Don Closson offers 5 myths about education commonly held by the American public, from a Christian perspective.  These myths include neutrality, more money is the solution, teachers are underpaid and school choice harms public education.

The Myth of Neutrality

Most of us assume that those involved with our public schools have at least one thing in common: the belief that the kids come first. This assumption allows us to believe that a kind of neutrality exists among the various participating parties. Since they all have the best interests of our children in mind, we can trust their motives and their actions. It also leads some to believe that there is no place for politics in schools; again, thanks to the myth of neutrality.

The problem with this kind of thinking is that no such neutrality exists. Our schools are highly political and are a battle ground for the various groups hoping to cash in on the huge amount of money Americans spend on public schools every year. Politics is all about deciding how our tax monies will be distributed, who gets what resources, when, and how. In the 2003-04 school year, America spent over $500 billion on public schools with about 60 percent of that amount going to actual classroom expenses. But even though we spend more on public education than any other industrialized nation, our schools continue to fail to adequately educate those who are most in need of a good education: our inner city students.

Despite being in an almost constant state of reform, the school districts in our largest cities perform poorly. In New York schools, only 18 percent of children receive a Regents Diploma after four years of high school. Those numbers fall to 10 percent for black and Hispanic students. Yet year after year, regardless of their performance teachers, principals, and central office staff cash their paychecks. Teachers unions, textbook publishers, and even colleges and universities that earn millions training and retraining teachers, thrive on their connection to the annual education budgets of our nation’s cities. As New York Post columnist Bob McManus once put it: “This is the New York City public school system, after all, where power comes first and kids come last—but where money matters most of all.”{1}

The entrenched bureaucracy that has grown up around the education industry knows how to protect itself and its link to the billions of dollars being spent. The lobbying efforts of teachers unions, national organizations representing school board members and superintendents, as well as the textbook companies all fight for influence in Washington and state capitols.

It must be said that there are many teachers, principals, school board members and countless others involved with our schools who are diligently and conscientiously working to educate our nation’s children. However, the way that our school systems are organized virtually guarantees that politics will reign supreme when important decisions are made on behalf of our most needy students.

In this article, we take a look at five myths about public education held by the American public.

The “If Only We Had More Money” Myth

Rarely do representatives of our nation’s teachers unions, the National Education Association, and the American Federation of Teachers write about deficiencies in our public schools without blaming them on a lack of adequate funding. The “we need more money” mantra has been heard so often that it is ingrained in the minds of most Americans and goes unquestioned by most. But is this always the best explanation for the failure of our schools to educate well? In fact, inadequate funding is only one of many possible reasons for poor performance.

The U.S. has been increasing per pupil spending consistently for the last fifty years. From 1945 to 2001, inflation adjusted spending has grown from $1,214 per student to $8,745. Measuring increases in performance over that period is more difficult. We do have good data from the early 1970s when the National Assessment of Educational Progress began. Unfortunately, scores for twelfth grade students have remained essentially flat in reading, math, and science over that time period, and graduation rates have changed little. Many studies have concluded that although we have increased our educational spending significantly there has been little or no significant improvement in our schools.

Various explanations have been given for why more money hasn’t resulted in improved student performance. One of the most popular is that much of the increase in funding has gone to services for disabled students and special education programs. The special ed complaint is answered by the fact that we don’t have a higher percentage of disabled students; rather, we are choosing to label students disabled who in the past would have been called slow or under-average learners. The percentage of students with severe disabilities has actually remained level between 1976 and 2001, and the number of students classified as mentally retarded has actually declined.{2} Regardless of what label we give these students, increased dollars spent should result in improved performance, but it hasn’t.

Some argue that a smaller fraction of every budget dollar actually goes to classroom instruction, but whose fault is that? Others complain that students are harder to teach today due to the effects of poverty, greater healthcare needs, and the fact that they are more likely to speak a foreign language than in the past. However, childhood poverty rates have held fairly steady since the late 70s and has been declining since 1992.{3} One of the best indicators of health care for children, the child mortality rate, has improved 66 percent in the last thirty years, so it is hard to argue that today’s children have poorer health care. The only argument that holds up is that more students have a native language other than English. But this factor alone does not explain why the huge increases in spending have not resulted in better performance.

Teachers Are Badly Underpaid

Another myth is that students perform poorly because teachers are severely underpaid.

Every few years we are warned about a looming shortage of teachers or that teachers cannot afford to live in the cities in which they teach, resulting in either inferior teachers or large classes. For instance, during the internet boom of the 90s, it was feared that teachers could not afford to live in Silicon Valley due to the high cost of real estate. But a number of years later, the San Jose Mercury analyzed housing data from that period and discovered that there was no crisis. In fact, 95 percent of the teachers who taught there lived there, and about two thirds owned their own homes.{4} In fact, teachers fared better than software engineers, network administrators, and accountants when it came to home ownership.{5}

Others argue that the best and the brightest stay away from teaching because salary rates compare poorly to similar professions. But most researchers compare teachers’ annual salary with the annual salary of other professions without taking into account the one hundred eighty day work year for the typical teacher. Adjusting the average teacher’s annual salary of $44,600 to a full-time equivalent brings it to $65,440. This amount represents a respectable middle class salary by anyone’s calculation.

Another way to look at the issue is on an hourly basis. In 2002, high school teachers made an average of $31.01 per hour. This compares to $30 per hour for chemists, $29.76 per hour for mechanical engineers, $28.07 per hour for biologists, and $24.57 per hour for nurses.{6} Doctors, lawyers, dentists, and others do make more per hour than teachers, but their education is far more rigorous, and they often require long internships or residency obligations.

Even when one compares benefits other than income teachers fare well. One researcher discovered that half of all teachers pay nothing for single-person health care coverage, while the same is true for less than one-quarter of private-sector professionals and technical employees.{7} Another type of employment benefit that teachers enjoy is job security. It becomes remarkably difficult to fire a teacher who has been employed by a school district for three or more years. Tenure protection for public school teachers give them almost unparalleled job security compared to professionals in the private sector.

The reason that teaching does not attract the best and the brightest is more likely tied to the way that individual teachers salaries are determined than the average amount paid. A recent study found that the inability of teachers to make more money by performing better than their peers is the main cause for the declining academic abilities of those entering the field.{8} Talented people want to know that they can earn more if they work harder than others around them.

School Choice Harms Public Education

Another controversy that has generated myths of its own is the debate over educational choice or voucher programs. There are two popular misconceptions: first, that research has been inconclusive regarding the benefits of voucher programs, and second, that educational choice damages public education.

Whenever the topic of school vouchers comes up in major media outlets the consistent message is that research on their benefit to students is mixed at best. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and Time magazine have all sounded the same warning. Time wrote, “Do vouchers help boost the test scores of children who use them? Researchers are trying to find out, but the evidence so far is inconclusive.”{9} Why would publications and even researchers equivocate on the benefits of vouchers? There are a number of possible reasons. Ideology can play a role. If one has come out against vouchers it’s difficult to affirm them regardless what the research says. Financial interests might also play a role if supporting vouchers might result in the loss of funding or readership.

The most accurate way to research the impact of voucher programs is to perform random-assignment studies.{10} There have been eight such studies, and all of them found a positive effect or advantage in academic progress for students who received a voucher to attend a private school. Seven of the eight findings were statistically significant. The question left to researchers is to determine the magnitude and scope of the positive effect and to establish the conditions that result in the greatest amount of progress.

The second myth; that voucher programs damage nearby public schools, is also contrary to the evidence. Although not all voucher programs are large enough to impact the public schools nearby, those programs that have the potential to do so have been studied. The consistent finding is that the competition caused by vouchers always results in an increase in public school performance. For instance, as a result of Florida’s A-Plus voucher program, “public schools whose students were offered vouchers produced significantly greater year-to-year test score gains than other Florida public schools.”{11} Schools that faced competition experienced a 5.9 percentile point advantage on the Stanford-9 math test over schools not facing competition.{12} Other studies showed that even the threat of future competition produced public school improvement.

Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby studied the impact that the oldest voucher program in the country has had on student performance in Milwaukee’s public schools. Again, she discovered that “schools exposed to greater voucher competition made significantly larger test score gains than schools less exposed to voucher competition.”{13}

Studies in other states have supported the benefit of competition as well. Vouchers offered in Maine, Vermont’s “tuitioning” programs, and charter schools in Arizona and Michigan have all prompted better performance in nearby public schools.

Public Education Doesn’t Matter

Our final American education myth is often held by conservative Christians. It is the belief that public education doesn’t matter. The argument goes something like this: the public educational establishment has adopted a completely naturalistic worldview. And. as a result, it is hostile towards anything Christian, rendering it morally bankrupt.

While it is true that our public education system is primarily built upon the assumptions of naturalism, and that it is often hostile to both individual Christians and Christian thought. It does not follow that Christians, even those who chose to home school or place their children in a private Christian school, should be indifferent to the fate of children in our public schools.

Perhaps we can compare our situation to that of the Israelites while in captivity in Babylon. Although the culture was alien and often hostile, as ours can be today, and it would have been tempting to undermine its institutions and seek its destruction, God communicated via the prophet Jeremiah that the Jews were to “seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.”{14}

Out of love for our neighbors and their children, we should desire to see them receive the best education possible. One of the earliest justifications for public education was that children needed to become literate in order to understand the Bible and apply it to their lives. In 1647, Massachusetts passed the Old Deluder Act which argued that public education was necessary because Satan attempted to keep men in ignorance of the Scriptures by keeping them from the true sense and meaning of the text. If they could read it for themselves they would be less susceptible to deception. The same need is present today. A literate society is not necessarily more open to the Bible and its message, but illiteracy places a large gulf between an interested individual and God’s revelation.

Another reason to not lose interest in the funding and functioning of our public schools is because we continue to pay for them. If we are to be good stewards of the monies granted us by God, we cannot ignore perhaps the largest single government expense. The amount of money spent on public education in America is massive by any standard, and the potential for abuse and misuse is equally large.

Into the near future, most American children, Christian and otherwise, will be educated in our public schools. Misinformation or political spin should not be allowed to shape our opinions or our decisions about education in the voting booth. The parties involved are not neutral. Although many have the best interests of the children at heart, power and money also play a major role in educational policy making.

Notes

1. Joe Williams, Cheating Our Kids (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 7.
2. Jay P. Green, Education Myths (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 24.
3. Ibid., 26.
4. Ibid., 72.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., 79.
7. Ibid., 82.
8. Ibid., 83.
9. Ibid., 147.
10. See chapter 13 of Education Myths for an explanation.
11. Education Myths, 170.
12. Ibid., 172.
13. Ibid., 173.
14. Jeremiah 29:7

© 2006 Probe Ministries

June 27, 2005

The Supreme Court has spoken and has essentially stuttered. How any sane person can make any sense of their two rulings on the Ten Commandments is beyond me. A divided court struck down displays in two Kentucky courthouses, but ruled a Ten Commandments monument on state government land in Texas was acceptable.

So why was a six foot granite monument on the grounds of the Texas Capitol constitutional? Perhaps they saw it acceptable because it is one of seventeen historical displays on the twenty-two-acre lot. So five justices determined it to be a constitutional tribute to the nation’s legal and religious history.

On the other hand, what is unconstitutional are copies of the Ten Commandments in Kentucky courthouses hanging alongside documents such as the Bill of Rights, the Star-Spangled Banner, and a version of the Congressional Record declaring 1983 the Year of the Bible. Anyone looking for a clear line of constitutionality will not find it in this confused muddle of court cases.

And anyone who doesn’t think the members of the court are openly hostile to religion need only read just a few lines of the opinion rendered by Justice John Paul Stevens. He couldn’t even accept the Texas Ten Commandments monument placed there over forty years ago by a secular institution. The monument is not a work of art and does not refer to any event in the history of the state, he wrote. The message transmitted by Texas chosen display is quite plain: This state endorses the divine code of the Judeo-Christian God.

Fortunately, other justices noted that one monument among many others is hardly an endorsement. You can stop to read it, you can ignore it, or you can walk around it. Chief Justice William Rehnquist argued that the monument’s placement on the grounds among secular monuments was passive, rather than confrontational. But that logic seemed lost on many of the justices.

The Supreme Court’s inconsistency in this case shows that many of the justices have clearly lost their way. Justice Antonin Scalia addressed the lack of any clear principle in this case in his scholarly dissent. He declared, “What distinguishes the rule of law from the dictatorship of a shifting Supreme Court majority is the absolutely indispensable requirement that judicial opinions be grounded in consistently applied principle.”

In 1980, the Supreme Court ruled against the posting of the Ten Commandments in the public schools in the case of Stone v. Graham. They ruled that the preeminent purpose for posting the Ten Commandments on schoolroom walls is plainly religious in nature. At least in 1980 we knew where the court stood on posting religious symbols in public places. This time they confused an already complex issue. According to Justice David Souter, the liberal justices were trying to establish official religious neutrality.

Justice Scalia listed various ways in which higher beings are invoked in public life, from “so help me God” in inaugural oaths to the prayer that opens the Supreme Court’s sessions. He asked, “With all of this reality (and much more) staring it in the face, how can the court possibly assert that the First Amendment mandates governmental neutrality? Perhaps trying to mandate neutrality is the problem.”

When we look at the Founding Fathers we see they were anything but neutral when it came to addressing the influence of the Ten Commandments on our republic. For example, twelve of the original thirteen colonies incorporated the entire Ten Commandments into their civil and criminal codes.{1}

John Quincy Adams stated, “The law given from Sinai was a civil and municipal [code] as well as a moral and religious code. These are laws essential to the existence of men in society and most of which have been enacted by every nation which ever professed any code of laws.” He added that “Vain indeed would be the search among the writings of [secular history] . . . to find so broad, so complete and so solid a basis of morality as this decalogue lays down.”{2}

Notes

1. Matthew Staver, The Ten Commandments Battle Continues To Gain Steam, National Liberty Journal, December 2001.
2. John Quincy Adams, Letters of John Quincy Adams, to His Son, on the Bible and Its Teachings (Auburn: James M. Alden, 1850), 61.
3. George Washington, Farewell Address (Philadelphia), September 17, 1796.
4. William Holmes McGuffey, Eclectic Reader in D. James Kenney, Whats Happening to American Education in Robert Flood, The Rebirth of America (Philadelphia: Arthur S. DeMoss Foundation, 1986), 122.

On September 19, 1796, in his Farewell Address, President George Washington said, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports.”{3}

William Holmes McGuffey, considered the Schoolmaster of the Nation, once said, “The Ten Commandments and the teachings of Jesus are not only basic but plenary.”{4}

It is more than just a little ironic that the Supreme Court that ruled against posting the Ten Commandments in public places actually has its own display of the Ten Commandments. Engraved in the stone above the head of the Chief Justice are the Ten Commandments with the great American eagle protecting them. Moses is included among the great lawgivers in the sculpture relief on the east portico. And sessions begin with the invocation, “God save the United States and this honorable court.”

So what can Christians do? First, we should be in prayer about this important issue and pray for future Supreme Court justices who will someday replace those who made these rulings.

Second, we should express our opinions by talking to friends, writing a letter to the editor, and educating people around us about the importance of the Ten Commandments in America.

Third, we should encourage Congress to pass the Constitutional Restoration Act which uses Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution to limit the appellate jurisdiction of the federal courts in areas like the Pledge of Allegiance and the Ten Commandments. Congress has the power to remove power from judges.

Judges who use their power to remove the Ten Commandments should have their power removed from them. Passing this legislation will accomplish that purpose.

© 2005 Kerby Anderson

Wall of Separation

When Thomas Jefferson first used the phrase “wall of separation,” it is certain that he never would have anticipated the controversy that surrounds that term two centuries later. The metaphor has become so powerful that more Americans are more familiar with Jefferson’s phrase than with the actual language of the Constitution.{1}

In one sense, the idea of separation of church and state is an accurate description of what must take place between the two institutions. History is full of examples (e.g., the Inquisition) of the dangers that arise when the institutions of church and state become too intertwined.

But the contemporary concept of separation of church and state goes far beyond the recognition that the two institutions must be separate. The current version of this phrase has come to mean that there should be a complete separation between religion and public life.

At the outset, we should state the obvious: the phrase “separation of church and state” is not in the Constitution. Although that should be an obvious statement, it is amazing how many citizens (including lawyers and politicians) do not know that simple fact.

Since the phrase is not in the Constitution and not even significantly discussed by the framers (e.g., The Federalist Papers), it is open to wide interpretation and misinterpretation. The only clear statement about religion in the Constitution can be found in the First Amendment and we will look at its legislative history later in this article.

Thomas Jefferson used the phrase “separation of church and state” when he wrote to the Danbury Baptist Association in 1802. Then the phrase slipped into obscurity. In 1947, Justice Hugo Black revived it in the case of Everson v. Board of Education. He wrote that the First Amendment “was intended to erect a wall of separation between church and State.” He added that this wall “must be kept high and impregnable.”{2}

The wall metaphor revived by Justice Black has been misused ever since. For example, the wall of separation has been used to argue that nearly any religious activity (prayer, Bible reading, moment of silence) and any religious symbol (cross, creche, Ten Commandments, etc.) is impermissible outside of church and home. Most of these activities and symbols have been stripped from public arenas. As we will see, it doesn’t appear that Jefferson intended anything of the sort with his metaphor.

It’s also worth noting that six of the thirteen original states had official, state-sponsored churches. Some states (Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and South Carolina) even refused to ratify the new Constitution unless it included a prohibition of federal involvement in the state churches.

History of the Phrase (part one)

So what was the meaning of “separation of church and state” and how has it changed? Some history is in order.

The presidential campaign of 1800 was one of the most bitterly contested presidential elections in American history. Republican Thomas Jefferson defeated Federalist John Adams (who served as Vice-President under George Washington). During the campaign, the Federalists attacked Jefferson’s religious beliefs, arguing that he was an “atheist” and an “infidel.” Some were so fearful of a Jefferson presidency, they buried their family Bibles or hid them in wells fearing that President Jefferson would confiscate them.{3}Timothy Dwight (President of Yale College) even warned a few years before that if Jefferson were elected, “we may see the Bible cast into a bonfire.”{4} These concerns were unwarranted since Jefferson had written a great deal in the previous two decades about his support of religious liberty.

In the midst of these concerns, the loyal Republicans of the Danbury Baptist Association wrote to the president congratulating him on his election and his dedication to religious liberty. President Jefferson used the letter as an opportunity to explain why he did not declare days of public prayer and thanksgiving as Washington and Adams had done so before him.

In his letter to them on New Year’s Day 1802, Jefferson agreed with their desire for religious freedom saying that religious faith was a matter between God and man. Jefferson also affirmed his belief in the First Amendment and went on to say that he believed it denied Congress (or the President) the right to dictate religious beliefs. He argued that the First Amendment denied the Federal government this power, “thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.”

It appears that Jefferson’s phrase actually came from the 1800 election. Federalist ministers spoke against Jefferson “often from their pulpits, excoriating his infidelity and deism.”{5} Republicans therefore argued that clergymen should not preach about politics but maintain a separation between the two.

We might add that a century and a half before Jefferson wrote to the Danbury Baptists, Roger Williams erected a “hedge or wall of separation” in a tract he wrote in 1644. Williams used the metaphor to illustrate the need to protect the church from the world, otherwise the garden of the church would turn into a wilderness.{6} While it might be possible that Jefferson borrowed the metaphor from Roger Williams, it appears that Jefferson was not familiar with Williams’ use of the metaphor.{7}

Jefferson used his letter to the Danbury Baptists to make a key point about his executive power. In the letter, he argued that the president had no authority to proclaim a religious holiday. He believed that governmental authority belonged only to individual states. Essentially, Jefferson’s wall of separation applied only to the national government.

History of the Phrase (part two)

Although the Danbury letter was published in newspapers, the “wall of separation” metaphor never gained much attention and essentially slipped into obscurity. In 1879 the metaphor entered the lexicon of American constitutional law in the case of Reynolds v. United States. The court stated that Jefferson’s Danbury letter “may be accepted almost as an authoritative declaration of the scope and effects of the [First] Amendment thus secured.”{8} Although it was mentioned in this opinion, there is good evidence to believe that Jefferson’s metaphor “played no role” in the Supreme Court’s decision.{9}

In 1947, Justice Hugo L. Black revived Jefferson’s wall metaphor in the case of Everson v. Board of Education. He applied this phrase in a different way from Thomas Jefferson. Black said that the First Amendment “was intended to erect a wall of separation between church and State.” He added that this wall “must be kept high and impregnable.”{10}

Daniel Dreisbach, author of Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State, shows that Black’s wall differs from Jefferson’s wall. “Although Justice Black credited the third president with building the ‘wall of separation,’ the barrier raised in Everson differs from Jefferson’s in function and location.”{11}

The wall erected by Justice Black is “high and impregnable.” On the other hand, Jefferson “occasionally lowered the ‘wall’ if there were extenuating circumstances. For example, he approved treaties with Indian tribes which underwrote the ‘propagation of the Gospel among the Heathen.’”{12}

There is also a difference in the location of the two walls. Whereas Jefferson’s “wall” explicitly separated the institutions of church and state, Black’s wall, more expansively, separates religion and all civil government. Moreover, Jefferson’s “wall” separated church and the federal government only. By incorporating the First Amendment nonestablishment provision into the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, Black’s wall separates religion and civil government at all levels—federal, state, and local.{13}

Jefferson’s metaphor was a statement about federalism (the relationship between the federal government and the states). But Black turned it into a wall between religion and government (which because of the incorporation of the Fourteenth Amendment could also be applied to state and local governments).

First Amendment

How did we get the wording of the First Amendment? Once we understand its legislative history, we can understand the perspective of those who drafted the Bill of Rights.{14}

James Madison (architect of the Constitution) is the one who first proposed the wording of what became the First Amendment. On June 8, 1789 Madison proposed the following:

“The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext, infringed.”

The representatives debated this wording and then turned the task over to a committee consisting of Madison and ten other House members. They proposed a new version that read:

“No religion shall be established by law, nor shall the equal rights of conscience be infringed.”

This wording was debated. During the debate, Madison explained “he apprehended the meaning of the words to be, that Congress should not establish a religion, and enforce the legal observation of it by law, nor compel men to worship God in any manner contrary to their conscience.”

Representative Benjamin Huntington complained that the proposed wording might “be taken in such latitude as to be extremely hurtful to the cause of religion.” So Madison suggested inserting the word “national” before the word “religion.” He believed that this would reduce the fears of those concerned over the establishment of a national religion. After all, some were concerned America might drift in the direction of Europe where countries have a state-sponsored religion that citizens were often compelled to accept and even fund.

Representative Gerry balked at the word “national,” because, he argued, the Constitution created a federal government, not a national one. So Madison withdrew his latest proposal, but assured Congress his reference to a “national religion” had to do with a national religious establishment, not a national government.

A week later, the House again altered the wording to this:

“Congress shall make no law establishing religion, or to prevent the free exercise thereof, or to infringe the rights of conscience.”

Meanwhile, the Senate debated other versions of the same amendment and on Sept. 3, 1789, came up with this wording:

“Congress shall make no law establishing articles of faith or a mode of worship, or prohibiting the free exercise of religion.”

The House didn’t like the Senate’s changes and called for a conference, from which emerged the wording ultimately included in the Bill of Rights:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

As we can see, Congress was attempting to prevent the establishment of a national religion or a national church with their drafting of the First Amendment.

Separation, Sponsorship and Accommodation

How should the government relate to the church? Should there be a separation of church and state? Essentially there are three answers to these questions: separation, sponsorship, and accommodation.

At one end of the spectrum of opinion is strict separation of church and state. Proponents of this position advocate the complete separation of any religious activity (prayer, Bible reading) and any religious symbol (cross, Ten Commandments) from government settings. Richard John Neuhaus called this “the naked public square” because religious values are stripped from the public arena.{15}

Proponents of this view would oppose any direct or indirect benefit to religion or religious organizations from the government. This would include opposition to tuition tax credits, education vouchers, and government funding of faith-based organizations.

At the other end of the spectrum would be sponsorship of religious organizations. Proponents would support school prayer, Bible reading in public schools, and the posting of the Ten Commandments in classrooms and public places. Proponents would also support tuition tax credits, education vouchers, and funding of faith-based organizations.

Between these two views is accommodation. Proponents argue that government should not sponsor religion but neither should it be hostile to religion. Government can accommodate religious activities. Government should provide protection for the church and provide for the free expression of religion. But government should not favor a particular group or religion over another.

Proponents would oppose direct governmental support of religious schools but would support education vouchers since the parents would be free to use the voucher at a public, private school, or Christian school. Proponents would oppose mandated school prayer but support programs that provide equal access to students. Equal access argues that if students are allowed to start a debate club or chess club on campus, they should also be allowed to start a Bible club.

We should reject the idea of a “naked public square” (where religious values have been stripped from the public arena). And we should also reject the idea of a “sacred public square” (where religious ideas are sponsored by government). We should seek an “open public square” (where government neither censors nor sponsors religion but accommodates religion).

Government should not be hostile toward religion, but neither should it sponsor religion or favor a particular faith over another. Government should maintain a benevolent neutrality toward religion and accommodate religious activities and symbols.

Notes

1. Barbara Perry, “Justice Hugo Black and the Wall of Separation between Church and State,” Journal of Church and State 31(1989): 55.
2. Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S., 16, 18.
3. Dumas Malone, Jefferson and His Time, vol. 3, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty (Boston: Little, Brown, 1962), 481.
4. Timothy Dwight, The Duty of Americans, at the Present Crisis, reprinted in Ellis Sandoz, ed., Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730-1805 (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1991), 1382.
5. Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) 111.
6. Roger Williams, “Mr. Cotton’s Letter Lately Printed, Examined and Answered,” in The Complete Writings of Roger Williams (Providence, RI: Providence Press, 1866), 1:392.
7. Edwin Gaustad, Sworn on the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B Eerdmans, 1996), 72.
8. Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145, 164.
9. Robert M. Hutchins, “The Future of the Wall,” in The Wall between Church and State, ed. Dallin H. Oaks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 17.
10. Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S., 16, 18.
11. Daniel Dreisbach, Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 125.
12. Derek H. Davis, “Wall of Separation Metaphor,” Journal of Church and State, vol. 45(1), Winter 2003.
13. Dreisbach, Thomas Jefferson, 125.
14. The details of the debate on the First Amendment can be found in the Annals of Congress. The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States. “History of Congress.” 42 vols. Washington, D.C.: Gales & Seaton, 1834-1856.
15. Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1984).

© 2005 Probe Ministries

 

See Also: “I Have Some Questions on the Separation of Church and State”

Introduction

I recently received a phone call from a somewhat frantic radio station producer asking if I would be available for an interview on a noontime call-in program the next day. I’m always a bit amazed when anyone wants to interview me or get my opinion on an important subject, but before I could get too excited about the offer I discovered that the original guest had just cancelled and that they were looking desperately for a last minute fill-in.

The topic of the program was “Who Dumbed-Down American Education.” I accepted the offer and the next day I called the station just before noon. The program host was a bit surprised when I started the show by voicing my discomfort with the intended topic. I told him that the topic implied that someone or some group is intentionally causing our children to perform poorly in school, and that I didn’t think that anyone was capable or even motivated to dumb-down American education. My experience with both public and private schools tells me that the vast majority of teachers and administrators have the best intentions for their students and community.

The educational enterprise in America is far too complicated for a single person or organization to purposefully undermine its successful operation. Public schools are influenced by a remarkable number of organizations both inside and outside of government. State legislatures, local school boards, the Department of Education, teacher’s unions, textbook publishers and numerous other interest groups take part in shaping both the purpose and practice of schooling in America. Although it might be tempting to reduce the problems of public education to one cause, it is highly unlikely that such is the case.

However, this is not to say that Americans are complacent about the performance of our schools. Evidence continues to suggest that our students do not learn as much as those from other countries. A recent international comparison of fifteen year olds found our students stuck in the middle of thirty-two nations on reading, mathematics, and scientific knowledge.{1} But the public’s dissatisfaction with government-sponsored schools goes back to their inception in the mid 1800’s. After a trip to a local New York school in 1892 Joseph Mayer Rice wrote that it was “the most dehumanizing institution that I have ever laid eyes upon.”{2} But while American’s usually agree that our schools have problems, they often differ as to what those problems are and on how to fix them.

Although there is no perfect schooling environment, we can highlight some of the factors that detract from the successful educational progress we would like all of our children to experience. Since the educational system in America is complex, the problems are complex. Here we will

consider a host of problems facing education in America and suggest alternatives that might offer the hope of a good education to more of our children.

Progessive Education

First we will consider the consequences of progressive educational philosophy.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century there have been two prevailing educational philosophies that have competed for dominance in our school systems. Traditional educational philosophy, also called the teacher-centered approach, argues that teaching should focus on the accumulated knowledge and values of our culture. Students should learn from teachers who have acquired a significant amount of that knowledge and who can model the habits and discipline necessary to become a learned person. This view assumes that most students are able to learn but that learning can be difficult and that the joy that comes from learning is often delayed until after the fact. The learning process is the responsibility of both the teacher, who breaks topics down into digestible chunks and the learner who must bring a certain amount of self-motivation to the table. The ultimate goal is the production of mature and responsible adults.

The other educational philosophy that has grown in popularity over the last hundred years is known as progressive educational theory or the student-centered approach. The progressive educational view argues that children are by nature both morally good and eager to learn. Learning is a source of pleasure to children and that given the freedom and opportunity all children will learn what they need to know. The teacher’s role is mainly that of a facilitator. If too direct of an approach to learning is forced on the student such as memorization or unnecessary repetition, students will lose interest in the process. Learning is natural and should proceed in a natural organic manner.

These two educational theories begin with conflicting views of human nature. The traditional view would have much in common with the Christian theologian Augustine, who in the fourth century described his own personal sin nature in his Confessions. His depiction of human nature is that we are born fallen or marred by sin. Education of the right kind can play a role in ameliorating the effects of sin but never erase it. The progressive view looks back to the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau and John Dewey for their point of view. Rousseau, in his work Emile, argues that children are good by nature and only need nature itself to guide their instruction. Dewey believed that children were neither good nor sinful, but rather highly malleable, making the educational process all the more important.

Rousseau and Augustine cannot both be right concerning human nature. Neither can traditional and progressive educational philosophy. Perhaps one problem with our schools is to be found in the most basic assumption of what it means to be human.

Truth

Let’s investigate how the changing way that our society views truth has changed both what and how we teach our children.

Just as progressive education philosophy has slowly found a home in our educational institutions so has a new view of truth. Prior to the twentieth century, education focused on helping students to discover and value truth and the good life that resulted from honoring it, a tradition that goes back to Greek philosophers and Judeo-Christian thought. Many educators limited this search for truth to what science alone could provide and may have valued reason above what is provided by faith and authority. However, the quest was to acquire and teach truth that applied to all people everywhere for all time. Teachers often viewed themselves as dispensers of knowledge, possessors of a grand tradition known as Western Civilization and participants of what is sometimes called the Great Conversation between pagan and Christian thought. These ideas mattered because they were part of a debate over the essence of things. How one viewed human nature, God, ethics, and the natural world were dependent upon which side was favored.

A new view of truth has emerged since the last world war to contest both the purpose of schooling and the role of the teacher. By the end of the twentieth century influential thinkers were arguing that the search for essences or the meaning of life have become useless endeavors. In fact, they argue that language itself is incapable of communicating truth that is true for all people everywhere and for all time. They hold that truth is itself a human invention and that those who possess power in a given culture produce it. In the past teachers might have argued that knowledge is power, today it is often held that power produces knowledge. As a result, all education is viewed more as a political endeavor rather than a quest for universal truth.

Truth is seen as a social construct, something created by a culture that enables people to cope with the world they live in. Since no one can step out of their own culture and evaluate other cultures in an unbiased way, all cultures and their corresponding truths must be treated as equally useful or true. Some cultures are not quite as equal as others. The culture of white males of European descent is almost universally seen as an oppressive one by instructors and textbooks.

The result of this change in our view of truth has been that learning facts about the key events and people of Western culture are downplayed, and coping mechanisms and self-esteem becomes the primary purpose of the educational enterprise.

Decline of the Family

So far we have considered the impact of progressive education philosophy and the postmodern view of truth on our schools. Now we will turn our attention to changes in the American family and how they have affected our classrooms.

One consistent finding of educational research is that family life matters. Students tend to do better in school, and schools are generally more effective when families mirror certain attributes. The most important indicator is the socioeconomic status of the family represented by the occupation, income, and education of the parents. However, other factors play a role as well, such as the presence of two parents in the home and the amount of encouragement given by fathers to go on to college.

Unfortunately, family in America has changed dramatically over the last few decades. Between 1960 and 1999, the percentage of births out of wedlock increased by 523 percent. In 1999 alone, 68.8 percent of births to black mothers, 42.1 percent of births to Hispanics and 22 percent of births to white mothers were to unmarried women.{3} This trend directly impacts the socioeconomic status of families. In 1998, only 9 percent of children suffered from the effects of poverty if their parents were married. On the other hand 46 percent of children lived in poverty if a female headed the family.

The lack of a stable family influence and the presence of a father can be especially devastating for boys. Recent statistics reveal that starting at the elementary school level, girls get better grades than boys and generally fair better in school.{4} Although girls have all but eliminated the much-discussed math and science gap with boys, boys’ scores in reading and writing have been on the decline for years. At the end of eighth grade, boys are held back 50 percent more often, and girls are twice as likely to say that they want to pursue a professional career.{5} Boys are twice as likely to be labeled “learning disabled” and in some schools are ten times more likely to be diagnosed with learning disorders such as A.D.D. Boys now make up two thirds of our special education classes and account for 71 percent of all school suspensions.{6} There is also evidence that boys suffer from low self-esteem and lack confidence as learners.{7}

Men as mentors for boys are not only missing in our homes but they are missing in our schools. The vast majority of our teachers, close to eighty percent, are women, many of them just out of college and with little experience with young boys. This lack of male leadership is one of the many reasons we are less than pleased with the performance of our schools.

Summary

Let’s conclude by focusing on what changes might help our schools do their job better.

In her recent book on the history of progressive education Diane Ravitch argues that:

Schools must do far more than teach children “how to learn” and “how to look things up”; they must teach them what knowledge has most value, how to use that knowledge, how to organize what they know, how to understand the relationship between past and present, how to tell the difference between accurate information and propaganda, and how to turn information into understanding.{8}

The reason that this kind of learning does not happen as often as we like is that we agree less and less about what knowledge has the most value and what constitutes accurate information vs. propaganda. The recent battle over multicultural sensitivities in the curriculum has caused textbook writers to water down history books fearing that some group might be offended. The strident political agenda of teachers’ unions on issues ranging from homosexuality to the environment has caused parents to question teachers’ objectivity and their suitability as role models for their children.

As our society becomes more and more diverse, the “one model fits all” public school system is causing more and more tension. Administrators respond to critics by adding more and more levels of bureaucracy to schools so that many districts now have more employees outside of the classroom than inside.

The current response of government has been to encourage curriculum standards and high stakes testing for all publicly funded schools, but it has avoided the one reform that might make a significant difference. Private schools, with less bureaucracy, more focused academics, and a traditional approach to learning have proven themselves successful in even the most difficult inner city areas. Giving parents, teachers and students real choice in the kinds of schools they want to learn and teach in, via a voucher or tax credit program would generate true diversity and, I believe greater learning for many more of our children. If we are concerned about the general welfare of our people it makes sense to give our poorest students the benefit of private schooling in our worst districts.

Over the last decade Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Cleveland, Ohio have taken bold steps to offer real school choice. So has the creation of a large and growing private voucher program. Soon we will have enough data to evaluate its impact on students. The question of the constitutionality of voucher programs has reached the Supreme Court. Its decision could destroy school choice or greatly encourage it in the future. I hope they don’t miss this opportunity.

Notes

1. David J. Hoff, “U.S. Students Rank Among World’s Best and Worst Readers,” Education Week, December 12, 2001, 7.

2. Diane Ravitch, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, (New York, Simon & Schuster, 2000), 21.

3. “The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators 2001” (Empower.org).

4. William Pollack, Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood, (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998), 15.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., p. xxiii.

8. Ravitch, 17.

©2002 Probe Ministries

Kerby Anderson looks at how a Christian, biblical framework operated as a critical force in establishing our constitution and governmental system. The founders views on the nature of man and the role of government were derived from their biblical foundation.

America’s Christian Roots

The founding of this country as well as the framing of the key political documents rests upon a Christian foundation. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the United States is a Christian nation, although some framers used that term. But it does mean that the foundations of this republic presuppose a Christian view of human nature and God’s providence.

In previous articles we have discussed “The Christian Roots of the Declaration and Constitution” [on the Web as “The Declaration and the Constitution: Their Christian Roots” ] and provided an overview of the books On Two Wings and One Nation Under God. Our focus in this article will be to pull together many of the themes of these resources and combine them with additional facts and quotes from the founders.

First, what was the perspective of the founders of America? Consider some of these famous quotes.

John Adams was the second president of the United States. He saw the need for religious values to provide the moral base line for society. He stated in a letter to the officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts:

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.{1}

In fact, John Adams wasn’t the only founding father to talk about the importance of religious values. Consider this statement from George Washington during his Farewell Address:

And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.{2}

Two hundred years after the establishment of the Plymouth colony in 1620, Americans gathered at that site to celebrate its bicentennial. Daniel Webster was the speaker at this 1820 celebration. He reminded those in attendance of this nation’s origins:

Let us not forget the religious character of our origin. Our fathers were brought hither by their high veneration for the Christian religion. They journeyed by its light, and labored in its hope. They sought to incorporate its principles with the elements of their society, and to diffuse its influence through all their institutions, civil, political, or literary.{3}

Religion, and especially the Christian religion, was an important foundation to this republic.

Christian Character

It is clear that the framers of this new government believed that the people should elect and support leaders with character and integrity. George Washington expressed this in his Farewell Address when he said, “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and Morality are indispensable supports.”

Benjamin Rush talked about the religious foundation of the republic that demanded virtuous leadership. He said that, “the only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid on the foundation of religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments.”{4}

He went on to explain that

A Christian cannot fail of being a republican . . . for every precept of the Gospel inculcates those degrees of humility, self- denial, and brotherly kindness which are directly opposed to the pride of monarchy. . . . A Christian cannot fail of being useful to the republic, for his religion teaches him that no man “liveth to himself.” And lastly a Christian cannot fail of being wholly inoffensive, for his religion teaches him in all things to do to others what he would wish, in like circumstances, they should do to him.{5}

Daniel Webster understood the importance of religion, and especially the Christian religion, in this form of government. In his famous Plymouth Rock speech of 1820 he said,

Lastly, our ancestors established their system of government on morality and religious sentiment. Moral habits, they believed, cannot safely be trusted on any other foundation than religious principle, nor any government be secure which is not supported by moral habits. . . .Whatever makes men good Christians, makes them good citizens.{6}

John Jay was one of the authors of the Federalist Papers and became America’s first Supreme Court Justice. He also served as the president of the American Bible Society. He understood the relationship between government and Christian values. He said, “Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty, as well as the privilege and interest of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers.”{7}

William Penn writing the Frame of Government for his new colony said, “Government, like clocks, go from the motion men give them; and as governments are made and moved by men, so by them they are ruined too. Wherefore governments rather depend upon men, than men upon governments. Let men be good, and the government cannot be bad.”{8}

The founders believed that good character was vital to the health of the nation.

New Man

Historian C. Gregg Singer traces the line of influence from the seventeenth century to the eighteenth century in his book, A Theological Interpretation of American History. He says,

Whether we look at the Puritans and their fellow colonists of the seventeenth century, or their descendants of the eighteenth century, or those who framed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, we see that their political programs were the rather clear reflection of a consciously held political philosophy, and that the various political philosophies which emerged among the American people were intimately related to the theological developments which were taking place. . . . A Christian world and life view furnished the basis for this early political thought which guided the American people for nearly two centuries and whose crowning lay in the writing of the Constitution of 1787.{9}

Actually, the line of influence extends back even further. Historian Arnold Toynbee, for example, has written that the American Revolution was made possible by American Protestantism. Page Smith, writing in the Religious Origins of the American Revolution, cites the influence of the Protestant Reformation. He believes that

The Protestant Reformation produced a new kind of consciousness and a new kind of man. The English Colonies in America, in turn, produced a new unique strain of that consciousness. It thus follows that it is impossible to understand the intellectual and moral forces behind the American Revolution without understanding the role that Protestant Christianity played in shaping the ideals, principles and institutions of colonial America.{10}

Smith argues that the American Revolution “started, in a sense, when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door at Wittenburg.” It received “its theological and philosophical underpinnings from John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion and much of its social theory from the Puritan Revolution of 1640-1660.{11}

Most people before the Reformation belonged to classes and social groups which set the boundaries of their worlds and established their identities. The Reformation, according to Smith, changed these perceptions. Luther and Calvin, in a sense, created a re- formed individual in a re-formed world.

Key to this is the doctrine of the priesthood of the believer where each person is “responsible directly to God for his or her own spiritual state…. The individuals who formed the new congregations established their own churches, chose their own ministers, and managed their own affairs without reference to an ecclesiastical hierarchy.”{12}

These re-formed individuals began to change their world including their view of government and authority.

Declaration of Independence

Let’s look at the Christian influence on the Declaration of Independence. Historian Page Smith points out that Thomas Jefferson was not only influenced by secular philosophers, but was also influenced by the Protestant Reformation. He says,

Jefferson and other secular-minded Americans subscribed to certain propositions about law and authority that had their roots in the Protestant Reformation. It is a scholarly common-place to point out how much Jefferson (and his fellow delegates to the Continental Congress) were influenced by Locke. Without disputing this we would simply add that an older and deeper influence — John Calvin — was of more profound importance.{13}

Another important influence was William Blackstone. Jefferson drew heavily on the writings of this highly respected jurist. In fact, Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England were among Jefferson’s most favorite books.

In his section on the “Nature of Laws in General,” Blackstone wrote, “as man depends absolutely upon his Maker for everything, it is necessary that he should, in all points, conform to his Maker’s will. This will of his Maker is called the law of nature.”{14}

In addition to the law of nature, the other source of law is from divine revelation. “The doctrines thus delivered we call the revealed or divine law, and they are to be found only in the Holy Scriptures.” According to Blackstone, all human laws depended either upon the law of nature or upon the law of revelation found in the Bible: “Upon these two foundations, the law of nature and the law of revelation, depend all human laws.”{15}

Samuel Adams argues in “The Rights of the Colonists” that they had certain rights. “Among the natural Rights of the Colonists are these: First, a Right to Life; second, to Liberty; third, to Property; . . . and in the case of intolerable oppression, civil or religious, to leave the society they belong to, and enter into another. When men enter into society, it is by voluntary consent.”{16} This concept of natural rights also found its way into the Declaration of Independence and provided the justification for the American Revolution.

The Declaration was a bold document, but not a radical one. The colonists did not break with England for “light and transient causes.” They were mindful that they should be “in subjection to governing authorities” which “are established by God” (Rom. 13:1). Yet when they suffered from a “long train of abuses and usurpations,” they believed that “it is the right of the people to alter or abolish [the existing government] and to institute a new government.”

Constitution

The Christian influence on the Declaration is clear. What about the Constitution?

James Madison was the chief architect of the Constitution as well as one of the authors of the Federalist Papers. It is important to note that as a youth, he studied under a Scottish Presbyterian, Donald Robertson. Madison gave the credit to Robertson for “all that I have been in life.”{17} Later he was trained in theology at Princeton under the Reverend John Witherspoon. Scholars believe that Witherspoon’s Calvinism (which emphasized the fallen nature of man) was an important source for Madison’s political ideas.{18}

The Constitution was a contract between the people and had its origins in American history a century earlier:

One of the obvious by-products [of the Reformation] was the notion of a contract entered into by two people or by the members of a community amongst themselves that needed no legal sanctions to make it binding. This concept of the Reformers made possible the formation of contractuals or, as the Puritans called them, “covenanted” groups formed by individuals who signed a covenant or agreement to found a community. The most famous of these covenants was the Mayflower Compact. In it the Pilgrims formed a “civil body politic,” and promised to obey the laws their own government might pass. In short, the individual Pilgrim invented on the spot a new community, one that would be ruled by laws of its making.{19}

Historian Page Smith believes, “The Federal Constitution was in this sense a monument to the reformed consciousness. This new sense of time as potentiality was a vital element in the new consciousness that was to make a revolution and, what was a good deal more difficult, form a new nation.”{20}

Preaching and teaching within the churches provided the justification for the revolution and the establishment of a new nation. Alice Baldwin, writing in The New England Clergy and the American Revolution, says,

The teachings of the New England ministers provide one line of unbroken descent. For two generations and more New Englanders had . . . been taught that these rights were sacred and came from God and that to preserve them they had a legal right of resistance and, if necessary a right to . . . alter and abolish governments and by common consent establish new ones.{21}

Christian ideas were important in the founding of this republic and the framing of our American governmental institutions. And I believe they are equally important in the maintenance of that republic.

Notes

 

1. John Adams, October 11, 1798, in a letter to the officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts. Charles Francis Adams, ed., The Works of John Adams – Second President of the United States: with a Life of the Author, Notes, and Illustration (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1854), Vol. IX, 228-229.
2. George Washington, Farewell Address (September 19, 1796). Address of George Washington, President of the United States, and Late Commander in Chief of the American Army. To the People of the United States, Preparatory to His Declination.
3. Daniel Webster, December 22, 1820. The Works of Daniel Webster (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1853), Vol. I, 48.
4. Benjamin Rush, “Thoughts upon the Mode of Education Proper in a Republic,” Early American Imprints. Benjamin Rush, Essays, Literary, Moral and Philosophical (Philadelphia: Thomas and Samuel F. Bradford, 1798), 8.
5. Ibid.
6. Webster, The Works of Daniel Webster, 22ff.
7. John Jay, October 12, 1816, in The Correspondence and Public Papers of John Jay, Henry P. Johnston, ed., (New York: G.P Putnam & Sons, 1893; reprinted NY: Burt Franklin, 1970), Vol. IV, 393.
8. William Penn, April 25, 1682, in the preface of his Frame of Government of Pennsylvania. A Collection of Charters and Other Public Acts Relating to the Province of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: B. Franklin, 1740), 10-12.
9. C. Gregg Singer, A Theological Interpretation of American History (Nutley, NJ: The Craig Press, 1964), 284-5.
10. Page Smith, Religious Origins of the American Revolution (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1976), 1.
11. Ibid, 2.
12. Ibid., 3.
13. Ibid, 185.
14. William Blackstone, “Of the Nature of Laws in General,” Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book 1, Section II.
15. Ibid.
16. Samuel Adams, “The Rights of the Colonists” (Boston, 1772), The Annals of America, Vol. II, 217.
17. John Eidsmoe, Christianity and the Constitution (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1987), 94.
18. James H. Smylie, “Madison and Witherspoon: Theological Roots of American Political Thought,” American Presbyterians
19. Smith, Religious Origins,
20. Ibid., 4
21. Alice M. Baldwin, The New England Clergy and the American Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 1928), 169.

©2004 Probe Ministries

Those Awful Pictures

Do you remember how you felt as the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal began to unfold in spring 2004? Maybe you saw the disturbing pictures when they were first aired on CBS television’s 60 Minutes II. Soon they were transmitted around the globe. They greeted you on the front page of your morning newspaper and on the evening news. The stream seemed endless.

You saw naked Iraqi prisoners in various stages of humiliation: hooded, naked men stacked in a pyramid; others lying on the floor or secured to a bed; one in a smock standing on a box with his arms outstretched and wires attached to him. In some of the photos, male and female American soldiers grinned and pointed. In one picture, a female soldier stood holding a leash around the neck of a naked male prisoner. In others, soldiers grinned over what appeared to be a corpse packed in ice.

What feelings did you experience? Shock? Anger? Rage? Disgust? Maybe you felt embarrassed or ashamed. “How could they do such degrading things to other human beings?” you might have wondered. Perhaps you feared how the growing storm might affect the life of your friend or family member serving in Iraq. Or wrestled with how to explain the abuse to your children.

Finger pointing began almost as soon as the story broke. High-ranking military and government officials announced that these were aberrations carried out by a few unprincipled prison guards. Accused military police claimed they were merely following orders of military intelligence officials to soften prisoners up for interrogation. Others insisted soldiers had a moral obligation to disobey orders to do wrong. The accused countered that the harsh techniques were in place before they arrived for duty at the prison. Ethical arguments surfaced that the war on terror demanded tough methods to help prevent another 9/11.

What factors prompt people to abuse others in such degrading ways? What goes on inside the minds of the abusers? Are there special social forces at work? While this article won’t attempt to analyze specific cases in the Iraq prison scandal, it will consider some fascinating psychological experiments that reveal clues to the roots of such behavior. The results -– and their implications -– may disturb you. A biblical perspective will also offer some insight.

The Stanford Prison Experiment

CBS News correspondent Andy Rooney said the Iraq prisoner abuse is “a black mark that will be in the history books in a hundred languages for as long as there are history books.”{1}

Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo was not surprised by the Abu Ghraib prison abuse. He had observed similar behavior in his famous 1971 experiment involving a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building.{2} The experiment showed that otherwise normal people can behave in surprisingly outrageous ways.

Zimbardo and his colleagues selected twenty-four young men considered from interviews and psychological tests to be normal and healthy. Volunteers were randomly assigned to be either “prisoners” or “guards.” Guards wore uniforms and were told to maintain control of the prison and not to use violence.

On the second day, prisoners rebelled, asserting their independence with barricades, taunting and cursing. Guards suppressed the rebellion. Zimbardo reports that the guards then “steadily increased their coercive aggression tactics, humiliation and dehumanization of the prisoners.”{3} He says the worst abuse came at night when guards thought no psychology staff were observing.{4} Zimbardo remembers that the guards “began to use the prisoners as playthings for their amusement…. They would get them to simulate sodomy. They also stripped prisoners naked for various offenses and put them in solitary for excessive periods.”{5} They dressed them in smocks, chained them together at the ankles, blindfolded them with paper bags on their heads, and herded them along in a group.{6} Sound familiar?

It was Berkeley professor Christina Maslach, Zimbardo’s then romantic interest whom he later married, who jolted him back to reality. On Day Five, she entered the prison to preview the experiment in preparation for some subject interviews she had agreed to conduct the next day. Shocked by what she saw, she challenged Zimbardo’s ethics later that evening – screaming and yelling in quite a fight, she recalls. That night, Zimbardo decided to halt the experiment.{7}

Zimbardo feels that prisons are ripe for abuse without firm measures to check guards’ lower impulses.{8} He recommends “clear rules, a staff that is well trained in those rules and tight management that includes punishment for violations.”{9}

An old Jewish proverb says, “Like a roaring lion or a charging bear is a wicked man ruling over a helpless people.”{10} Unfettered prison officials -– or most anyone -– can yield to their baser natures when tempted by power inequalities.

The Perils of Obedience

What about those who say they were only obeying authority? How far will people go to inflict harm under orders? In the 1960s, Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted classic experiments on obedience.{11} (Ironically, Milgram and Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo were high school classmates.{12})

At Yale, Milgram set up a series of experiments “to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist.” He writes, “Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not.”{13}

Milgram’s basic design involved a volunteer “teacher” and a “learner.” The learner was actually an actor who was in on the deception. The learner was strapped to “a kind of miniature electric chair” with an electrode on his wrist. The teacher sat before an impressive-looking “shock generator ” with switches indicating voltages from 15-450 volts.{14}

The teacher asked test questions of the learner and was instructed to administer increasingly large shocks for each incorrect answer. (You say you’ve known some teachers like that?) The machine here was a fake –- no learner received shocks -– but the teacher thought it was real.

In the initial experiment, over 60 percent of teachers obeyed the experimenter’s orders to the end and punished the victim with the maximum 450 volts. Milgram found similarly disturbing levels of obedience across various socioeconomic levels. His conclusions after hundreds of experiments were chilling:

…Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.{15}

Why did they obey? Milgram offers several possibilities. Fears of appearing rude, desires to please an authority, aspirations to do one’s best, and lack of direct accountability can all cloud judgment. But could there be something deeper, something in human nature that influences abuse? A famous novel illustrates how the dark side of human nature can affect group behavior.

Lord of the Flies

Prisoner abuse shows what can happen when power inequalities and inappropriate devotion to authority distort one’s moral compass. Nobel laureate William Golding’s short novel, Lord of the Flies,{16} illustrates through a fictional story how similar flaws can manifest in society. A film version of the book helped inspire the popular television series Survivor.{17}

Lord of the Flies opens on a remote, uninhabited island on which some British schoolboys, ages six to twelve, find themselves after an airplane crash. An atomic war has begun, and apparently the plane was evacuating the boys when it was shot down. The island has fresh water, fruit, and other food. The setting seems idyllic. Best of all, the boys discover, there are no grownups (the plane and its crew presumably have washed into the sea).

Four central characters soon emerge. Ralph is elected leader. Piggy, an overweight asthmatic and champion of reason, becomes Ralph’s friend. Simon is a quiet lad with keen discernment. Jack becomes a hunter.

At first, the boys get along without much conflict. Soon, though, fears envelop them, and they debate whether an evil beast might inhabit the island. Jack and his followers kill a wild pig and, in frenzied blood lust, dance to chants of “Kill the pig! Cut her throat! Bash her in!“{18} When Ralph criticizes Jack for breaking some tribal rules, Jack replies, “Who cares?” His hunting prowess will rule.{19}

One night, some boys see a dead parachutist, which they mistake for the “evil beast” and flee. Jack posts a pig’s head onto a stick in the ground as a gift for the beast. The decaying, fly- covered pig’s head soon becomes for Simon the “Lord of the Flies,” a sort of personification of evil.{20} Later, Simon discovers that the feared “beast” is only a human corpse. Running to tell the group this good news, he encounters their mock pig-killing ritual. The crazed boys attack Simon and kill him. Nearly all the boys follow Jack and, acting like savages with painted bodies and spears, kill Piggy and hunt down Ralph. Only the surprise appearance of a British naval officer, drawn by the smoke from a fire, halts the mad pursuit. Ralph and the boys dissolve in tears. Ralph weeps, as Golding writes, “for the end of innocence, the darkness of man’s heart….”{21}

Lord of the Flies is filled with symbolism, both biblical and from Greek tragedy. But Golding’s stated purpose was “to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature.”{22} Could his point that darkness lurks in the human heart help explain the prisoner abuse?

Animal House Meets Lord of the Flies

Prisoner abuse is a sad reality in the U.S. and abroad.{23} The Iraq prisoner abuse scandal smacks of fraternity hazing on steroids, Animal House meets Lord of the Flies. Consider from this sad episode some lessons for both prison reform and society in general:

• Establish clear rules for prison staff; train them well and punish them for violations, as Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo recommends.
  
• Educate against blind conformity. Some of Milgram’s experimental subjects found the strength to resist abusive authority.{24} Some psychologists feel that strong moral values and experience with conformity can strengthen moral courage.{25}
  
• Involve external observers and critics. Often outsiders, not emotionally swept up in a project or event, can through their psychological distance more clearly assess ethical issues. For example, Christina Maslach, Philip Zimbardo’s friend and colleague who challenged the ethics of his prison experiment, credits her late arrival on the scene with facilitating her concern. The experimenters who had planned and had been conducting the experiment for five days were less likely to be startled by the developing misconduct, she maintained.{26}
  
• Realistically appraise human nature’s dark side. Again, Golding said Lord of the Flies was “an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature.”{27} Jesus of Nazareth was, of course, quite clear on this point. He said, “From within, out of a person’s heart, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder,adultery, greed, wickedness, deceit, eagerness for lustful pleasure, envy, slander, pride, and foolishness. All these vile things come from within….”{28}

Some dismiss as simplistic any analyses of human suffering that begin with alleged defects in human nature. They would rather focus on changing social structures and political systems. While many structures and political systems need changing, may I suggest that a careful analysis of the human heart is not simplistic? Rather it is fundamental.

Perhaps that’s why Paul, a leader who agreed with Jesus’ assessment of human nature,{29} focused on changing hearts. Paul was a former persecutor of Jesus’ followers who zealously imprisoned them{30} but later joined them and became a prisoner himself.{31} Paul eventually claimed that when people place their faith in Jesus as he had, they “become new persons. They are not the same anymore, for the old life is gone. A new life has begun!”{32} Could this diagnosis and prescription have something to say to us amidst today’s prisoner abuse scandals?

Notes

1. Andy Rooney, “Our Darkest Days are Here,” CBS 60 Minutes, May 23, 2004, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/20/60minutes/rooney/main618783.shtml.

2. Kathleen O’Toole, “The Stanford Prison Experiment: Still powerful after all these years,” Stanford University News Service, January 8, 1997, http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/97/970108prisonexp.html. A slideshow presentation of the experiment is at www.prisonexp.org. See also W. Lawrence Neuman, Social Research Methods: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches, Third Edition (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1997), 447; Claudia Wallis, “Why Did They Do It?” TIME.com, posted May 9, 2004 (from TIME magazine, cover date May 17, 2004), http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101040517/wtorturers.html; John Schwartz, “Simulated Prison in ’71 Showed a Fine Line Between ‘Normal’ and ‘Monster’,” New York Times, May 6, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/06/international/middleeast/06PSYC.html?pagewanted=print&position=.

3. O’Toole, loc. cit.

4. Ibid.

5. Wallis, loc. cit.

6. O’Toole, loc. cit.

7. Ibid.

8. Schwartz, loc. cit.

9. Wallis, loc. cit. The words are Wallis’.

10. Proverbs 28:15 NIV.

11. Stanley Milgram, “The Perils of Obedience,” Harper’s, December 1973, 62-66, 75-77. (The article is adapted from Milgram’s book, Obedience to Authority [Harper and Row, 1974]). See also Neuman, loc. cit.; O’Toole, loc. cit.; Schwartz, loc. cit.; Wallis, loc. cit.; Anahad O’Connor, “Pressure to Go Along With Abuse Is Strong, but Some Soldiers Find Strength to Refuse,” New York Times, May 14, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/14/international/14RESI.html?ei= 5059&en=854c94250243f62d&ex=1084593600&partner=AOL&pagewanted =print&position=.

12. O’Toole, loc. cit.

13. Milgram 1973, op. cit., 62.

14. Ibid., 62-63.

15. Ibid., 75- 76.

16. William Golding, Lord of the Flies (New York: Perigee, 1988). This “Casebook Edition” includes the 1954 novel plus notes and criticism edited by James R. Baker and Arthur P. Ziegler, Jr.

17. http://www.cbs.com/primetime/survivor8/show/episode14/s8story3.shtml.

18. Golding, op. cit., 69; emphasis Golding’s.

19. Ibid., 84.

20. Many have noted that the phrase “lord of the flies” translates the word “Beelzebub.” See, for instance, E.L. Epstein, “Notes on Lord of the Flies,” in Golding, op. cit., 279: “‘The lord of the flies’ is, of course, a translation of the Hebrew Ba’alzevuv (Beelzebub in Greek) which means literally ‘lord of insects.’” Theologian Louis A. Barbieri, Jr., commenting on Matthew 10:24 ff. says, “Beelzebub (the Gr. has Beezeboul) was a name for Satan, the prince of the demons, perhaps derived from Baal-Zebub, god of the Philistine city of Ekron (2 Kings 1:2). ‘Beelzebub’ means ‘lord of the flies,’ and ‘Beezeboul’ or ‘Beelzeboul’ means ‘lord of the high place.’” (In “Matthew,” John F. Walvoord and Roy B. Zuck, The Bible Knowledge Commentary [Wheaton, Illinois: Scripture Press Publications, Inc., 1983, 1985], Logos Research Systems digital version.) Biblical references to Beelzebub include Matthew 12:24, 27; Mark 3:22; Luke 11:15, 18, 19. In a 1962 interview, Golding himself referred to “the pig’s head on the stick” as “Beelzebub, or Satan, the devil, whatever you’d like to call it….” (James Keating, “Interview with William Golding,” in Golding, op. cit., 192.)

21. Golding, op. cit., 186-187.

22. Epstein, op. cit., 277-278. The words are Golding’s.

23. For example, see “Missouri ‘Rain’ Leads to Toilet Duty,” Inside Journal: The Hometown Newspaper of America’s Prisoners, 14:7, November/December 2003, 5. Inside Journal publisher Prison Fellowship, www.pfm.org, and its affiliates seek to help rehabilitate prisoners and promote restorative justice.

24. Milgram 1973, op. cit., 63-64.

25. O’Connor, loc. cit.

26. O’Toole, loc. cit.

27. Epstein, loc. cit.

28. Mark 7:21-23 NLT.

29. For detailed information on Jesus and evidence to support His claims, see www.WhoIsJesus-Really.com.

30. Acts 8:3; 22:3-5 ff.

31. E.g., Acts 16:19-40.

32. 2 Corinthians 5:17 NLT.

© 2004 Probe Ministries

A Supersnoop’s Dream

Every day we seem to wake up to news about another terrorist threat, so it’s not surprising that Americans are placing more of their faith in the government to protect them. But there are also important questions being raised about our loss of privacy and constitutional protections. So in this article we are going to take a look at some of these issues as we focus on the subject of homeland security.

The Department of Homeland Security was created by combining twenty-two existing agencies and 170,000 federal employees with an annual budget of approximately $35 billion. While the implications of this megamerger of governmental agencies will be debated for some time, some columnists have already begun to question the impact it will have on our private lives.

The Washington Times called it “A Supersnoop’s Dream.” Columnist William Safire of the New York Times wrote a column entitled “You Are a Suspect” in which he warned of a dangerous intrusion into our lives. He predicted in November 2002 that if the Homeland Security Act were not amended before passage, the following would happen to you:

• Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend—all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as a virtual centralized grand database.

• To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you—passport application, driver’s license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance—and you have the supersnoop’s dream: a Total Information Awareness about every U.S. citizen.

It is important to point out that these concerns about a potential invasion of privacy did not start with the passage of the Homeland Security Act. Over a year ago, critics pointed to the hastily passed U.S.A. Patriot Act which widened the scope of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and weakened 15 privacy laws.

On the other hand, there are many who argue that these new powers are necessary to catch terrorists. Cal Thomas, for example, writes that “Most Americans would probably favor a more aggressive and empowered federal government if it lessens the likelihood of further terrorism. The niceties of civil liberties appear to have been lost on the 9/11 hijackers and countries from which they came. Wartime rules must be different from those in peacetime.”{1}

The Patriot Act

Let’s look more closely at the U.S.A. Patriot Act. When Senator Russ Feingold voted against the Act, he made these comments from the Senate floor on October 11, 2001:

“There is no doubt that if we lived in a police state, it would be easier to catch terrorists. If we lived in a country where police were allowed to search your home at any time for any reason; if we lived in a country where the government is entitled to open your mail, eavesdrop on your phone conversations, or intercept your e-mail communications; if we lived in a country where people could be held indefinitely based on what they write or think, or based on mere suspicion that they are up to no good, the government would probably discover more terrorists or would-be terrorists, just as it would find more lawbreakers generally. But that wouldn’t be a country in which we would want to live.”

Most would agree that the Patriot Act weakens grand jury secrecy. Already there is criticism that grand juries have become mere tools of the prosecution and have lost their independence. By destroying its secrecy, any federal official or bureaucrat can “share” grand jury testimony or wiretap information.

The Patriot Act also weakens Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. Under the Act, law-enforcement agencies can in “rare instances” search a person’s home without informing that homeowner for up to ninety days. This so-called “sneak and peek” provision can be used to sneak into your home, and even implant a hidden “key logger” device on a suspect’s computer (allowing federal officials to capture passwords and monitor every keystroke).

And, the Patriot Act weakens financial privacy. The bill added additional amendments and improvements to the Bank Secrecy Act which already encourages FDIC member banks to profile account holders and report to the government (FBI, IRS, DEA) when you deviate from your usual spending or deposit habits. The Act exempts bank employees from liability for false reporting of a money laundering violation.

Michael Scardaville of the Heritage Foundation, however, isn’t concerned about conferring this new power on bureaucrats. “Even if they wanted to, the program’s employees simply won’t have time to monitor who plays football pools, who has asthma, who surfs what Web site or even who deals cocaine or steals cars. They’ll begin with intelligence reports about people already suspected of terrorism.”{2}

Immigration Threats

Lincoln Caplan, writing in the November-December issue of Legal Affairs (a magazine of the Yale Law School), said that the U.S.A. Patriot Act “authorized law enforcement agencies to inspect the most personal kinds of information — medical records, bank statements, college transcripts, even church memberships. But what is more startling than the scope of these new powers is that the government can use them on people who aren’t suspected of committing a crime.”

Although there has been some concern expressed about the intrusion of government into our lives, an even greater concern is how the Homeland Security Act fails to address the real threat to our country through lax enforcement of immigration laws. Michelle Malkin, author of Invasion, cites example after example of problems at the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).

Foreign students getting visas to enter the U.S. constitute a major problem that is out of control. Malkin says that the bill establishing this new department doesn’t do anything about it. There is also a problem with foreigners getting tourist visas to enter the U.S. and then overstaying their visas. The bill doesn’t do anything about this problem either.

More than 115,000 people from Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries are here illegally. Some 6,000 Middle Eastern men who have defied deportation orders remain on the loose. Add these numbers to those who are here legally, but still intend harm to the United States, and you can begin to grasp the extent of the problem.

Consider the case of Hesham Mohamed Hedayet, who shot and killed people at the Los Angeles International Airport. He managed to stay in this country by obtaining a work permit after his wife won residency in a visa lottery program (given to 50,000 foreigners on a random basis).

Michelle Malkin broke the story about the Washington, D.C. area sniper suspect John Malvo. The INS had him in custody but released him. The U.S. State Department failed to obtain a warrant for the arrest of the other sniper suspect, John Muhammad, after he was suspected of using a forged birth certificate to obtain a U.S. passport.

Congress needs to take another look at both the Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Act. In its rush to deal with the imminent terrorist threat, it has conferred broad powers to bureaucrats that should be refined and failed to address some crucial concerns in immigration that continue to threaten our safety. It is time for Congress to pass some common sense amendments to these two pieces of legislation.

History of Governmental Power

I think all of us would strongly support the President and Attorney General in their attempts to track down terrorists and bring them to justice. But some wonder if Congress has put too much power in the hands of the executive branch, power that could easily be abused by this administration or future administrations.

Let’s consider our history. President John Adams used the Alien and Sedition Act to imprison his political enemies and curb newspaper editors critical of him. President Woodrow Wilson permitted his attorney general (Mitchell Palmer) to stop political dissent during the Palmer Raids. And President Franklin Delano Roosevelt interned thousands of Japanese-American citizens during World War II.

It is interesting that some of the greatest expansions of powers have come under Republican presidents. The first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, suspended the writ of habeas corpus. (This is a judge’s demand to bring a prisoner before him, with the intent to release people from unlawful detention.) This led to the imprisonment of physicians, lawyers, journalists, soldiers, farmers, and draft resisters. Sixteen members of the Maryland legislature were arrested in order to prevent them from voting for their state to secede from the Union. By the time the Civil War was over, 13,535 arrests had been made.

Although Democrats have often been credited with expanding the size and scope of the federal government, Republican administrations are actually the ones who have expanded various police powers. RICO and nearly all the seizure laws (where police can confiscate cars, boats, even homes without due process) were passed by Republican administrations.

Dana Milbank wrote in the Washington Post (Nov. 20, 2001) that “The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the war in Afghanistan have dramatically accelerated a push by the Bush administration to strengthen presidential powers, giving President Bush a dominance over American government exceeding that of other post-Watergate presidents and rivaling even Franklin D. Roosevelt’s command.”

Perhaps it is time for Congress to revisit this important topic of anti-terrorism and modify some of the provisions of the Patriot Act. Some have suggested that Congress pass legislation that would sunset all aspects of the Patriot Act. The bill currently has sunset provisions that apply to selected portions of the legislation. But sunset provisions do not apply to the expanded powers given to the federal government which weaken the Fourth Amendment protections we are guaranteed under the Bill of Rights. The bill was touted as an emergency wartime measure, but some of the most dangerous aspects of the bill would continue on even after America wins the war on terrorism. It is time to revisit this bill and make some necessary changes.

Christian Perspective on Government and Privacy

Let’s focus in on the matter of government and privacy.

To begin with, Christians must acknowledge that Romans 13:1-7 teaches that civil government is divinely ordained by God. Government bears the sword, and that means it is responsible to protect citizens from foreign invaders and from terrorists. So on the one hand, we should support efforts by our government to make our society safer.

On the other hand, we should also work to prevent unwarranted intrusions into our privacy and any violation of our constitutional liberties. In the past, drawing lines was easier because an unconstitutional search was conducted by a person who came to your door. Today we live in a cyber age where our privacy can be violated by a computer keystroke.

In the past, what used to be called public records weren’t all that public. Now they are all too public. And what used to be considered private records are being made public at an alarming rate. What should we do?

First, live your life above reproach. Philippians 2:14-15 says “Do all things without grumbling or disputing, that you may prove yourselves to be blameless and innocent, children of God above reproach in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you appear as lights in the world.” 1 Timothy 3:2 says that an elder must be “above reproach” which is an attribute that should describe all of us. If you live a life of integrity, you don’t have to be so concerned about what may be made public.

Second, get involved. When you feel your privacy has been violated or when you believe there has been an unwarranted governmental intrusion into your life, take the time to complain. Let the person, organization, or governmental agency know your concerns. Many people fail to apply the same rules of privacy and confidentiality on a computer that they do in real life. Your complaint might change a behavior and have a positive effect.

Third, call for your member of Congress to take another look at both the Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Act. In their rush to deal with the imminent terrorist threat, Congress may have expanded federal powers too much. Track congressional legislation and write letters. Citizens need to understand that many governmental policies pose a threat to our privacy. Bureaucrats and legislators are in the business of collecting information and will continue to do so unless we set appropriate limits.

Sadly, most Americans are unaware of the growing threats to their privacy posed by government and law enforcement. Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. We need to strike a balance between fighting terrorism and protecting constitutional rights.

Notes

1. Cal Thomas, “More Power to the Government,” Nov. 21, 2002.
2. Michael Scardaville, “TIA Targets Terrorists, Not Privacy,” Nov. 22, 2002.

©2003 Probe Ministries

America’s war on terrorism has once again raised important questions about the proper use of military action. President George W. Bush said on September 20, 2001, “Whether we bring our enemies to justice, or justice to our enemies, justice will be done.” This message and following statements by President Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfield articulated portions of what has come to be known as just war theory. This 1600-year-old Christian doctrine attempts to answer two questions: “When is it permissible to wage war?” and “What are the limitations on the ways we wage war?”

Historically, Christians have adopted one of three positions: (1) Activism — it is always right to participate in war, (2) Pacifism — it is never right to participate in war, or (3) Selectivism — it is right to participate in some wars. The just war theory represents the third position and was articulated initially by Augustine who developed it as a logical extension of Romans 13:1-7.

1 Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God.
2 Therefore whoever resists authority has opposed the ordinance of God; and they who have opposed will receive condemnation upon themselves.
3 For rulers are not a cause of fear for good behavior, but for evil. Do you want to have no fear of authority? Do what is good and you will have praise from the same;
4 for it is a minister of God to you for good. But if you do what is evil, be afraid; for it does not bear the sword for nothing; for it is a minister of God, an avenger who brings wrath on the one who practices evil.
5 Therefore it is necessary to be in subjection, not only because of wrath, but also for conscience’ sake.
6 For because of this you also pay taxes, for rulers are servants of God, devoting themselves to this very thing.
7 Render to all what is due them: tax to whom tax is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor.

Augustine argued that not all wars are morally justified. He said, “It makes a great difference by which causes and under which authorities men undertake the wars that must be waged.”

This seven-point theory provides a framework for evaluating military action. A just war will include the following conditions: just cause, just intention, last resort, formal declaration, limited objectives, proportionate means, and noncombatant immunity. The first five principles apply as a nation is “on the way to war” (jus ad bellum) while the final two apply to military forces “in the midst of war” (jus in bello). Let’s look at each of these in more detail.

Seven Points of a Just War

• Just cause — All aggression is condemned in just war theory. Participation must be prompted by a just cause or defensive cause. No war of unprovoked aggression can ever be justified.

• Just intention — War must be to secure a just peace for all parties involved. Revenge or conquest are not legitimate motives.

• Last resort — War must be engaged as a last resort only after diplomacy and economic pressure have been exhausted.

• Formal declaration — War must be initiated with a formal declaration by properly constituted authorities.

• Limited objectives — War must be characterized by limited objectives such a peace. Complete destruction is an improper objective. War must be waged in such a way that once peace is attainable, hostilities cease.

• Proportionate means — Combatants may not be subjected to greater harm than is necessary to secure victory. The types of weapons and amount of force used should be limited to what is needed to repel aggression and secure a just peace.

• Noncombatant immunity — Military forces must respect individuals and groups not participating in the conflict. Only governmental forces or agents are legitimate targets.

Objections to Just War

Two types of objections often surface against the idea of just war theory. First, there is the moral objection. Pacifists argue that it is never right to go to war and often cite biblical passages to bolster their argument. For example, Jesus said believers should “turn the other cheek” (Matt. 5:39). He also warned that “those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword” (Matt. 26:52).

However, the context of the statements is key. In the first instance, Jesus is speaking to individual believers in his Sermon on the Mount, admonishing believers not to engage in personal retaliation. In the second instance, He tells Peter to put down his sword because the gospel should not be advanced by the sword. But at the same time, Jesus actually encouraged his disciples to buy a sword (Luke 22:36) in order to protect themselves.

Two political objections have been cited in the last few months against the application of just war theory to our war on terrorism. Critics say that the idea of a just war applies to only to nations and not to terrorists. Even so, that would not invalidate American miliary actions in Afghanistan or Iraq.

But the criticism is incorrect. It turns out that Christian thought about just war predates the concept of modern nation-states. So the application of these principles can apply to governments or terrorist organizations. Moreover, the very first use of American military force in this country was against Barbary Pirates (who were essentially the terrorists of the 18th century).

Critics also argue that since terrorism is an international threat, the concept of just war would require an international declaration of war. This is not true. The U.S. or any other country does not need to get international approval to defend itself. Even so, both President George H. W. Bush and President George W. Bush have brought the issue of Iraq to the United Nations for a vote. But as the current president made clear, he sought UN approval, not permission. He would like multilateral approval and help, but the U.S. is prepared to go it alone if necessary.

©2003 Probe Ministries

Introduction

For more than thirty years proponents of comprehensive sex education have argued that giving sexual information to young children and adolescents will reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

Perhaps one of the most devastating popular critiques of comprehensive sex education came from Barbara Dafoe Whitehead. The journalist who said that Dan Quayle was right also was willing to say that sex education was wrong. Her article, “The Failure of Sex Education” in Atlantic Monthly, demonstrated that sex education neither reduced pregnancy nor slowed the spread of STDs.

Comprehensive sex education is mandated in at least seventeen states, so Whitehead chose one of those states and focused her analysis on the sex education experiment in New Jersey. Like other curricula the New Jersey sex education program rests on certain questionable assumptions.

The first tenet is that children are “sexual from birth.” Sex educators reject the classic notion of a latency period until approximately age twelve. They argue that you are “being sexual when you throw your arms around your grandpa and give him a hug.”

Second, children are sexually miseducated. Parents, to put it simply, have not done their job, so we need “professionals” to do it right. Third, if miseducation is the problem, then sex education in the schools is the solution. Parents are failing miserably at the task, so “it is time to turn the job over to the schools. Schools occupy a safe middle ground between Mom and MTV.”

Learning about Family Life is the curriculum used in New Jersey. While it discusses such things as sexual desire, AIDS, divorce, and condoms, it nearly ignores such issues as abstinence, marriage, self-control, and virginity.

Whitehead concludes that comprehensive sex education has been a failure. For example, the ratio of teenage births to unwed mothers was 67 percent in 1980 and rose to 84 percent in 1991. In the place of this failed curriculum, Whitehead describes a better program. She found that “sex education works best when it combines clear messages about behavior with strong moral and logistical support for the behavior sought.”

One example she cites is the Postponing Sexual Involvement program at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, which offers more than a “Just say no” message. It reinforces the message by having adolescents practice the desired behavior and enlists the aid of older teenagers to teach younger teenagers how to resist sexual advances. Whitehead also found that “religiously observant teens” are less likely to experiment sexually, thus providing an opportunity for church-related programs to help stem the tide of teenage pregnancy.

Condoms

Are condoms a safe and effective way to reduce pregnancy and STDs? Sex educators seem to think so. Every day sex education classes throughout this country promote condoms as a means of safe sex or at least safer sex. But the research on condoms provides no such guarantee.

For example, Texas researcher Susan Weller, writing in the journal Social Science Medicine, evaluated all research published on condom effectiveness. She reported that condoms are only 87 percent effective in preventing pregnancy and 69 percent effective in reducing the risk of HIV infection. This 69 percent effectiveness rate is also the same as a 31 percent failure rate in preventing AIDS transmission.

To be effective, condoms must be used “correctly and consistently.” Most individuals, however, do not use them “correctly and consistently” and thus get pregnant and get sexually transmitted diseases.

Contrary to claims by sex educators, condom education does not significantly change sexual behavior. An article in the American Journal of Public Health stated that a year-long effort at condom education in San Francisco schools resulted in only 8 percent of the boys and 2 percent of the girls using condoms every time they had sex.

Even when sexual partners use condoms, sometimes condoms fail. Most consumers do not know that the FDA quality-control standards allow for a maximum failure rate of four per 1,000 using a water fill test. And even if condoms are used correctly, do not break, and do not leak, they are still far from 100 percent effective. The Medical Institute for Sexual Health reported that “medical studies confirm that condoms do not offer much, if any, protection in the transmission of chlamydia and human papillomavirus, two serious STDs with prevalence as high as 40 percent among sexually active teenagers.”

Nevertheless, condoms have become the centerpiece of U.S. AIDS policy and the major recommendation of most sex education classes in America. Many sex educators have stopped calling their curricula “safe sex” and have renamed them “safer sex”–focusing instead on various risk reduction methods. But is this false sense of security and protection actually increasing the risks young people face?

If kids buy the notion that if they just use condoms they will be safe from AIDS or any other sexually transmitted disease whenever they have sex, they are being seriously misled. They should be correctly informed that having sex with any partner having the AIDS virus is life-threatening, condoms or no condoms. It would be analogous to playing Russian roulette with two bullets in your six chambers. Using condoms removes only one of the bullets. The gun still remains deadly with the potential of a lethal outcome.

School-based Health Clinics

As comprehensive sex education curricula have been promoted in the schools, clinics have been established to provide teens greater access to birth control information and devices. Proponents cite studies that supposedly demonstrate the effectiveness of these clinics on teen sexual behavior. Yet a more careful evaluation shows that school-based health clinics do not lower the teen pregnancy rate.

The most often-cited study involved the experience of the clinic at Mechanics Arts High School in St. Paul, Minnesota. Researchers found that a drop in the number of teen births during the late 1970s coincided with an increase in female participation at the school-based clinic. But at least three important issues undermine the validity of this study.

First, some of the statistics are anecdotal rather than statistical. School officials admitted that the schools could not document the decrease in pregnancies. Second, the total female enrollment of the two schools included in the study dropped significantly. Third, the study actually shows a drop in the teen birth rate rather than the teen pregnancy rate. The reduction in the fertility rate listed in the study was likely due to more teenagers obtaining an abortion.

Today, more and more advocates of school-based health clinics are citing a three-year study headed by Laurie Zabin at Johns Hopkins University, which evaluated the effect of sex education on teenagers. The study of two school-based clinics in Baltimore, Maryland, showed there was a 30 percent reduction in teen pregnancies.

But even this study leaves many unanswered questions. The size of the sample was small and over 30 percent of the female sample dropped out between the first and last measurement periods. Critics point out that some of girls who dropped out of the study may have dropped out of school because they were pregnant. Other researchers point out that the word abortion is never mentioned in the brief report, leading them to conclude that only live births were counted.

On the other hand, an extensive, national study done by the Institute for Research and Evaluation shows that community-based clinics used by teenagers actually increase teen pregnancy. A two- year study by Joseph Olsen and Stan Weed found that teenage participation in these clinics lowered teen birth rates. But when pregnancies ending in miscarriage or abortion were factored in, the total teen pregnancy rates increased by as much as 120 pregnancies per one thousand clients.

Douglas Kirby, former director of the Center for Population Options, had to admit the following: “We have been engaged in a research project for several years on the impact of school-based clinics. . . . We find basically that there is no measurable impact upon the use of birth control, not upon pregnancy rates or birth rates.”

Sex Education Programs

As we’ve seen, the evidence indicates that the so-called “solution” provided by sex educators can actually make problems worse.

The problem is simple: education is not the answer. Teaching comprehensive sex education, distributing condoms, and establishing school-based clinics is not effective. When your audience is impressionable teens entering puberty, explicit sex education does more to entice than educate. Teaching them the “facts” about sex without providing any moral framework merely breaks down mental barriers of shame and innocence and encourages teens to experiment sexually.

A Louis Harris poll conducted for Planned Parenthood found that the highest rates of teen sexual activity were among those who had comprehensive sex education, as opposed to those who had less. In the 1980s, a Congressional study found that a decade-and-a-half of comprehensive, safe sex education resulted in a doubling in the number of sexually active teenage women.

Our society today is filled with teenagers and young adults who know a lot about human sexuality. It is probably fair to say that they know more about sex than any generation that has preceded them, but education is not enough. Sex education can increase the knowledge students have about sexuality, but it does not necessarily affect their values or behavior. Since 1970 the federal government has spent nearly $3 billion on Title X sex education programs. During that period of time nonmarital teen births increased 61 percent and nonmarital pregnancy rates (fifteen-to-nineteen-year-olds) increased 87 percent.

Douglas Kirby wrote these disturbing observations in the Journal of School Health:

“Past studies of sex education suggest several conclusions. They indicate that sex education programs can increase knowledge, but they also indicate that most programs have relatively little impact on values, particularly values regarding one’s personal behavior. They also indicate that programs do not affect the incidence of sexual activity. According to one study, sex education programs may increase the use of birth control among some groups, but not among others. Results from another study indicate they have no measurable impact on the use of birth control. According to one study, they are associated with lower pregnancy rates, while another study indicates they are not. Programs certainly do not appear to have as dramatic an impact on behavior as professionals once has hoped.”

So, if sex education is not the solution, what is? Let’s look at the benefits of abstinence and the abstinence message in the schools.

Abstinence

Less than a decade ago an abstinence-only program was rare in the public schools. Today, directive abstinence programs can be found in many school districts while battles are fought in other school districts for their inclusion or removal. While proponents of abstinence programs run for school board or influence existing school board members, groups like Planned Parenthood bring lawsuits against districts that use abstinence-based curricula, arguing that they are inaccurate or incomplete.

The emergence of abstinence-only programs as an alternative to comprehensive sex education programs was due to both popularity and politics. Parents concerned about the ineffectiveness of the safe- sex message eagerly embraced the message of abstinence. And political funding helped spread the message and legitimize its educational value.

Parents and children have embraced the abstinence message in significant numbers. One national poll by the University of Chicago found that 68 percent of adults surveyed said premarital sex among teenagers is “always wrong.” A poll for USA Weekend found that 72 percent of the teens and 78 percent of the adults said they agree with the pro-abstinence message.

Their enthusiasm for abstinence-only education is well founded. Even though the abstinence message has been criticized by some as naive or inadequate, there are good reasons to promote abstinence in schools and society.

First, teenagers want to learn about abstinence. Contrary to the often repeated teenage claim, not “everyone’s doing it.” A study by the Centers for Disease Control found that 43 percent of teenagers from ages fourteen to seventeen had engaged in sexual intercourse at least once. Put another way, the latest surveys suggest that a majority of teenagers are not doing it.

Second, abstinence prevents pregnancy. Proponents of abstinence- only programs argue that abstinence will significantly lower the teenage pregnancy rate, and they cited numerous anecdotes and statistics to make their case.

Third, abstinence prevents sexually transmitted diseases. After more than three decades the sexual revolution has taken lots of prisoners. Before 1960, doctors were concerned about only two STDs: syphilis and gonorrhea. Today there are more than twenty significant STDs ranging from the relatively harmless to the fatal.

Fourth, abstinence prevents emotional scars. Abstinence speakers relate dozens and dozens of stories of young people who wish they had postponed sex until marriage. Sex is the most intimate form of bonding known to the human race, and it is a special gift to be given to one’s spouse.

Teenagers want and need to hear the message of abstinence. They want to promote the message of abstinence. Their health, and even their lives, are at stake.

 

©2003 Probe Ministries.

If anything is constant in public education, it is the endless cycle of reform and innovation that in turn generates endless theories and educational jargon. Heated conflicts exist over how to teach everything from reading to algebra. In the past, when our public schools were mostly local affairs, the debate was more localized. Today, state legislatures and even Congress take part in the battles, which can occasionally become the single most important issue in statewide elections.

Parents are usually not interested in the politics of education; they want to know what works! They realize that their children have one opportunity to become an educated person and those inappropriate educational ends or methods will permanently shape their children’s lives. Here we will focus on answers to the question, “What works in education?” Some of the answers will come from a compilation of research done by the Department of Education under William Bennett in the 1980’s.

Education should be about two tasks, building the intellect and instilling virtue. Regarding the intellect, the following words of Jacques Barzun serve us well:

[I]t is intelligence stored up and made into habits of discipline, signs and symbols of meaning, chains of reasoning and spurs to emotions–a shorthand (and a wireless) by which the mind can skip connectives, recognize ability, and communicate truth. Intellect is at once a body of common knowledge and the channels through which the right particle of it can be brought to bear quickly, without the effort of redemonstration, on the matter in hand.{1}

Many have recognized the fact that parents are the first and most important teachers of their children. Christian parents should seek to begin their children’s education as early as possible. To that end, John Amos Comenius wrote in his work The Great Didactic that,

If we want to educate a person in virtue we must polish him at a tender age. And if someone is to advance toward wisdom he must be opened up for it in the first years of his life when his industriousness is still burning, his mind is malleable, and his memory still strong.{2}

What can parents do? To begin with, the more book-friendly parents can make a home the better. Parents should read to their young children and let their children read to them. Asking in-depth questions about what is being read will boost comprehension skills, vocabulary, and general knowledge. Keep a consistent family routine for meals, bedtime and homework. Both parents should model the importance of a life of the mind. One of the best ways of doing this is to limit mindless entertainment like television. For, in order for our children to become mature handlers of the Word (2 Timothy 2:15), they must become competent readers.

Next we will look at the way parents and teachers can partner together to educate our children.

The Parent Teacher Partnership

It is extremely important that both teacher and parents convey high expectations to students regarding academic performance. Studies have shown that low expectations on the part of teachers can become self-fulfilling prophecies for their students. These students are often seated far from the teacher, receiving less direct instruction and attention. Parents need to work with teachers who have failed to expect good work from their children. This requires frequent communication with the teacher, as well as the student. If a parent perceives that a teacher may have “given up” on their child, a meeting with everyone involved, including a school counselor, should be called immediately. If the situation is allowed to continue, your child may find himself hopelessly behind.

Sometimes parents demand too much of their children, resulting in anxiety and low self-confidence, but it is far more common for parents not to expect reasonably high standards for their children’s academic work.

A corollary to setting high expectations for students is helping them to make a healthy connection between ability and effort. When students are young they equate effort with ability. In other words, if they work hard and do well, they assume that they have a high level of ability. Failure means that they did not try hard enough, something that they can personally overcome on the next assignment. Later, students learn that ability and effort are not the same. Some students need to work much harder at certain things in order to do as well as others. As a result, students might try to mask what they perceive to be low ability by turning in tests early even though they are hastily finished or by choosing not to participate in class discussions. High levels of effort come to represent low ability. As a result many students fail to work to their potential. Believing that they lack ability, they eventually lose hope for academic success.

Underachievement becomes a response to the possibility that they may be low ability students. Teachers and parents must intervene before these patterns become fixed. By setting high standards and insisting on consistent, diligent work, parents and teachers can work together to build confidence that can become the foundation for future effort. In some cases, parents may need to help their children crawl before they can walk. They may have to supervise homework efforts minute by minute until the student begins to see a connection between the work invested and its resulting success.

Some general rules for successful study include: convince your child not to cram or try to accomplish large amounts of work in one sitting, help them to weigh the importance of an assignment by developing a system of schoolwork triage, and help your student to identify the standards necessary to succeed. Parents and students should work together to find a strategy that yields the best results.

Classroom Environment

The amount of class time spent on instruction has an obvious influence on student achievement. Unfortunately, studies show that in elementary classrooms actual “time on task,” time focused on academic subjects, ranges from 50 percent to 90 percent of a given school day. This is so proportioned because of tasks imposed on the classroom teacher by those outside of the schools. But it can also be an indication of poor classroom management. What does a well-managed classroom look like?

First, class work is carefully planned, including content, presentation time, and instructional activities. Good teachers set and communicate clear expectations to the students so that they know what is required to succeed. They also make sure that content is sequenced so that it builds in a logical and consistent fashion and that students know where they are heading and how to get there.{3} A good teacher will also check students for comprehension often and give them multiple opportunities to practice what they have learned. This common sense approach to classroom management is called direct instruction, and research indicates that it has been found to help young and disadvantaged students learn basic skills and older, higher ability students to tackle more complex material.{4}

Since the more time that is focused on a topic naturally results in greater learning, the way that a teacher utilizes homework is also important. Research shows that although homework is beneficial for all students, it is even more significant for those with low and medium abilities. In fact, average students who do three to five hours of homework a week, begin to receive grades equal to those of high-ability students who do no homework at all.{5} It has been found that Japanese students spend about twice as much time studying outside of school as American students.{6}

However, not every type of homework is helpful. All of us can remember doing homework that seemed like an afterthought. Homework needs to be well planned to be effective. It should relate directly to what is happening in the classroom and be treated as an integral part of instruction by the teacher. This means that teachers should take time to evaluate the assignments and count the grade. Assignments should be analytical rather than standard work sheets, and they should encourage students to think more deeply about the material. Homework encourages students to follow directions, to make comparisons, to raise questions, and to develop responsibility and self-discipline.{7}

Student assessment is another key factor to effective schooling. Teachers should evaluate students often in order to detect if the material is being covered too quickly or too slowly. Assessment should be done often and by various means. Teachers should use essays, tests, homework, quizzes (both verbal and written), as well as group projects to measure student progress. Students benefit from immediate feedback so that they can correct ineffective study habits or arrange for special tutoring

Teaching Methods

You wouldn’t think that how we teach children to read would be very controversial. It is! The ongoing battle between whole-language advocates and those who recommend systematic, structured phonics instruction is a heated and often strident one. The two methods stand on very different theoretical foundations and thus emphasize different activities for children. Both use phonics and both advocate early, intensive reading by children. But whole-language promoters argue that learning to read and write are natural skills that can be acquired as easily as learning to talk. Just immerse children in words and good books, and they will eventually make sense of it all. Phonics advocates argue that reading is not a natural skill, and that children need intensive and comprehensive phonics training to succeed. They add that a high level of illiteracy, even in the U.S. where the written word is universally found, refutes the notion that language skill acquisition is automatic.

Jeanne Chall, long time professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education argued that research has established that reading is essentially a phonemic activity; children must know the relationship between sounds and letters. If children have not mastered this basic information, they cannot learn to read. Research has also demonstrated that teaching phonics benefits all children, particularly those who are at risk. Focusing on phonics does not deaden a child’s desire to read, in fact, whole language is hurting children by not providing them with the tools necessary to read.{8} Athough whole language advocates argue that invented spelling, which calls upon students to apply phonics knowledge, actually forces students to think more deeply about phonics, others are not convinced of its effectiveness.

Our question is, “What really works?” Research by Steven A. Stahl and Patricia Miller concluded, “We have no evidence showing that whole language programs produce effects that are stronger than existing basal programs, and potentially may produce lower effects.”{9} Even stalwarts of whole language are moving towards a more comprehensive phonics curriculum.

Similar arguments have arisen over the use of calculators in early math instruction. Although many math teachers advocate early classroom use, the public is not so sure. One survey found that 80 percent of math teachers are in favor of early use, but only 10 percent of the public agrees. Although the final word on early calculator use is still out, research does support the use of manipulatives in teaching young children math. Using objects to represent mathematical values helps students to understand abstract ideas quicker.

Likewise, students learn science best when they are able to do experiments on personal predictions regarding natural phenomenon. Students often reject textbook and lecture material for what they consider to be common sense. Only when they are confronted with actual experimental data do they shed themselves of incorrect assumptions.

Finally let’s look at how overall school organization affects learning.

School Organization

Schools benefit greatly from having a strong educational leader, usually the principal, who focuses continually on improving the educational program of the school. This doesn’t seem too controversial. Unfortunately, many principals are either not equipped to perform this role or are not expected to. In order to be an educational leader, a principal must have thought carefully and deeply about what it means to be an educated person, and to have developed a clear vision for implementing his or her plan. Some principals haven’t had the academic experience to prepare them for this role. Too many have come from a physical education background and coaching duties, which may be a plus when it comes to discipline problems, but not very helpful in constructing an overall vision for academic excellence.

The educational leader should also enjoy a high degree of autonomy in building his or her program. This includes the hiring and firing of teachers and unrestricted communication with parents. Success is often determined by how well parents and teachers can be motivated towards the principal’s vision. Unfortunately, this is much easier to do in private schools than in public ones.

A safe and orderly school environment is necessary for learning to occur. Nevertheless, many schools do not enjoy this basic requirement for success. This problem not only impacts inner city schools, which fight the multiple problems related to poverty and highly bureaucratic administrations. Rural schools can suffer from poor discipline and a lack of consistent policies as well. Realistically, even in generally good schools, a single teacher can diminish the educational experience of his or her class by refusing to, or not even desiring to, maintain order. This is where a strong principal can step in and make a difference.

A teaching staff is most effective when they share high morale, agree that students need grounding in the basics of each subject, and hold students to high standards. Teacher collegiality, the sharing of problems and solutions with one another in a professional atmosphere, is another indication of an effective teaching staff. Unfortunately, many teachers operate without the benefit of peer input. Collegiality seems to occur more often at the elementary school level than in our high schools.

Schools that test their students for the purpose of offering remedial help tend to be more effective, as are those that encourage their students to take more advanced academic courses.

Just knowing what an effective school looks like is only part of the battle for better schools. The challenge is to change poorly performing schools into effective ones. Research shows that effective schools tend to have a much higher degree of autonomy than ineffective ones; something found far more often in private schools than in public schools. Unfortunately, our public school bureaucracy doesn’t appear to be moving in the right direction.

Notes

1. Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect, (Harper & Row: New York, 1959), 4.
2. What Works: Research About Teaching and Learning, U.S. Department of Education, 1986, 6.
3. Ibid., 34.
4. Ibid., 35.
5. Ibid., 41.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 42.
8. “Whole Language in the 90’s,” Update, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Vol 35 #9, 1993.
9. Arthur Ellis & Jeffrey Fouts, Research on Educational Innovations, Princeton, NJ: Eye On Education, 46.

©2001 Probe Ministries