Christian Education Awareness Network (CEANet)

Presents a Book:

Tyranny Through Public Education

The Case Against Government 
Control of Education

by Willam F. Cox, Jr.

ISBN 1-594675-43-0

Chapter 10

Education Is A Religious Activity (Part 2 of 2)

The fact that Jefferson’s doctrine has prevailed and even flourished to this day is revealed in the recent statement by education spokesman R. Freeman Butts (1995):

A fitting way to conclude this subsection is to reference the "formula" that is couched in the predominant religious persuasion of this country: "Religion = Christianity + all its competitors" (cf., Nash, 1988, p. 25). There is no neutrality in this regard -- the "culture of unbelief" is really what amounts to as "cultures of other-belief" (Marty, 1987, p. 21). Or as was said of the atheist, "He believes in No-God, and he worships him" (James, 1982, p. 35). Obviously, that which answers questions about ultimate matters serves as a religion. For instance, world view answers that address the meaning of the good life are religious in nature. Culture and religion, according to T. S. Eliot, "are different aspects of the same thing -- our culture is our lived religion" (cf., Adams & Stein, 1989, p. 59).

Without going too deeply into causal reasons for the above, some clarity comes by way of several basic propositions proposed by Goudzwaard (1975). First, "every man is serving god(s) in his life." This is another way to say that there is no neutrality. We make idols out of many different things and worship them. Along this same line, Dostoevsky wrote that we "cannot live without worshipping something" (Tinder, 1989, p. 80). Additionally, Goudzwaard claims that individuals are transformed into images of these gods and also that man makes society into his own image. In other words, we and thus our society take on the nature or characteristics of that which we worship. And this is exactly what we have seen in this last chapter segment. Our educational system has taken on the image of civic virtue which its leaders proclaim as right, proper, and even holy.

All the above is born out by many examples throughout mankind’s history. For instance, to be successful, the Nazis knew they had "to substitute their world view for Christianity" (cf., Adams & Stein, 1979, p. 65). Similarly, in order to make U.S. society over into their own image, the Universalists of the early to mid-1800s employed the same strategy. Said Brownson, one of their former members, "The great object was to get rid of Christianity... The plan was to establish a system of state -- we said national -- schools, from which all religion was to be excluded, in which nothing was to be taught but such knowledge as is verifiable by the senses, and to which all parents were to be compelled by law to send their children... For this purpose a secret society was formed..." (Blumenfeld, 1985, pp. 95, 96). According to the conclusion of the liberal and secularist education writings of Nord (1995), the agenda uncovered by Brownson has been very successful. Nord claims that public school indoctrination "makes religious accounts of the world seem implausible, even inconceivable. It fails to provide students with the intellectual and emotional resources that would enable them to take religion seriously" (p. 36).

Our concluding remarks should not be construed to mean that every educational mandate is devious. But it most certainly is meant to indicate that in the final analysis, those who mandate education onto others make it a sacred rite by deciding what should and should not be taught. Education is in this way a religious activity and a way to bring all of society into a religious image. Interestingly and paradoxically, what the church has been prohibited to do by force of law the public schools are licensed to do. Even those who object to religious instruction in public schools promote the very same thing -- they create "a sectarian establishment, consisting of schools, in which the tenets and dogmas of sect are taught" (cf., Glenn, 1988, p. 175).

An example of how the schools have substituted one value system for another is revealed in the very able analysis of public school textbooks by Vitz (1986). The 1983, federally funded analysis by Professor Paul Vitz of ninety currently and widely used elementary readers and social studies and high school history texts is contained in the appropriately titled book, Censorship: Evidence of Bias in Our Children’s Textbooks. Summarizing briefly, none of the books covering grades one through six contained even one word referring to any religious activity in contemporary American life. No mention was made of praying or of going to church or temple. Further, "not one word or image in any book shows any form of contemporary representative Protestantism."

In the fifth grade U.S. history texts, "the treatment of the past 100 or 200 years is so devoid of reference to religion as to give the impression that it has almost ceased to exist in America." The sixth grade books "neglect, often to the point of serious distortion, Jewish and Christian historical contributions." Of all the high school books covering U.S. history, "none came close to adequately presenting the major religious events of the past 100 or 200 years. Most disturbing was the constant omission of reference to the large role that religion has always played in American life. This fact has been seen as a fundamental feature of American society by foreign observers since de Tocqueville" (pp. 2-3).

Vitz also claims that this bias against religion is not merely coincidence or insignificant. For example, religion is not mentioned as a part of the Pilgrim’s life, and children were led to believe that Thanksgiving was "when the Pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians." In an account of Joan of Arc, "there was no reference to any religious aspect of her life. This is an obvious serious misrepresentation of her historical meaning." Similarly in the story of Nobel Laureate and Jewish writer Isaac Singer, words were modified to omit "to God" where the main character prayed to God, and the "Thank God" expression of the man character was changed to "Thank goodness."

The authors of these various biased and substitute-value texts "write in order to produce certain states of mind in the rising generation, if not because they think those states of mind intrinsically just or good, yet certainly because they think them to be the means to some state of society which they regard as desirable" (Lewis, 1947, pp. 39, 40). When books are written from this spirit, "The practical result of education ... must be the destruction of the society which accepts it" (p. 39). Lewis continued, "A great many of those who ‘debunk’ traditional or (as they would say) ‘sentimental’ values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process. They claims to be cutting away the parasitic growth of emotion, religious sanction, and inherited taboos, in order that ‘real’ or ‘basic’ values may emerge" (pp. 41, 42).

Such authors typically think that they can do away with traditional values and so much for the better:

Obviously this is religious world view kind of thinking. Lewis’s prophecy is validated more recently through statements like those of the influential Professor Goodlad: "The use of conventional wisdom as a basis for decision-making is a major impediment to educational improvement. The majority of our youth still hold the same values as their parents and, if we don’t resocialize, our system will decay" (Schlafly, 1984, p. 145). Lewis goes on:

In the final analysis "Each new power won by man is a power over man as well... Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of man" (pp. 71, 77).

Faith Basis of Education

Whether one agrees or not with the contention that Jefferson’s Enlightenment philosophy or any other secular philosophy is a substitute religion in public schools is not important to this next section. Here we present the perspective that all education is rooted in a primary characteristic of religion—that is, faith. It is this matter of faith that brings everything to the same level. Most if not all of what we believe ultimately rests on assumptions or faith statements which are not ultimately provable. Even so, we must stand somewhere and act as though things are true and good else we quickly become befuddled and stagnate.

This matter of believing certain assumptions to be true without ultimate proof clearly applies to the meaning and worth of life -- concerns central to the education of youth. Tolstoy said that "faith alone gave man answers as to the questions of life, and consequently the possibility of living." Furthermore, "faith is the knowledge of the meaning of life... Faith is the force of life. If a man lives, he believes in something. If he did not believe that there was something to live for, he would not live" (cf., Creel, 1977, p. 40). Commenting on these passages from Tolstoy, Creel (p. 40) concludes, very apropos to our concern, "the question is not whether to be religious, but how to be religious."

Specifically, in the education establishment,

There are not, as our modern world wants to believe, two separate entities, faith and reason. While it may seem that

Young (1954) shows us the significance of this proposition in his discussion of Immanuel Kant’s attempt to divorce faith and reason. Kant proposed that since knowledge is based on sensory derived information about the natural world, this is the only realm man can know anything about. If a supernatural world does exist, it is unknowable to human knowledge according to Kant. In his critique, which can easily serve as a generalization to the entire question of whether faith and reason are separate entities, Young describes two fallacies in Kant’s thinking. First, Kant, as with everyone, has to take it on faith that knowledge or the knowing of something is even possible. Otherwise, Kant could not even speak to knowledge of the natural world. Without this very crucial first step of a faith nature, mankind would never escape from skepticism, born from a lack of certainty, that quickly would deteriorate to nihilism. Secondly, there is a contradiction in the supposed reliance on reason to declare that knowledge is limited to the natural or phenomenal world. It is a contradiction of highest import because this declaration is not logically or reasonably demonstrable. Instead, this highest order premise for Kant is not primarily a function of reason at all but of faith. In other words, Kant believes his proposition not because he has demonstrated its truthfulness but because he accepts it apriori by faith. As alluded to in earlier sections of this chapter and as obvious via Kant, the truth of the matter is that reason is based in faith. The mutually exclusive coexistence of faith and reason is not possible.

In his classic work on education, C. S. Lewis (1947) argues that education taught without a foundation of faith but from reason only will not elevate but instead will lead man to his ultimate downfall -- hence the title of his book, The Abolition Of Man. Lewis’s point is that reason alone cannot arrive at ultimate truths; instead, truths must be taken on faith. Without faith, man must rely either on his instincts or his ratiocination facilities. But instincts, says Lewis, are drives that merely give impulse; they do not provide the all important reason for what ought to be.

Further, instincts compete against one another and without a standard (which they cannot supply) regarding which one of the oughts should be obeyed at any given time, there can be no order and ultimately no meaningful education. Reason suffers much the same shortcoming. It similarly cannot provide an ultimate standard. Questions of value cannot conclusively be answered by reason. Henry (1995) in commenting on Johnson’s examination (1991) of Darwin’s theory said, "Much as one may appeal to universal rationality as supplying the content of ethics, universally shared norms cannot be distilled from what Johnson depicts as ‘The Unanchored, self-validating human mind’" (p. 60). As a result, Lewis concludes that "neither in any operation with factual propositions nor in any appeal to instinct can [one] find the basis for a system of values" (p. 52). Instead, we must have faith in the great truths within what Lewis calls the "doctrine of objective values" (p. 29) that come to us via major religions and philosophical schools of thought like Platonism, Hinduism, Judaism, and Christianity. It must be taken on faith; it cannot otherwise be invented. Furthermore, any change that would seem necessary to this objective system of values must come from the faith perspective that the system is inherently valid to begin with. Modification from outside the system is meaningless and ultimately self-destructive.

The final point to be made in regard to Lewis’s commentary relates to paradoxical consequences of education without faith. Writing in 1947, Lewis described a then-contemporary educational practice of severe prophetic implication. Tragically, the prophetic fulfillment is upon this current generation yet in large part unrecognized. It is unrecognized because it is unaccompanied by faith in the truthfulness of Lewis’s observation. Namely, Lewis chronicled that we have removed the basis of morality and virtue yet "continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible" (p. 35). His wording at the close of the chapter entitled "Men without chests" says it so poignantly: "In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful" (p. 35).

Not at all an aberrant view, Lewis’s perspective is echoed by others. Hans Jonas (1966) insightfully observes that for a scientific theory of man to be possible, man has to be conceived of as being determined by casual laws, as being totally a part of nature. The scientist, while maintaining freedom of inquiry and openness to reason, evidence, and truth, assumes and thus comes to know man the subject of study as lower than himself: "Then man-lower-than man explained by the human sciences -- man reified -- can by the instructions of those sciences be controlled (even ‘engineered’) and thus used" (p. 196). As Vitz comments (1977, p. 119),

The disastrous and widespread psychological impact of education from this perspective is well documented (cf., Vitz, 1977) and goes well beyond the scope of our present concerns.

In addition to faith being the ground upon which knowledge resides, as demonstrated above, faith is also the key to learning. To learn is to go from the known to the unknown. In this act of becoming vulnerable to the unknown, faith must necessarily be exercised as a prerequisite for learning to occur in any systematic and ongoing way. This exercise of faith seems to involve two components. The one component is abandonment. The security of the known is abandoned in some sense for the unknown. The learner willingly and sometimes even unwillingly abandons stability for an initial and psychologically uncomfortable state of disequilibrium. Italian Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirendola (cf., Schwehn, 1992, p. 50) claims we are to even welcome such struggles since in academic conflicts "it is a gain to lose." Faith abides in the process by way of allowing the learner to step over the edge into initial chaos without experiencing debilitating fear. The presence of such fear would inhibit learning in no insignificant way. Faith in this sense enables the learner to be receptive rather than resistant to the learning process.

Additionally, faith acts to allow submission to the unknown and/or to the teacher who brings the unknown. Theologians like Emil Brunner (1946, p. 35) speak to this dynamic as a basic human trait. "Faith, therefore, is not only the submission of the self-confident ‘I’; it is also the venture of trust in another." Wherein our "distrustful, anxious, self-centered hearts" work against receiving God, according to Brunner, it is likewise the case that our hearts can work against submitting to the authority of the teacher and/or the instructional content. Faith in the learning process according to this second dynamic is the renunciation of independence and of one’s own sovereignty; we believe and obey someone else for our betterment when the evidence of this change for the good can come only after the submission and obedience has occurred. This believing before receiving is obviously the essence of faith.

Schwehn (1992, p. 50, quoting Gustafson) applies these ideas on faith very specifically to the educational process: "... we need to acknowledge, each of us as schools, teachers and students, that all our knowing involves ‘faith,’ human confidence in what we have received." It is an educational truism that thinking and learning are hindered in an atmosphere of distrust (i.e., lack of faith). The acceptance of a teaching from another means that trust in that person and a humility to submit to that person’s teachings must be present. All of this equals faith.

We turn now to some specific examples of faith in education. First, we return to the concept of democracy that was discussed in Chapter 9. There we saw that democracy met the qualifications of a religion. Now as further confirmation, we will see that it is taught from a basis of faith. Jefferson, for instance, did not hold onto his notion of republican democracy by way of pure reason no matter how much he "thought" it to be true. He had a conviction about it that could not ultimately be derived from reason. While his assumptions may appear to be "reasonable" (cf., Baer, 1987, p. 11), they could not be proved by reason, instead, they were faith commitments.

Similarly, John Dewey held onto the democratic ideal as a matter of faith. Institutionalizing this idea, the Educational Policies Commission of the National Education Association (1941) cited as its first tenet that "democratic education is devoted to the realization of the democratic faith" (p. 92). Furthermore, the first responsibility of the public school teacher was to "maintain a steadfast loyalty to the democratic faith" (p. 109). In the twentieth century, democracy came to be conceived as "the super-religion, over and above all religions... America’s civil religion, democracy, is the overarching faith, in which the particular religions may find their particular place, provided they don’t claim any more" (Herberg, 1974, p. 84).

Another educational content area covered in Chapter 9 which is also faith based is that of science. Dewey’s one and one only method for ascertaining truth, the scientific method, was the subject of his book, A common faith. His conclusion about this method came not from the laboratory, but from his faith orientation (cf., Young, 1954, p. 40). As Young states, "In practice the man of science is a man of faith just as much as the man of religion. Scientists have faith in their own ability to arrive at cognitive judgments, they have faith in those with whom they work, they have faith in the truth of the discoveries of the past, they have faith in the orderliness of the world with which they work, and so on" (p. 206).

In more specific terms, the issue of evolution nicely illustrates the point about science being rooted in faith. To illustrate how much the belief in evolution is a matter of faith for its adherents, Johnson (1991, p. 130) cites Dobzhansky "the greatest evolutionist of our century and a lifelong Russian Orthodox: "Is evolution a theory, a system, or a hypothesis? It is much more -- it is a general postulate to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must henceforth bow and which they must satisfy in order to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light which illuminates all facts, a trajectory which all lines of thought must follow -- this is what evolution is."

In discussing evolution, Dobzhansky clearly uses the kind of language reserved for religious activities. In fact, the quoted paragraph would read perfectly well as a passage from any theological document if the name of that theology were substituted for each mention of the name evolution. That believing scientists have faith in this religion of evolution is not even a matter for debate. For instance, the senior paleontologist at the British Natural History Museum and an author on evolution, Colin Patterson, classifies both evolution and creationism as based primarily on faith and not science (Johnson, 1991, p. 9). When Patterson asked evolutionists at the University of Chicago if there was anything true about evolution, all he got was silence. Eventually one person said, "I do know one thing -- it ought not to be taught in high school" (p. 10).

The renowned science philosopher Michael Ruse calls evolution as much metaphysically based as is creationism (Woodward, 1994, p. 7). Even while continuing to maintain his personal belief in evolution, he says it is to be taken on faith in its philosophical assumptions. Although Ruse no longer believes his former position on the subject, it was his contrast of evolution as science and creationism as religion that in 1982 led a federal judge to abolish Arkansas’s "Balanced Treatment Act" (McLean v. Arkansas). Evolutionist Loren Eiseley wrote, "After having chided the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in the unenviable position of having to create a mythology of its own: namely, the assumption that what, after long effort, could not be proved to take place today had, in truth, taken place in the primeval past" (Eiseley, 1957, p. 199). The famous Buddhist astronomer Chandra Wickramasinghe stated that "contrary to the popular notion that only creationism relies on the supernatural, evolution must as well, since the probabilities of random formation of life (spontaneous generation) are so tiny as to require a ‘miracle’ for spontaneous generation ‘tantamount to a theological argument’" (Geisler, 1982, p. 151).

Another area in the scientific realm where faith is the pivot point of the matter is that of mathematics. We tend to envision math as being based on anything but faith. Here we see differently. Consider the simple truth that when two numbers are added together they result in an entirely new number. Faith places a major role in the unquestioned belief that the resultant number called the "sum" consistently and reliably describes what happens in nature when the two elements represented by the addends are combined. It truly is an act of faith to believe that the totality of all mathematical formulas, equations, operations, etc., exactly replicate occurrences in nature. These abstract, inherently meaningless, symbols (i.e., numbers), totally disconnected from the quantities they represent, can be combined according to certain rules, not necessarily related to the physical operations they represent, to accurately portray natural phenomenon. So trusting are we in this faith-based system that we do not question, for instance, whether or not our weekly salary can even be represented by such mathematical computations.

Similarly, the predictive accuracy of math is so highly trusted that countries launch people into outer space fully believing they will return at a given time and place based only on the results of math calculations and not, say, on a promise from God or a space creature (both of which equally would also have to be faith-based). In his dialogue with Hobbs, the cartoon character Calvin captures the entire matter in only a few sentences (1991):

Equally true in other disciplines, our faith is based on the testimony of authority just as alluded to above. History is almost exclusively a record of the past that is believed primarily through faith in the initial witnesses. For instance, no one doubts that Christopher Columbus did exist and that he did travel to the western hemisphere in 1492. While those who are alive to read these words were not alive in 1492 and further were not eyewitnesses to Columbus’s voyages, the general accounts of Columbus are believed as a matter of faith. Similarly, the Easter accounts of the resurrection of Christ are believed not because photographs and/or eyewitnesses can be cross-examined in person but because in faith the historical account of eyewitnesses are trusted.

Christians believe that the witnesses were able to accurately perceive that the person they saw, communicated with, and touched was Christ and that they could accurately relate the account to others. In other words, the facts of history are not generally examined firsthand. Instead, it is the testimonies about such facts that are accepted or rejected based, for instance, on tests of verification such as corroboration and coherence. History then is ultimately rooted in faith since it cannot be proved but only believed or even not believed in faith. Furthermore, it is the removal of existing values of a religious nature in history that has brought on the "moral crisis" that so many see in the revisionists’ versions of, particularly, U.S. history (Cohen, 1995).

The examples could go on, but it seems that the point about faith has been properly established. We hope it is now apparent that faith is basic to knowing of any kind. As Young states, "All men are men of faith... Reason always functions within the framework of faith -- that is, in relation to what the individual believes to be of consequence. Faith and reason cannot be separated. Faith is the basic category of all knowing" (Young, 1954, p. 36).

The bottom line issue behind all of this is not that of faith versus reason. The real issue is that in which man puts his faith: "The crucial problem is that some thinkers place their trust in one set of assumptions in their search for truth, while other thinkers place their trust in a ‘different’ set of assumptions" (Young, 1954, p. 37). Yet educators typically "assume one highly controversial set of definitions -- those provided by modern science and social science -- and then convey them uncritically to their students" (Nord, 1995, p. 44).

Conclusion

There is a bit of folk wisdom which says that if you put a frog in boiling water, it will immediately sense the hotness of the water and jump out of the pot. The "proper way" to cook the frog is to put it in water of room temperature and gradually increase the temperature. Since the frog’s body temperature will rise along with that of the water, it will never sense a contrast in temperature and thus will stay in the pot until cooked to death. As documented in the A Nation at Risk report of 1983 by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, the same thing is happening in this country in education: "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the level of educational performance that we have today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war... We have in effect, been committing an act of unthinkable unilateral educational disarmament" (p. 1). We have been immersed in downward achievement without even knowing it. In fact, the report noted that "For the first time in the history of our country, the educational skills of one generation will not surpass, will not equal, will not even approach those of their parents" (p. 11).

As sad as this is, it is eclipsed by a more tragic and far more pervasive "unsuspecting frog" account in education that occurred in this country starting in the early 1800s. In a respectable piece of investigative writing, Blumenfeld (1985) documents the fact that in Boston in 1817,

Even so, in 1818 the school committee was ordered by the town officials to implement a new system of public primary schools. According to Blumenfeld, the reason for this forced adoption of public schools centers on religion. It was a question of which religious persuasion was going to prevail in education -- Calvinism or Unitarianism. Whereas the initial settlers saw education as a religious activity that was to be under the control of churches and/or parents, the Unitarians wanted to separate children from parents as early as possible and to substitute for Christianity a belief in the natural goodness and limitless potential of mankind to control its own destiny.

Additionally, the Unitarians of the day believed that their own salvation hinged on whether or not they promoted the reformation of society, gave to the poor, and engaged in other similar social improvements. As already noted, "The great object was to get rid of Christianity" in the classrooms. (Whatever the incumbent religion was is not the issue. What is important to see is that the replacement or substitute system has successfully but erroneously been promoted as not being a religion.)

Nowadays, the entire matter of religious foundations is considered as inappropriate for public education. Even so, officially endorsed education content regularly answers religious questions. More specifically, the endorsement and teaching by the education system of "absolutism in evolutionary science and relativism (or selective relativism) in morals perfectly reflects the established religious philosophy of late-twentieth-century America" (Johnson, 1995, p. 166).

The problem is that education has not moved from being religiously based in colonial America to being non-religious in contemporary America. No, it is instead a matter of education shifting from a foundation in one religion to that of another (i.e., substitute) religion: "[T]he practice of our schools [was] to force dissenting and non-believing children of the poor to behave like Protestants. Eventually the courts said No. That particular tyranny is behind us only to be replaced by another: children of whatever belief now must study the gospel of secular neutrality" (Coons, 1992, p. 18).

The early Unitarian substitution for Calvinism is one such example. An example of another type of substitution has been documented by Newsweek (June 14, 1993). As many as 6-8 million students in United States public schools have been subjected to the religious teachings of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. His text The Way to Happiness  (1981) has been used by public schools supposedly to teach values and morality. Teachers who used the text assumed it contained a morals-only perspective. But the president of the Church of Scientology International claims that the book is a "part of Hubbard’s extensive, philosophical and religious writings, which for Scientologists are the same as the Bible is for Christians and the Koran is for Muslims" (p. 76).

Most troubling, critics and former Scientology officials alike claim that the morals text "is primarily a recruiting tool for the church" (p. 77). Obviously, what substitutes for a religion is still a religion. The four defining characteristics of religion (i.e., declaration of education as religion, world view based, non-neutrality, and faith based) as discussed in this chapter are all satisfied in this regard. Further, whether or not the substitute beliefs fit our stereotype of religion, if they substitute for a recognized religion or functionally act as a religion, they are religious, objections from nonbelievers in the substitute notwithstanding. After all, no one can decree what is or is not religious for some other person.

The failure to see that educational practices are religiously based because they have over some period of time been definitionally excluded as such is explained by an observation from C. S. Lewis (1947, p. 17). The well-established declaration that education is not religious is an example of "an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him [the deceived] to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all." The removal of formal religious doctrines from schooling through promoting some substitute beliefs instead, declaring the substitute as non-religious, is self-deceiving. In fact, humanists no longer call humanism a religion because of the attacks from fundamentalists brought on by the humanists in saying that they are a religion (cf., The Journal, 1995, p. 6). Vested interest positions of this type should be immediately suspect if not totally disregarded. A story attributed to Abraham Lincoln helps us see the point that the mere relabeling of something does not change it: "Abraham Lincoln once asked a critic, ‘How many legs does a cow have?’ "Four’ was the reply. ‘If you call her tail a leg, how many does she have?’ asked Lincoln. ‘Five’ was the answer. "No’ declared Lincoln. ‘Just calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg.’ " (Gabler, Gabler, & Hefley, 1985, p. 42). In other words, declaring that something is not a religion when it fully serves a religion does not make it any less a religion.

The frog-in-the-pot analogy demonstrates that we have been saturated for so long in a particular narrowly-defined perspective of religion that we accept it as the norm. Yet as this chapter has shown, religion is not confined to formally organized doctrines found within the typically deceived church. Religion guides all of life’s activities such that there really is no distinction between the secular and the sacred for the vast majority of people. Our religion is what we act out regardless of what we may say to the contrary.

Obviously, the implications for the proposition that education is a religious activity are enormous. For one, education should formally be recognized as subject to the religious provisions of the First Amendment to the Constitution. This already is the case in the sense that courts rule on what aspects of religion are to be allowed in education. So even without this chapter’s revolutionary perspective, education needs to be recognized as being under the jurisdiction of the First Amendment because of the way it is interpreted. It is not a matter of whether education is religious but of which religious perspective informs education.

When the more enlightened conceptualization of religion in this chapter is coupled with the original-intent interpretation of the First Amendment as covered in Chapter 5, many new implications arise. This will be discussed in detail in Chapter 11.

Another implication regarding the religious nature of education addresses not the federal but instead the role of each state in education. For instance, state provisions regarding religion must by definition incorporate educational matters. Conversely, state statutes regarding education mandates now need to be viewed as potential infringements on religious matters. Obviously worthy of detailed consideration, this matter is discussed in Chapter 12.

Our last statement for the present chapter comes from the 1889 writing of United States Assistant Attorney General Zach Montgomery. The very fact that his quote is equally applicable now as it was one hundred years ago gives regretful validity to Santayana’s statement that (1905/1980) "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." These words from Montgomery will hopefully be heeded this time:

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Tyranny Through Public Education by William F. Cox, Jr. 

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Definition of Tyranny, and The Setting

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