Resist Evil - Schooling and Indoctrination
The Amish were the canary in the coal mine, we English paid them essentially no heed; and we got it wrong, again.
This is Part 2 of the Resist Evil series; Part 1 was Resist Evil - Money.
For the past, present and future teachers who might be reading this:
James 3
3 Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, knowing that as such we will incur a stricter judgment.
Background
I’ll get to the “origin story,” the why and how we got here from there, but first I want to address the history of Amish schooling.
The story of Amish education offers a compelling demonstration of Amish resistance to key educational trends of the twentieth century, including school consolidation, busing […], an extended school year, and additional years of compulsory education. The resistance was so stiff that hundreds of parents were imprisoned.1
Amishmen. Going to prison to safeguard your children and preserve your way of life; that’s a definition of badassery.
Until World War II there were very few Amish schools, perhaps as few as five by 1940.2 Which is not to say there had not been conflict with the individual state(s) regarding the building of those schools; conversely, “there had been a number of conflicts in several states since the 1920s […]”3 But, the watershed moment was the 1972 Supreme Court decision in Wisconsin v. Yoder, et al., a “legal case in which the U.S. Supreme Court on May 15, 1972, ruled (7–0) that Wisconsin’s compulsory school attendance law was unconstitutional as applied to the Amish (primarily members of the Old Order Amish Mennonite Church), because it violated their First Amendment right to free exercise of religion. The case involved three Amish fathers—Jonas Yoder, Wallace Miller, and Adin Yutzy—who, in accordance with their religion, refused to enroll their children, aged 14 and 15, in public or private schools after they had completed the eighth grade. The state of Wisconsin required, pursuant to its compulsory attendance law, that children attend school to at least the age of 16. The fathers were found guilty of violating the law […]”4
Chief Justice Warren Burger noted that,
“Old Order Amish communities […] are characterized by a fundamental belief that salvation requires life in a church community separate and apart from the world and worldly influence. This concept of life aloof from the world and its values is central to their faith.”
The Supreme Court’s decision in Wisconsin v. Yoder, et al. relieved the Amish of the need to send their children on to high school after they had finished the eighth grade. For all intents and purposes, it also legitimated the Amish insistence on educating their children in the local one-room schoolhouses that were being abandoned by mainstream society as public schools were consolidated.5
The numbers of Amish schools exploded after the Yoder decision:
1950 | 22
1960 | 89 (67 added)
1970 | 248 (159 added)
1980 | 434 (186 added)
1990 | 707 (273 added)
2000 | 1,139 (432 added)
The 2007 to 2008 school year was the last in which Pathway Publishing produced the “School Directory,” as the task was becoming too onerous. At that time, the directory was 21 pages long and listed 1,830 schools of which 1,475 were Amish and 355 Old Order Mennonite. By 2012, there were an estimated 55,000 Amish pupils being taught by 3,000 teachers in 2,000 private Amish schools in North America.6
Further to the above, I wrote this in my post, The Amish, and What We English Can Learn:
Those teachers by the way, “are typically young, single Amish women who begin teaching at about eighteen years of age <with 8th grade educations>.” Outcomes you ask? Here is an example […] “testing of students in Iowa and northern Indiana shows that eighth grade pupils […] scored more than one grade level above the national standard on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills.”
‘Nuf said on skills outcomes, for now. One full grade level more advanced than the “English,” in just 8 years. My educated guess is that we English have worsened and the Amish have stayed the same since those 2009-2010 test results.
So. Why did we do it, what did we do, and how did we do it, to get to the point (and now well past that) where the Amish would choose to abandon our schools, suffering the pain of imprisonment for their trouble?
The Origin of Government Schools
Definitions
Before I get started in answering this question, I want to get straight on some definitions; otherwise I will be confused and you will be confused, as we go through the rest of this history. Let’s visit again with the Amish:
The Amish distinguish between schooling (“book learning”), which teaches skills, and education (wisdom), which inculcates values. Although they permit children to be schooled by “outsiders,” they have never allowed them to be “educated” by the world.”7
I see the wisdom in that, it is not quite where I am going, but close.
As for schooling, I am going with 1b or 4 from the Merriam-Webster (M-W) definition; there is some overlap there I think you will agree. Except for the horse of course. Keep these definitions in mind as you read further, and I think you will understand where I am coming from.
My King James study Bible defines wisdom as “skill in living,” as for example the behaviors put forward in the book of Proverbs. My highlighting above is as close as M-W gets to “skill in living.” And, my view of the definitions of these first two words comes pretty close to the Amish view.
To educate: 1 looks a lot like schooling, and I do not equate schooling with educating; 3 looks a lot like indoctrination, and that is quite the coincidence, in fact M-W lists “indoctrinate” as a synonym of educate. You’ll want to keep that in mind, too! 2 comes as close as M-W gets to “wisdom.”
M-W goes further regarding indoctrination:
Indoctrinate means "brainwash" to many people, but its meaning isn't always so negative. When the verb first appeared in English in the 17th century, it simply meant "to teach"—a meaning linked closely to its source, the Latin verb docēre, which also means "to teach." (Other offspring of docēre include docile, doctor, document, and, of course, doctrine). By the 19th century, indoctrinate was being used in the sense of teaching someone to fully accept only the ideas, opinions, and beliefs of a particular group.
And there you have it, the italics and bold are mine.
Furthermore, I will be presenting quotes from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries; the use of these words in the context of those quotes will leave something to your imagination, and mine, as to the writer’s intended meaning.
WHY Do Governments Act In Primary Education?
For this first section I will be relying heavily on a book by Agustina S. Pagalayan, Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education.
It has been thought that industrialization, democratization, and military power competition, have driven the need for mass schooling. Also, if we are being charitable vis-à-vis the government, the development of mass schooling could be a policy tool for reducing poverty and income inequality, as well as improving the upward mobility of the lower classes. I am not charitable when it comes to the government, and the data available does not seem to support any of the hypotheses above as cause of government involvement.
Fear of internal conflict, crime, anarchy and the breakdown of social order, coupled with the perception that traditional policy tools such as repression, redistribution, and moral instruction by the Church were increasingly insufficient to prevent violence, led governments to develop a national primary education system. Central governments went to great lengths to place the masses in primary schools under their control out of concern that the “unruly,” “savage,” and “morally flawed” masses posed a grave danger to social order and, with that to ruling elites’ power. […] State-regulated primary education systems, then, emerged fundamentally as a state-building tool.8
Before further discussion of the causes of government action in education from the quote above, I want to address some other “traditional policy tools,” briefly.
The Church. The founders saw fit to ensure that the federal government could not set up its own Church; this is the first, the beginning, of the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion […],” because it had been used as a policy tool in Great Britain.
Redistribution. This started in earnest with FDR and Social Security, as part of the New Deal; the next and bigger step was taken by Lyndon Johnson, as part of his Great Society, and known as the War on Poverty. The government could not care less about poverty; the point is to prevent revolt. In other countries redistribution of land is, and has been used to pacify the masses; in South Africa for example, Zimbabwe, and the United States after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. The provision of “free” schooling to the lower classes is also seen as a form of redistribution.
Repression. Repression takes many forms, but the war on the citizenry in modernity went kinetic during the 1960s, and continues to this day; the internal police state being led by the FBI, under the truly evil J. Edgar Hoover in the early years. <If you ask me, Kash Patel should bring in demolition experts and drop the damn Hoover building into its footprint.> I should note, and we will discuss, that in the early days of the republic kinetic action was also taken in two events particularly relevant to this post.
The powers that be want to remain as the powers that be. Maintenance, i.e. protection of the status quo, is a primary objective of the elites; any and all policy tools necessary to protect the elites and their position as such in society can and will be employed.
Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants.
Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling, by John Taylor Gatto (taught for 30 years in public schools, New York State’s official “Teacher of the Year” in the year he retired.
Further to the impact of a breakdown in social order as cause, this in the United States, and from Thomas Jefferson:
… And say, finally, whether peace is best preserved by giving energy to the government <energy to repress violently> or information to the people. This last is the most certain, and the most legitimate engine of government. Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. Enable them to see that it is in their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve them…”
Thomas Jefferson, in his 20 December 1787 letter to James Madison before they became the third and fourth President of the United States, respectively.
This was part of an exchange between Adams and Jefferson that was prompted by Shay’s Rebellion:
Shay’s Rebellion <1786-1787> was an armed uprising in Western Massachusetts […] in response to a debt crisis among the citizenry and in opposition to the state government's increased efforts to collect taxes on both individuals and their trades. […] Historically, scholars have argued that the four thousand rebels, called Shaysites, who protested against economic and civil rights injustices by the Massachusetts Government were led by Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays. By the early 2020s, scholarship has suggested that Shays's role in the protests was significantly and strategically exaggerated by Massachusetts elites, who had a political interest in shifting blame for bad economic conditions away from themselves.
-wiki
Notice the role of the “elites” in the wiki entry above. Now I would like to believe that what Jefferson meant by “education,” is the same as I showed in the definitions above; which is to say not indoctrination. We will almost certainly never know. My hope would be that he meant to educate the people regarding our form of government, a republic, and its remedies, as he had learned, through the study of empires going back to the Greeks and Romans. And perhaps he did mean that, but alas, that is not the choice we have made as a society.
Having said that, it was not long before government took action following Shay’s Rebellion; “in 1789 the Massachusetts legislature passed the first state law on common education […] [the law] called for the organization and public funding of “common schools,” which were to teach a curriculum that was to some extent supervised by the state government.” While trying to not get ahead of myself, I will say that in the United States, Massachusetts has led the way in schooling ever since.
Adding fuel to the elite fire, was the Whiskey Rebellion in 1791:
The Whiskey Rebellion (also known as the Whiskey Insurrection) was a violent tax protest in the United States beginning in 1791 and ending in 1794 during the presidency of George Washington. The so-called "whiskey tax" was the first tax imposed on a domestic product by the newly formed federal government.
-wiki
This rebellion was put down by repression; “Washington himself rode at the head of an army to suppress the insurgency, with 13,000 militiamen provided by the governors of Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.” That also from the wiki. It was the largest army ever to put foot on American ground, and according to the wiki, led by the President himself.
So, the “why” of government involvement in schools is not a European thing, it is not an absolutist-regime thing, rather it spans all forms of government, space, i.e. geography, and time. It is an “elites protecting themselves and their station” thing.
We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.
Woodrow Wilson
Paglayan goes to great lengths in Raised to Obey regarding the “why,” the cause and effect relationship between the breakdown of social order and the rise of government involvement is schools. I will leave you to the book for more details justifying the assertion.
WHAT Was To Comprise The System?
While rulers deployed the army, and later, police forces, to repress the disorderly masses, internal threats also motivated them to invest in primary education systems designed to forge social order through indoctrination.
Key to this state-building endeavor was the effort to inculcate a set of moral principles that exalted the value of obedience, and rejected the individual use of violence. Every aspect of primary education systems was crafted to teach children to obey existing rules and authorities, and accept the status quo. […]
Primary education systems, then, were conceived as part of a repertoire of policy tools used by the state to consolidate its power.9
So. The key role that schools were to perform, on behalf of government, was to indoctrinate children in their earliest years.
6 Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it.
Proverbs 22:6 NIV
Proverbs 22:6 is truth, and the elites knew that, using it to their advantage. Sometimes and in some places the Bible and religion were used in schools, if what was being taught supported the objectives of the elite.
The teaching of morals though, was to be front and center. Those “morals:”
Docility;
blind obedience to the rules, questioning authority is verboten;
acceptance of the status quo; and
the rejection of individual violence.
When this author, Paglayan, uses the word “indoctrination,” she is using “the Oxford American Dictionary, which defines indoctrination as ‘the process of teaching a person or group to accept a set of beliefs uncritically.’” Who put Joe in charge? Don’t ask. Is pure democracy the best form of government? Don’t ask. Is a republic the best form of government, or is communism, or fascism, or socialism? Don’t ask.
What makes something indoctrination is not the content being taught; what characterizes indoctrination is the process of teaching this content leaves no room for room for questioning or critical thinking.
Elites, political and otherwise, feeling threatened, usually as a result of some sort of breakdown in the social order, supported mass schooling and indoctrination; inoculating themselves if you will, against the ignorant, unwashed masses.
What’s that old saying, “If you are getting it for free (the product or service, like Google search), you in fact are the product (Google is selling your data).” Or words to that effect. So it goes with “free” government education; an indoctrinated version of you is the product, subservient to the state.
But what forms does this indoctrination program take in our schools? What are the schools actually intent on doing?
[…] compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.
1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. […]
2) The integrating function. This might well be called “the conformity function,” because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. […]
3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student’s proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in “your permanent record.” […]
4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been “diagnosed,” children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits—and not one step further. […]
5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin’s theory of natural selection as applied to what he called “the favored races.” In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit—with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments—clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That’s what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.10
Emphasis is mine. Does any of that ring bells for you? Most of it does for me, and I was in primary school relatively early in this “project,” the 1960’s. Number 5 in particular; I have vivid memories of 2nd grade, almost 60 years ago. Suffice it to say that some of the indoctrination “stuck.” Which of course, was an objective.
HOW Was The Indoctrination Program Implemented In The United States?
The short answer is, through law, over a significant time period, and step by step, i.e. gradually. But, mass education, with government involvement if not outright total control, began in Europe with Prussia leading the way, leading by example not just in Europe, but in the Americas as well.
Arguing that universal public education was the best way to turn unruly American children into disciplined, judicious republican citizens, Mann won widespread approval from modernizers, especially in the Whig Party, for building public schools. Most U.S. states adopted a version of the system Mann established in Massachusetts, especially the program for normal schools to train professional teachers.
-wiki
Do you see anything in that introduction from Wikipedia about literacy, or numeracy, history or geography, civics, or anything but indoctrination under the cover of education? The introduction also gives you a hint as to what came on Mann’s heels; job one was to indoctrinate the teachers. Train the trainers, as is now often said, in “normal schools,” to train the children in “common schools.” And, he was from Massachusetts, the colony that was first to fire a shot in 1775, and then, perhaps counter-intuitively, the first state to brainwash its children.
Where did Mann get his ideas? Further from the wiki:
Upon becoming the secretary of education of Massachusetts in 1837, Mann worked to create a statewide system of professional teachers, based on the Prussian <i.e. German> model of "common schools." Prussia was attempting to develop a system of education by which all students were entitled to the same content in their public classes. Mann initially focused on elementary education and on training teachers. The common-school movement quickly gained strength across the North.
Mann traveled to Prussia in 1843, to learn of the Prussian system first hand. How did the Prussians think?
Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished ... The social psychologist of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.
— Johann Gottlieb Fichte
(1762-1814) German philosopher, psychologist, considered the father of German nationalism
Prussian University in Berlin, 1810, quoted by The Impact of Science on Society by Bertrand Russell, 1952
Somehow, perhaps even with good intentions, Mann convinced himself that he could copy and paste from the Prussian model without ill effect.
[…] if Prussia can pervert the benign influences of education to the support of arbitrary power, we surely can employ them for the support and perpetuation of republican institutions. A national spirit of liberty can be cultivated more easily than a national spirit of bondage; and, if it may be made one of the great prerogatives of education to perform the unnatural and unholy work of making slaves, then surely it must be one of the noblest instrumentalities for rearing a nation of freemen. If a moral power over the understandings and affections of the people may be turned to evil, may it not also be employed for good?
Mann’s 7th Annual Report as Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education
It is probably safe to say, that when you paste a copy of a system designed for “making slaves,” you will have likely strayed a good distance from anything resembling the Socratic method in the process.
The Socratic method […] is a form of argumentative dialogue between individuals based on asking and answering questions. […] In Plato's dialogue "Theaetetus", Socrates describes his method as a form of "midwifery" because it is employed to help his interlocutors develop their understanding in a way analogous to a child developing in the womb. The Socratic method begins with commonly held beliefs and scrutinizes them by way of questioning to determine their internal consistency and their coherence with other beliefs and so to bring everyone closer to the truth.
-wiki
It seems to me, i.e. I believe, that to sustain a republic long term, we need more of the Socratic method, and little of the Prussian method, if any.
A republic, if you can keep it.
—Benjamin Franklin's response to Elizabeth Willing Powel's question: "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?”
Furthermore, since the people did not want what Mann was offering, Massachusetts went the way of compulsory schooling in 1852. By the 1960’s, virtually all states in the Union had followed Mann’s and Massachusetts’ lead, with Prussian programming top to bottom, and with compulsory education K-12. I’ll remind you that “K” is for Kindergarten, literally garden of children, from the German. The indoctrination apple did not fall far from the absolutist monarchy tree.
United States Federal Government Involvement
The involvement of the federal government in education got a real kick in the pants in “the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson.” If you have any reason to hold Johnson in contempt, add this to the list. Not long after that the work on the system was elevated to the cabinet level when “President Carter signed a 1979 bill that re-established a federal education department. It began operating in May 1980 […]” The timing here is coincidental, coincidental with the breakdown in civil order that took place in the 60’s and 70’s, as Paglayan would have forecast; the more overt policy tools (counterintelligence program operations by the FBI, sending the 101st Airborne to ensure desegration of Arkansas schools, the Kent State shootings by the Ohio National Guard, etc.) proved insufficient to the task of pacifying the citizenry. Therefore, “guiding” the “education” of youngsters from the federal level achieved the necessary support of elites to become law.
Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the careful result of the substantial education which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.
William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education 1899-1906
There is one good thing about federal involvement; we now have the statistics to show that government-school leadership is entirely disinterested in education, as we serfs think of it, you know, literacy, numeracy, aka reading, writing, and arithmetic. If you still hold on to a shred of belief that the feds care about the education of your children, see my post,
The Department of Education
The Department of Education was never a good idea, and still is not, and it never will be, even when judged by its own measurements. Recently James and I watched the documentary Schooling the World; it was the second or perhaps third time for me, but I wanted to introduce it to James.
Even without clicking on the link, in the one chart shown above, Reading levels at Age 13 (8th grade), improvement is not in evidence. And the cost of that lack of improvement; we are expected to pay for “fiscal year 2025 Budget requests <of> $82.4 billion in discretionary funding for the Department […],” a 4% increase from 2024. Not only do we continue to throw good money after bad, but more good money.
As I have said also of the ineffectual War on Poverty (only effective in breaking down families), systems are designed to produce the output(s) they produce, and if they are not producing the desired output(s) the system is changed. We have not changed the system because we, the elites that is, are getting what the system is designed to produce; broken families, and docile, blindly obedient and accepting of the status quo citizens, who will never even think of using violence to resist the elite powers that be. Okay. I think that is about all we need to know the “how” of government indoctrination.
School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they’ll never be bored.
Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling, by John Taylor Gatto
Before, and since we of European stock were indoctrinated, other were, and are being indoctrinated.
Starting in the late 1800s, the United States created an assimilation policy where they took Native American children from their families and placed them in harmful institutions called "Indian Boarding Schools", usually far away from home. Native children were treated badly and abused. Families were not allowed to see their children. Many children died in these institutions. The goal was to force Native peoples to assimilate into American society and eliminate all of their traditional cultures and languages. This policy did not end until 1978 and many schools remained open until the 1980s-2000s. The impact this policy has had on Native peoples is still being felt today and there are many survivors to tell their stories.
Since it worked so well on Native Americans, we took the show on the road, so to speak; see the free documentary “Schooling the World: The White Man’s Last Burden.”
So. What can be done by way of resistance to this evil?
Alternatives to Government Schools
First of all, the Department of Education is completely extra-Constitutional, which is to say the Constitution makes no mention of it, and according to the Tenth Amendment;
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
And therefore, God willing, the Department will be found un-Constitutional and reduced to rubble. Short of that, and given state involvement for the same reasons, we are on our own with respect to finding alternatives. There are many, but generally at family/student expense. To list just a few:
Microschool
Private school
Parochial school
Boarding school
Charter school
Homeschool
Unschool
Homeschool Co-op
The problem, again, is cost. We are already paying property taxes, even if you are a renter, and in most cases a very large fraction of those taxes is going to pay for schooling. We have a top-down system, where with our tax dollars we fund an industry granted a monopoly on education by government. Monopolies are of course protected from competition; most people have no choice but to send their children to public school. Ultimately, that needs to change, the system, the school choice, needs to be driven from the bottom-up, which is to say that the money needs to flow to the family/student, and the family/student then decides where to spend that money, creating competition for those dollars. Having said that, in the meantime there is unquestionably an exodus from public schools:
Over the first two school years under the pandemic, K–12 enrollment in public schools fell by more than 1.2 million students, with prominent losses among students in early elementary grades and kindergarten.
In the 2021–22 school year, private school enrollment was 4 percent higher while homeschool enrollment was 30 percent higher.
The growth in private school enrollment was particularly large in kindergarten and early elementary grades.
DC and the 21 states that had available data showed increased homeschool enrollment during the pandemic. The smallest increase occurred in North Carolina, where homeschool enrollment grew by 8 percent. Other states saw particularly large increases, including Florida (43 percent), New York (65 percent), and Pennsylvania (53 percent).
But, there are close to 50,000,000 kids in public schools, so we have only scratched the surface. Until the funding problem is solved, the mass exodus will not develop fully. As soon as the funding problem is solved, well, Katie bar the door. Pester your representatives … meanwhile, if you have the available resources, get your children out of the public school system, especially the primary and middle schools, where the most damage is done.
18 And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.
19 Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost:
20 Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world. Amen.
Matthew 18-20 KJV (The Great Commission)
Some additional interesting links:
https://americanarchive.org/exhibits/first-amendment/protests-60s-70s
https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.CHAP1.HTM
https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.TAB1.2.GIF
https://www.crossrivertherapy.com/research/literacy-statistics
https://www.barbarabush.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/BBFoundation_GainsFromEradicatingIlliteracy_9_8.pdf
https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/literacy-statistics-2022-2023
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Gottlieb_Fichte
What was Fichte’s connection to German education leaders; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system
Separation of church and state; https://search.brave.com/search?q=%22separation+of+chuch+and+state%22+thomas+jefferson&source=desktop&summary=1&conversation=be326f1d315d6ca54a9b4bDonald B. Kraybill, The Amish (John Hopkins University Press, 2013), 251.
Mawdsley, R.D. "Wisconsin v. Yoder." Encyclopedia Britannica, May 9, 2024. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Wisconsin-v-Yoder.
Johnson-Weiner, "Old Order Amish Education: The Yoder Decision in the 21st Century." 27
Johnson-Weiner, "Old Order Amish Education: The Yoder Decision in the 21st Century." 28
Donald B. Kraybill, The Amish (John Hopkins University Press, 2013), 253.
Agustina S. Paylayan, Raised to Obey (Princeton University Press, 2024), 2
Agustina S. Paylayan, Raised to Obey (Princeton University Press, 2024), 3
John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction (New Society Publishers, 2010), xviii-xix