Excerpts from a post by Bill Muehlenberg:
In a recent article about marriage, American writer Phyllis Schlafly said this about the Marxist war against the traditional family:
Marx hated the bourgeois family, not only because it provided the means of transmission and accumulation of private property, but also because the family controlled the formation and education of children. Marx wanted to break the family so that children could be raised and educated communally, free from patriarchal ties and religious beliefs.
In the 1848 Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels blasted the “bourgeois claptrap about the family and education” and insisted that “we replace home education by social”. They demanded free public education for all children as a means by which the state, not parents, could control children.
This battle over the control of children did not stop with the death of Marx, but has been an ongoing battle. The coercive utopians of the state always see autonomous groups such as church and family as a threat to their control on power.
So education is always heavily regulated and increasingly brought fully under state control. Good citizens (read: mindless zombies) is what most states prefer. Those states which allow independent, critical thinkers to move about unchecked will always feel uneasy.
This is why all the great works of fiction warning about a future totalitarian state deal with the issue of education. Whether it is George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, or others, they rightly warn about how the total state must have total control over education.
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There is an educational war going on in the West, part of the larger cultural wars. Abraham Lincoln was quite right when he stated that “The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.” That is why the state is so keen about education, and why so many parents are so worried about it.
In his book After America, Mark Steyn wrote:
For four decades America watched as politically correct fatuities swallowed the entire educational system, while conservatives deluded themselves that it was just a phase, something kids had to put up with as the price for getting a better job a couple years down the road. The idea that two generations could be soaked in this corrosive bilge and it would have no broader impact, that it could be contained within the precincts of academe, was always foolish.
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