In the struggle to establish an adequate world government, the teacher has many parts to play. He must begin with his own attitude and knowledge and purpose. He can do much to prepare the hearts and minds of children for global understanding and cooperation. … At the very top of all the agencies which will assure the coming of world government must stand the school, the teacher, and the organized profession.

But since the American people have expressed no burning desire for world government, the educationists have had to resort to the dialectical technique to advance, stage by stage, from crisis to crisis, to what the educationists ultimately want: a system totally controlled by behavioral psychologists and social engineers molding children for a collectivist society.

The process was started by John Dewey whose 1898 essay, “The Primary-Education Fetich,” outlined what had to be done if the schools were to be used to bring about socialism. First, he said, we must divest ourselves of the notion that high literacy is a desirable goal. High literacy, he argued, produced selfish individuals with minds of their own who couldn’t be efficiently collectivized. What was needed was a system of education that promoted socialization.

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“If after a full and faithful experiment, it should at last be seen that fidelity to the religious interests of our children forbids a further patronage of the system, we can unite with the Evangelical Christians in the establishment of private schools, in which more full doctrinal religious instruction may be possible.”

No one can doubt that for the last 150 years the public schools have had that full and faithful experiment, and that the spiritual effect on Christian children has been disastrous. In several schools around the country, Christian children have even been murdered by fellow students possessed by satanic beliefs. How much worse can it get?

In fact, during the last 20 years, thousands of Christian parents, without knowledge of the debates that took place in 1849, have removed their children from the public schools and have either placed them in private Christian schools or are home-schooling them. They have done this despite the fact that many well-known Christian leaders have not yet sounded the alarm and, in many instances, have urged Christians to stay in the public schools and work to reform them.

Education, I told him, is concerned with the development of the mind, of the intellect, while training deals with learning specific skills. Education is a more personal activity, in that its main purpose is the enhancement of an individual’s ability to use his mind for his own personal pleasure or gain. Training means developing skills that will be used more for social and economic reasons than for the self. Which means that education should come first, training later.

Animals, it should be noted, can be trained, but they can’t be educated. Why is that? It is because human beings have the one capability that no other species has: the ability and capacity to use language. Language is more than merely a means of communication. Language links us with our Creator. God gave Adam the power of speech because he wanted to communicate with his creation. And he wanted Adam to be able to communicate back.

And now there’s even lice to worry about. According to nurse Elaine Zeundt, germs spread more quickly today because teaching methods have changed. Students no longer sit in straight rows with their backs to each other. Now, children face one another in circles, are paired with partners, and work together — all part of the cooperative learning craze now sweeping American public education.

“Thirty years ago,” says Zeundt, “if a student coughed it would at least be at the back of the head of the student in front of him. Now kids are in groups and coughing right in each other’s faces.” Linda Walsh, director of clinical services in the city of Newton, Mass., notes that students “share their germs as readily as they share their fruit.”

And in a few months, some of the first graders will be labeled learning disabled, dyslexic, reading disabled, ADD, or ADHD. Parents will be told that their children need to be put on Ritalin. But, believe it or not, there is a solution to all of this, and it is called homeschooling.

What sort of malpractice? Let’s take whole-language reading instruction for example. Whole-language practice de-emphasizes phonics in favor of a holistic approach, in which children are taught to look at each word holistically, as if it were a Chinese character. The child is taught to look for picture clues, configuration clues, context clues, syntactic clues, and as a last resort, phonetic clues. The result is that children do a lot of guessing, misreading, substituting words, mutilating words, leaving out words, putting in words that aren’t there — in general, making a mess of the text.

That then creates a large number of children who need remediation by a cadre of trained professionals, or reading specialists, whose salaries are higher than the normal classroom teacher’s. Thus the teaching of reading becomes far more expensive than if the schools used the ancient, time-tested way of teaching reading: intensive, systematic phonics. That’s the way reading was taught in America until the 1930s, when the professors of education threw out the alphabetic phonics method and put in a new whole-word approach, better known as the Dick and Jane method.