Working in the Texas public school system for nearly two decades, I’ve seen multiple political administrations implement policies that have significantly shaped how schools operate. I witnessed the acceleration of high-stakes testing due to George W. Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind Act, which tied federal school funding to student performance. I saw the intensification of data-driven instruction during the Obama-era, necessitating digital tracking tools that educational technology companies were happy to provide.
I’m currently witnessing how the proliferation of “EdTech,” coupled with progressive ideology, has produced shallow thinking and moral bankruptcy. Across the nation, public schools bought into the myth that adaptive learning platforms would produce student gains they sorely needed, only to see student performance continue to decline. At the same time, the Trump-era education initiatives to crack down on DEI and woke ideology have failed to curb the leftist indoctrination that marked the Obama/Biden years.
Many conservative Christians see this issue as “the world’s problem.” In many ways, they are right. While many faithful Christian parents have sought alternative educational options for their children, public schools have descended into both intellectual and moral chaos, leaving an opening for opportunists to redesign the traditional school model into one that fits their transhumanist utopian vision. What originally stemmed from a Reformed Protestant vision for promoting moral excellence and intellectual rigor has gradually devolved into a hollow, corporatized machine. We are seeing the fruits of a secular, materialist worldview that reduces its pupils to mere widgets controlled by an amoral technocratic elite. After all, if humans are simply cogs in a machine, why shouldn’t students be reduced to data points to achieve the goals set by the manufacturer?
Of course, we as Christians know that children are not born tabula rasa, to be molded and conditioned for Public Ed’s utilitarian purposes, but instead are born with a sin nature and need the loving discipline and spiritual shepherding of their parents, as commanded by God’s inerrant Word. However, we as Christians must also be aware that the quality of students that public schools produce will directly impact our future political policies, cultural narratives, and even the viewpoints of our future church congregants and church leaders.
The public schoolhouse has long been the incubator of American social cohesion and began with the primary purpose of discipling young minds and hearts to know and love Christ. If the church refuses to take an active role in engaging public education, we will miss out on the opportunity to share Christianity’s answer for hope and meaning to a lost and fragmented generation.
A Brief Historical Overview of American Public Schools
Though education in colonial America was primarily left to the parents, the first community schools were instituted by the Puritans as a way to ensure biblical literacy, something many parents neglected to do. Christian education was of utmost importance to the early settlers, as the future of their community depended on having people with a deep, abiding faith. An early example of this was the Massachusetts Bay Colony law named The Old Deluder Satan Act of 1647. This law required townships of a certain number of households to create community schools “that learning may not be buried in the graves of our forefathers in Church and Commonwealth.”
In the 1830’s, Massachusetts education reformer and Unitarian, Horace Mann, led a movement for universal education, called “common schools.” They offered lower-income children an education meant to instill moral virtue and civic duty. As America became more industrialized, a movement for compulsory, non-sectarian, state-funded public schools spread throughout the nation. This was especially deemed necessary in the early to mid 20th century to assimilate the growing immigrant population. Later, the civil rights era introduced federal oversight that ushered in a slew of social justice ideologies that remain entrenched today. Schools became increasingly hostile to the Christian faith, instead seeking to embrace liberalism as its unifying force.
Indeed, the intellectual and moral state of modern public schools is in dire straits, prompting many parents to choose homeschooling or private schools. While evangelicals are more likely to pursue this route, a vast majority of Christian parents still send their children to public school. Some conservative states have introduced a number of new laws meant to infuse Western Civilization’s biblical heritage in the classroom. Texas, for example, now requires that all classrooms contain a poster of the Ten Commandments and ensures that their state-approved elementary school curriculum includes key biblical narratives. While on the surface these seem like positive steps, they do little to address the deeply embedded pluralistic ideology that continues to thwart any meaningful return to America’s Christian roots. Moreover, the AI-takeover in the classroom (as in society writ large) has not only rewired students’ brains, it’s peddled an anti-human religion that, undeterred, threatens to make future generations its acolytes.
Prophetic Voices in the Educational Wilderness
Christian thought leaders have long sounded the alarm on the dangers of modern technological overreach in the name of “progress.” In 1944’s The Abolition of Man, author and professor C.S. Lewis starts off critiquing a university textbook, under the pseudonym The Green Book, for its valueless approach to literary analysis. He saw it as a sign that modern education was falling under the control of the “Conditioners,” the scientific elite who envisioned a world where social planning and technological advances would ultimately conquer human nature. Right now we are seeing the fruits of Lewis’ predictions, as millions of students are cognitively offloading their school work onto faceless AI tools, unquestioningly accepting both the veracity of their output and the implication that human reasoning is obsolete compared to a more superior machine.
In the 1970s, Reformed theologian Francis Schaeffer spoke of the dangers of secular humanism and its role in bringing forth an American technocracy. In the televised version of his book How Should We Then Live?, Schaeffer posits, “When the Christian consensus died, it left a vacuum.” This explains how behaviorists like B.F. Skinner was able to “control education in the schools down to the lowest grades. With all forms of determinism, man as man dies. ” In today’s American schools, control is enacted through soulless teaching machines deemed necessary to make learning more ‘equitable’ and ‘personalized.” Many schools rolled out 1-to-1 device programs during COVID-era distance learning. Rather than curb tech usage when in-person instruction resumed, schools began leaning into digital tools to better prepare students for ubiquitous online testing. Now, students who cannot disassociate technology from entertainment are using these devices as dopamine-slot machines during instructional time. Many educational leaders fail to realize how this increasing technology dependence is a symptom of a deeper, spiritual issue.
It’s been nearly 20 years since the advent of the iPhone, yet it wasn’t until last year that most states signed cell phone bans into law. However, even with the cell phone dragon essentially slain in many schools, there remains an even greater threat looming under the surface. In the next 5-10 years, AI, an invention greatly influenced by Skinner’s operant conditioning theory, will be fully integrated into the learning experience. This means AI will teach our nation’s children what is worth knowing, how to think, and where to find meaning. The problem is that creators of AI, like the editors of The Green Book, have no regard for the human soul. The pupil needs an education that can teach him or her about goodness, truth, and beauty that transcends the positive reinforcements of this temporal world.
Rage Pray Against the Machine
This country is a long way from the quaint one-room schoolhouse we saw on “Little House on the Prairie.” Blame secular humanism, blame feminism; whatever the cause, if we want to see our nation return to its Christian heritage, we need to address how we educate our future citizens. Yes, public schools have been godless institutions for quite a while now, but the fact is that they continue to hold a significant place in the community. Furthermore, it’s the place where a majority of Americans are educated. While some wish to write off these unfortunate souls, I believe public schools can be a fertile mission field for the church. I’ll end with some practical ways the church can have an impact on public schools.
1) Support Christian Students and Staff
While it’s true that public schools are filled with teachers spewing leftist ideologies, there is still a remnant of God-fearing teachers and staff members who are choosing to swim upstream. There are also students who are yearning for spiritual food. Pastors can volunteer their time to minister to them through student Christian clubs or as volunteer chaplains. Also, churches can donate Bibles to local schools, which are in high demand now among students (Praise God!). We support foreign missionaries because we see the hard work it takes to infiltrate hostile territories; why not look at our local teachers the same way?
2) Engage with your Local School Board
Most changes in schools happen through community involvement. Teachers are often blacklisted for speaking out against harmful school policies. Church members can be the voice of those teachers and help keep local leaders accountable. They can also coordinate with parent advocates to speak on their behalf. Just look at how Pastor Amachukwu entered the public conversation with his school board appearances concerning inappropriate books in schools. Start by asking a public-school teacher in your church what issues are currently causing concern.
3) Pray for our Schools
Even though public education stands to meet the same fate as the Titanic, it still remains an institution that carries great significance in our culture. Pray that God will raise up virtuous school leaders to turn the ship around towards its Christian foundation. We pray that our country returns to a Christian moral framework. We pray for reformation in our church denominations. We can pray that American schools are restored to their original intention.
Photo Credit: Unsplash
