“I am sure as I am of the fact of Christ’s reign that a comprehensive and centralized system of national education, separated from religion, as is now commonly proposed, will prove the most appalling engine for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief, social and political, which this sin-rent world has ever seen.”
Professor A. A. Hodge, Princeton Theological Seminary in 1887
“The education of children for God is the most important business done on earth. It is the one business for which the earth exists. To it all politics, all war, all literature, all money-making, ought to be subordinated; and every parent especially ought to feel, every hour of the day, that, next to making his own calling and election sure, this is the end for which he is kept alive by God–this is his task on earth.”
R. L. Dabney From On Secular Education (1820-1898)
“America started with government-backed churches and private schools. Now we have private churches and government-backed schools. Someday we’ll have it all one way or the other.”
Rev. Ed Opitz, Author of several books including The Kingdom Without God, and Religion: Foundation of a Free Society.
“A general state education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another, and the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in government.”
John Stuart Mill, 19th Century English Economist, Author of On Liberty, Principles of Political Economy
“But that which was lamentable … was that many of their children, by these occasions, and ye great licentiousness of youth in the country (Holland), and ye manifold temptations of the place, were drawn away by evil examples into extravagante and dangerous courses … departing from their parents. Some became soldiers … and others some worse courses, tending to dissoluteness and the danger to their souls, to the great grief of their parents and dishonor of God. So that they saw their posterity would be in danger to degenerate and be corrupted.”
William Bradford in History of Plymouth Plantation
“It is virtue, then, direct virtue, which is the hard and valuable part to be aimed at in education. If virtue is not settled in the student, to the exclusion of all vicious habits, all the education in the world will do nothing but make the student worse or more dangerous.”
John Locke quoted by R. L. Dabney in On Secular Education
“The education of children for God is the most important business done on earth. It is the one business for which the earth exists. To it all politics, all war, all literature, all money-making, ought to be subordinated; and every parent especially ought to feel, every hour of the day, that, next to making his own calling and election sure, this is the end for which he is kept alive by God–this is his task on earth.”
R. L. Dabney From On Secular Education (1820-1898)
“A society which is predominately Christian will propagate Christianity through its schools: one which is not, will not. All of the ministries of education in the world cannot alter this law.”
C.S. Lewis