Anyone looking at the state of public education in the United States (and the world) today, would never guess that the public school system was founded by the frequently vilified Puritan believers in Massachusetts. In fact, many liberal colleges and universities like Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Oxford, Brown, and Cambridge, to name a few; were once bastions of biblical truth.
The “Old Deluder Satan Act” of 1642, was the first law enacted with the purpose of establishing public education in the state of Massachusetts and was later adopted by the other states in one form or another.
The purpose of this law was to teach “literacy and numeracy” to all the children in the colonies, but the main goal was to enable everyone to read the Bible. This is a far cry from the state of our public schools today, where God is rarely mentioned, prayer is banned and the Bible is a taboo.
America is no longer a Christian country…perhaps it never was, but at least God and his Word were honored and respected more in the past. We have descended into a dangerous and dark time. The so-called “Enlightenment” has covered millions of minds with a cloud of darkness and confusion.
The fact is that secular or liberal education, that is education that is not “tainted” with God or the Bible, is simply an endless and useless accumulation of facts. This world is filled with a plethora of highly educated criminals of every sort.
What our schools need, is not more computers and edge cutting technology. We need all those things and more, but if we don’t return to God soon, there will be more school shootings, more drugs, more teenage pregnancies and more criminal behavior.
Godless schools and jails attempt to reform our wayward generation, but a mind devoid of the knowledge of the Lord, is not educated at all and will not be reformed, unless it is transformed by the power of Jesus Christ.
The apostle Paul admonishes us to “…be transformed by the renewing of your mind…” (Romans 12:2). Our minds can only be renewed when we receive Christ as our Savior and Lord. A person that becomes a Christian has a brand new heart and mind. In fact, the Bible says in 1 Corinthians 2:16 that, “…we have the mind of Christ.”
I work in a public school and I enjoy my job (most days), but I am aware of the fact that the lessons that I teach are worthless for the most part. What good is it for my students to learn everything there is to know about this world and lose their souls because they don’t know the truth?
“Set your mind on things that are above, not on things that are on the earth” (Colossians 3:2). This is the best advice for those who want to transform their minds by the truth and power of the Gospel.
A. G.
