Today it may be popular to think the purpose for education is to make it possible for youth to qualify for the best possible employment.

That’s almost as lame as believing the purpose for life on earth is to make as much money as possible so tax collectors can get the maximum from you while you’re alive and even more when you die.

The Colonists who established some of America’s most prestigious educational institutions had other ideas.

Harvard’s charter opens with “Whereas, through the good hand of God, many well devoted persons have been, and daily are moved, and stirred up, to give and bestow, sundry gifts, legacies, lands, and revenues for the advancement of all good literature, arts, and sciences in Harvard College . . . that may conduce to the education of the English and Indian youth of this country, in knowledge and godliness.”

Dartmouth began as a charity school training Indians to carry the gospel to their own people.

Yale’s charter contained the purpose “wherein youth may be instructed in the arts and sciences [and] through the blessing of Almighty God may be fitted for public employment both in church and civil state.”

The charter of the first state university, the University of Georgia, opens as follows:
As it is the distinguishing happiness of free governments that civil order should be the result of choice and not necessity, and the common wishes of the people become the laws of the land, their public prosperity and even existence very much depends upon suitably forming the minds and morals of their citizens. When the minds of people in general are viciously disposed and unprincipled and their conduct disorderly, a free government will be attended with greater confusions and with evils more horrid than the wild, uncultivated state of nature. It can only be happy where the public principles and opinions are properly directed and their manners regulated. This is an influence beyond the stretch of laws and punishments and can be claimed only by religion and education. It should therefore be among the first objects of those who wish well to the national prosperity to encourage and support the principles of religion and morality, and early to place the youth under the forming hand of society that by instruction they may be molded to the love of virtue and good order.

Translated into 21st Century English the founders of American institutions of learning believed that man is wicked by nature and needs to be taught to appreciate and abide by biblical morality — because it’s the smart thing to do. They saw this as vital for the nation’s survival.

President John Adams put it this way,”Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

President Teddy Roosevelt had this take: “To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”

The basic concept is this: If the vast majority of citizens hold solid biblical moral values the laws they make will be good and enforceable. If the majority of citizens lack biblical moral values no amount of police, courts and jails will save society from self destruction.

This purpose was not reserved for college education. The first American public school was in Massachusetts where in 1647 the “Old Deluder Satan Law” began:

It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures, as in former times by keeping them in an unknown tongue, so in these latter times by persuading from the use of tongues, that so that at least the true sense and meaning of the original might be clouded and corrupted with false glosses of saint-seeming deceivers; and to the end that learning may not be buried in the grave of our forefathers, in church and commonwealth, the Lord assisting our endeavors. It is therefore ordered that every township in this jurisdiction, after the Lord hath increased them to fifty households shall forthwith appoint one within their town to teach all such children as shall resort to him to write and read, whose wages shall be paid either by the parents or masters of such children, or by the inhabitants in general.

Lest there be any doubt about the purpose of early public schools consider this snippet teaching the alphabet from the New England Primer (used for over 100 years).

A – A Wise son maketh a glad father, but a foolish son is the heaviness of his mother.
B – Better is a little with the fear of the Lord, than great treasure & trouble therewith.
C – Come unto Christ all ye that labor and are heavy laden and he will give you rest.
D – Do not the abominable thing which I hate saith the Lord.
E – Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.
F – Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him.
G – GODLINESS is profitable unto all things, having the promise of the life that now is, and that which is to come.
H – HOLINESS becomes GOD’s house for ever.
I – It is good for me to draw near unto GOD.

If all you remember about the nations founders is Jefferson’s call for separation of church and state you have been badly deluded. Public schools were unashamed in their fundamental Christian moral instruction and legislators wanted it that way. They considered it protection from society being overrun by wickedness.

Today, this has been turned on its head. Homosexual activists want to use the public schools to rid society of biblical moral beliefs. An effort to do this was made in Georgia in 1992. The sex education material presented by the State Department of Education to specialists hired to teach sex education contained the following:

“Do not use words such as: normal, right, wrong, good, bad, sinful, evil, perversion, unnatural, abnormal, promiscuity or promiscuous. . . Avoid heterosexual terms such as premarital sex, marital sex and non-marital sex. When referring to people who are married, you can speak of ‘partners’ rather than husband and wife.”

Abraham Lincoln said, “The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.”

Hitler Youth education material included heavy doses of propaganda declaring Germans a master race. One such textbook contained the following: “The Christian church, above all the Roman Catholic Church, rejects racial thinking by claiming that ‘All men are equal before God.’ All who are of the Christian faith, be they Jew, a Negro from the jungle, or white, are better and more valuable to it than a German who is not a Christian. Saving faith is the only bond.” Hitler’s schools taught against salvation being available to all through Jesus Christ because having pure German blood all Hitler thought you needed to be ideal. He considered six million Jews impure and taught children so.

The young men who flew jets into the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon spent time in the United States. They mingled with ordinary Americans. They could see what we’re like, but the purpose of those who provided their education was to convince them that Americans are infidels fit only for death. Their “education” was stronger than their vision.

Different groups have different purposes for education. If the American people want a society where honesty, integrity, courtesy and civility are the norm we had better get the purpose of American education right. The old deluder Satan would love for us to get it wrong. He delights in racism, terrorism, promiscuity, vulgarity and rebellion. Many inner city schools that run amok with violence, sex and drugs are his playground. Such schools would benefit greatly if they waged some war on the old deluder but, in the name of separation of church and state, they’re left defenseless.

Today at the University of Georgia it’s doubtful more than a handful of teachers and administrators have any concept of why the school was founded. Many would quit before seeing the original purpose for the university restored.

Sadly, the true purpose for education is understood and appreciated by fewer and fewer Americans.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was martyred by Hitler, said, “If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction.” Adolf Hitler put Germany’s schools on the wrong train. The entire world paid a heavy price to stop that train.

The founders of American public education put children on a train powered by biblical instruction. The Supreme Court stopped that train and forced the children off.

What train do you think America’s public schools are on today? Where is it taking America?