert academia during the student rebellion of the late 1960s. Over the last several decades, the radical Left has consolidated its power in academia, and the spawn of the Frankfurt School, critical theory, especially critical race theory, has burst out of academia and is threatening to utterly destroy American society.
Leftists have seized control of education, and their wicked philosophies have inflicted terrible harm upon our schools, our families, and our nation. Which brings us back to where we came in: Our schools are succeeding at Leftist indoctrination, but failing at pretty much everything else, including teaching reading, writing, mathematics, languages, history, geography, civics, science, health and physical fitness, and the practical arts and technologies.
“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and discipline.” Proverbs 1:7
This article is condensed and edited for content from a series by Sam Kastensmidt at the Institute for Faith and Culture.