Ignorant Intellectuals, No. 5

RV50-02

There is a publication issued which is called The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. This bulletin has periodically published the picture of the face of a clock with hands set at the proximity of mankind to atomic doomsday at midnight. In December of 1980, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists had the picture of the clock on its cover with the minute hand at seven minutes to midnight. In January of 1981, ... the bulletin had moved the minute hand up to four minutes to midnight. The entire human race, in the minds of these atomic scientists, stands on the threshold of enormous social upheaval and of unprecedented suffering and death through an atomic holocaust. These are not Christian Scientists. These are simply men of the world. These are simply scientists who are analyzing what they see from their frame of reference as scientists, and the picture is very bad indeed.

What these scientists are referring to, unknowingly, is what the Bible describes as the seven-year tribulation period of human history. During this period, all restraints of biblical principles will be removed, as the Christians are raptured off the face of the earth. God the Holy Spirit, who indwells church-age believers, will also leave the earth at the rapture, and will terminate, thereby, His current restraint of evil, which He now exercises upon societies of the world. Mankind in the tribulation will then be free, under Satan's leadership, to build human society on the human viewpoint concepts devised by influential men from the past. There will be no more Moral Majorities around to be irritating with various restraints.

Ignorant Intellectuals

John Dewey

Progressive Education

The Open-Ended Discussion

Subjective Feelings

The counselor technique is to ask the patient how he feels about something. This is why it's so easy to be a counselor. It's a lucrative trade. It's a wonderful business to get into, because all you do is: First, you grow a beard. Then you sit in a soft chair. Then you listen to the person's problem, and you say, "Now, what do you think about that?" And the person tells you what he thinks about it. Then you say, "Now what do you think you should do about it?" Then he tells you what he should do about it. Then you say, "What do you feel about what you think you should do about?" And he tells you what he feels about what he should do about it. Then the time is up: thirty minutes; $50; "Thank you;" we'll take care of it; and, the nurse goes out. And you have contributed a vast amount of wonderful health to this human being? That is the counselor technique: "Look into yourself, dummy, and see what you can dredge up, and come up with."

This enables a person to have no divine viewpoint answers. You can manipulate emotions, and you can cause a person to have a sense of subjection to the group mentality, and away from personal convictions, and what your parents taught you. That's the whole purpose of the discussion of subjective feelings. It's terrible when so many Christian youth programs resort to this as the method to be relevant to people: to sit there and discuss how you feel about things. Many times, it is something that some kid never even thought about the fact that he should have any adverse feelings about. Remember that Satan controls through emotional domination of the soul. That is his prime technique. Anybody without the daily intake of Bible doctrine into his soul is at Satan's mercy, and make no mistake about that. That's why the technique of progressive education, and of dredging up your subjective feelings about one thing and another, is so successful, because without doctrine in the mind, you're a sitting duck.

The program of progressive education was designed around, of all things, the deemphasizing of learning content. It discouraged assigning homework, because that caused you to think that learning subject matter was important, and that wasn't the purpose of school anymore under the Dewey system. You weren't there to learn subject matter. You weren't there to develop academic skills. When you gave a child homework, it distracted him from the thing that school was for, which was to be occupied with his emotions, and to changing his attitudes so that he was beginning to be transformed into a socialist mentality. That is what the school system was for – using the school to bring about social changes.

Consequently, the issuing of report cards, with objective grades, was viewed as competitive and individualistic, and therefore it was viewed as part of the capitalist free enterprise mentality, and it was rejected. Giving report cards means that some people have more ability than other people. Some people score higher than other people. Some people, therefore, are able to, by their abilities, secure more benefits than other people. So, report cards were discouraged. They couldn't get rid of the report cards entirely because parents wouldn't stand for that. So, they said, "We'll change what we put on a report card. Instead of giving grades, we'll put an 'S' for satisfactory, and we'll put a 'U' for unsatisfactory. That's it." Parents get a report card, and it says "S" for satisfactory, or "U" for unsatisfactory. Dewey said, "That's one of the most brilliant moves we made. We wiped the report card out without eliminating it."

The report card hinders developing a socialist mentality. It made people seem to be deserving of unequal benefits on the basis of how they applied themselves, and how they use the ability that God has given them. Classroom discipline conducive to learning was viewed as stifling to the development of the human personality. So, teachers were not to keep a quiet classroom. They were not to demand that children function in an orderly pattern of rules within the classroom. The traditional classroom was seen as a climate for memorizing information, and for practicing academic skills like learning how to write, instead of developing attitudes for the socialist state, which is what schools were now designed to do. Classroom discipline discouraged children from doing their own thing, and it encouraged them to conform to their parents' middle-class values. So, Dewey said, "We have to remove from the classroom this demand for order, and quietness, and application. That works against our being able to develop a socialist outlook."

They took the attitude that children do not have a sin nature. But a disciplined classroom takes the attitude of the nature of the case – that children do have a sin nature, and that, on their own, they will do what is wrong unless that nature is curbed. Well, Dewey said, "No, children by nature are good, and they never tire of saying, "If children will be left to themselves, they will do the right thing." I wondered if any of them who said that ever had children. That has not been entirely my experience, and I doubt if it has been yours.

Subject matter majored upon what was called social studies. The term "social studies" was unknown in American education until Dewey came along and invented it. They lumped geography; civics; economics; and, political science together. They were no longer to be taught as separate subjects with all the implications of using them in that way. Instead, the material was united in such a way as to create, from a variety of these basic directions, a concept for a one-world socialist government. This was the mentality that social studies developed in the minds of children, which was, in effect, an anti-biblical viewpoint. The mastery of the three R's; the mastery of fine literature; the mastery of mathematics; and, the mastery of languages was replaced by Mickey Mouse projects and play activities. The whole concept of subject matter was out. The concept of social studies to change attitudes was in.

The government itself was increasingly brought under the control of progressive education, and was involved in curriculum development projects. One of those was sponsored by the National Science Foundation, which spent vast sums of money to develop a course of study called "Man: A Course of Study." The acronym was "MACOS." There are thousands upon thousands of schools in the United States who now use this program designed for fifth-graders. This course of study was financed by the United States government several years ago with over $7,000,000 dollars, which would be quite a bit more today. When this program was put out, it went to the publishers, who themselves are rabid Dewey fans and liberals, and who want to promote all of these basic ideas that we've been talking about that are going to create the tribulation world. Even these publishers backed off and said, "You must be crazy. Do you think we're going to publish that?" The people who developed the program said, "Well, the United States government sponsored this program." The publishers said, "We don't care. We're not about to publish it." Finally, the United States government made a deal with an unknown publisher called Curriculum Development Associates on an 80% discount of the royalties that were supposed to go back to the government, so that they would publish this course of study.

So, I want to read to you a little bit about the description of this course, and what is included, for fifth-graders. And this is not just here and there. This is all over the United States. This is what is being drilled into fifth-grade children:

"Materials for the MACOS, which include numerous books, films, records, pamphlets and other teaching aides, are full of references to adultery; cannibalism; infanticide; killing of old people; trial marriages; wife-swapping; murder; and, other behavior practiced by the Netsilik Eskimos studied as part of the course. The idea drummed into fifth-grade children day-after-day is that such practices are considered all right by the Eskimo culture, and, by extension, should be looked upon with tolerance by ours. This is what bothers parents and other critics of this program. It is not that students should not be exposed to knowledge of other cultures, but there is some question as to whether children should be exposed to such harsh realities at this young stage of their development. In the view of many, this kind of material might better be reserved for college-level anthropology courses.

"Even worse, if children are going to be exposed to this kind of behavior in other cultures, it should be made clear to them that such activity should by no means be considered acceptable or morally upstanding. Yet, the purpose of MACOS, as its educator supporters readily admit, is precisely to get children to question this society's most cherished values.

"The alarming result, as Susan Marschner demonstrates in the study to be published shortly by The Washington-based Heritage Foundation, is that children come to believe that there are no moral absolutes. To say that it is not possible to use a set of moral values to arrive at answers to problems assumes the truth of situation ethics and relativism. In short, MACOS teaches children that nothing is sacred – not the religious beliefs taught them by their parents; not Western civilization; not their country; nothing, except perhaps the anything-goes beliefs of the course's leftist developers Jerome S Bruner and B.F. Skinner, whose book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, showed in stark relief his affinity for changing human values through psychological conditioning."

Here are direct quotes from some of the written materials provided elementary school children as part of their MACOS training:

"Wife-swapping: Husbands have a very free hand in their married life. It is considered to be quite in order for them to have intercourse with any woman wherever there is an opportunity." Volume 1, page 117.

Another quote: "Two men who become ... partners are so closely bound together that they can exchange wives if they choose." Booklet 18, page 38.

Another quote, on cannibalism: "The wife knew that the spirits had said her husband should eat her, but she was so exhausted that it made no impression on her. She did not care. It was only when he began to feel her, when it occurred to him to stick his fingers in her side to feel if there was flesh on her, that she suddenly felt a terrible fear. So, she, who had never been afraid of dying, now tried to escape. With her feeble strength, she ran for her life. Then it was as if ... he saw her only as a quarry that was about to escape him. He ran after her, and stabbed her to death. After that he lived on her, and he collected her bones in a heap over by the side of the platform for the purpose of fulfilling the taboo required of all who die." Volume 1, pages 97-98.

This is what these fifth-grade children read in these textbooks.

Here's a section on divorce and trial marriage: "Divorce is common as long as there are no children, and there are women who go through seven or eight trial marriages before they finally settle down." Volume one, page 115.

A section on female infanticide: "I talked to several Netsilik women in one camp about the children they had. One had borne eleven children: four boys, and seven girls, of which four girls had been allowed to die at birth." Booklet 18, pages 24-25.

On murder: "As time went on, the old woman grew angry, for she too wanted a husband. She envied her daughter more and more, until one day when her daughter's husband was out hunting caribou, she killed her. She took the young, smooth skin from her daughter's face and hand, and with it she covered her wrinkled old face and her bony hands. When her daughter's husband returned, the mother went to greet him as her daughter always did." Booklet 25, pages 11-12.

This is fifth-grade reading material.

On senicide (old age): "When we spoke of Eskimo murder, father Henry told me about a man now at Committee Bay who had come to him one day, and after the usual tea and silence, had said to him suddenly, 'I took the old woman out on the ice today.' It was his own mother that he had driven out and sat down at sea to freeze to death. 'He was fond of her,' he explained. 'He had always been kind to her, but she was too old, and she was no longer any good for anything – so blind she couldn't even find the porch to crawl into the igloo. So, on a day of blizzard, the whole family agreeing, he had taken her out, and they had struck camp and gone off, leaving her to die." Volume seven, page 18.

"The children are far from being passive observers in this program. On the contrary, they are required to grapple with some of the most difficult of moral questions. In addition, they are made to participate in psychological games involving surveillance of the actions of their fellow pupils, and their parents' conduct of family life. MACOS has been denounced by the renowned New York clinical psychologist Dr. Rhoda Loran for 25 years, a practitioner of psychotherapy for children and young adolescents, and also a professor at Long Island University. Said Dr. Loran, 'The program not only forces the children to be preoccupied with infanticide and senicide, as well as the gory details of animal slaughter; it also aims at making the children accepting of these practices. Further, the children are forced to identify with the customs through role-playing, even of Eskimo myths. In the enactment of one myth, a child (about whom I was told) was required to play the role of the elderly grandmother who clings to a boat which is about to leave her behind to die. Another child was assigned the role of her offspring who chops off the grandmother's fingers so that she can't delay their departure.'"

This is in the classroom, and these are the roles they play. Remember that we said role-playing? That is one of the techniques and key words of the Dewey concept.

"Dr. Armand Di Francesco, a family physician in Buffalo, New York, says MACOS has caused emotional traumas and psychological disturbances for several young children he has personally treated: 'I first became interested in this course of study when a young 12-year-old girl from a nearby city was referred to me because of severe anxiety, and insomnia, and school phobia, who began to have sexual obsessive thoughts. In therapy, I've learned that this was brought about by the teachings and by the stories as recounted in the MACOS program. I subsequently had occasion to have two other cases of children who developed anxiety and conflicts as a result of some of the things that were taught in this program that were in conflict with some of their religious beliefs and teachings at home. But if MACOS were not doing enough harm, EDC is now moving forward under a new grant approved on January 10th of this year to promote and market a sequel to MACOS for high school students called 'Exploring Human Nature.''"

That is just a little sampling of the materials that constitute progressive education. Again, it is wide-spread. We gave you an example of that right here in the local system of this city last week. It is not something that exists on the other side of the world. The government is increasingly being brought in to subsidize this kind of an educational system. The government is being brought in to try to inhibit traditional schools. The ultimate expression of that, of course, was the creation under the previous administration of the federal Department of Education. The federal Department of Education is a lividly leftist organization run by lividly leftist Dewey supporters. It was a political payment made by Mr. Carter to the National Education Association, which, for the first time in its history, endorsed a political candidate when they endorsed Mr. Carter for the presidency. He paid his debt at the great destruction, again, of our national heritage, because the National Education Association is dedicated to creating a secular humanist society in the progressive education heritage of John Dewey. This group needs desperately to eliminate the competition of traditional schools, especially of the Christian kind.

Remember that – that that is what government is frequently used for. Government is used to eliminate competition. In business, we have a lot of howling and whining about the regulations that government has produced that's inhibiting business. Most people do not realize that the regulations that are imposed on business do not originate with the members of Congress. They originate with members of the business community. Here's a segment of the business community that's under the painful pressure of competition from another segment, so they create a set of regulations which they say will improve our industry, but they create the regulations in such a way that it will keep them in business, but eliminate their opposition. And they take that to Congress. These congressmen don't come up with these regulations. They simply accept it from the very community that is going to be regulated. But it's one segment using government to regulate another.

That's exactly what's happening in education. The leftist category of education is creating the regulations upon education in this country. The National Department of Education is such a device for the explicit purpose of eliminating the competition that is threatening the Dewey leftist education for socialism in this country. So the National Education Association has turned the teaching profession from an honored profession into a trade union in order to eliminate the competition of traditional education.

This contrast is so fantastic that it is really pathetic. There's an excellent little book out called Divine Songs by Isaac Watts. It has been reprinted. Sometime perhaps we'll go through in more detail on the introduction to this little volume. But the whole point that the introduction makes is that a lady gathered these songs of Isaac Watts into a book that children used to learn. This lady began researching what children's literature was like in the United States before the era of John Dewey. And she was appalled to discover the kind of solid material that children read; the kind of information that children were given; and, the kind of biblical concepts. These were the kind of things that we would consider that you've got to be practically out of high school to read and think about now. Instead, now we have Mrs. Piggly Wiggly's Farm, and the Cat in the Hat, and Dick and Jane. That's the level of the content that children are given to read.

Unless you go through some of these things, you cannot believe the kinds of things that American children grew up reading. And they learned to read with their mothers at home. When they came to school, no school ever thought about a child coming and saying, "This is an 'A,' and this is a 'B.'" When you came to school, you already basically knew how to read, because you started learning that at home. And the kind of thing you were reading was the hard kind of thing, like the King James Version of the Bible. Here were little first-graders walking in our culture in the United States of America with that kind of capacity. And not only that, but with all of the qualities of discipline and orderliness and control necessary to a classroom situation already built in them.

What do we do in Berean Christian Academy? We are constantly plagued with children who come to us totally unprepared for a classroom situation by their sloppy parents. Their parents now find themselves desperately unable to change a child because you've got to clip it within the first two or three years. Now, they are trying to get us to help them. Periodically, I have to make speeches to my teachers that they are not obliged to suffer and to sweat blood over some kid who cannot enter our educational system because his parents have not prepared him at home because of the kinds of things that they are prepared his mind with from television, instead of the quality and the substance that children should receive from the parents before they ever walk into school. It is no wonder that the Dewey education is having such a marvelous field day of slaughtering the people of this country, and our children, and our heritage.

Remember that John Dewey had the ... method right, though his principles were wrong. He said, "Get us one generation where we have our system of education throughout this country, and we will wipe out the attitude for free enterprise capitalism; we will wipe out biblical principles; we will establish secular humanism; we will establish a socialist mentality; and, it will be irrevocable, no matter what happens."

This is exactly what Hitler said. Hitler used to scoff at parents who were resisting him. He would say, "Who are you? I have your children, and your children will turn against you, and they will destroy you. I have your children. Who are you to stand up and oppose me?" And he was correct in that concept.

The Heritage of Progressive Education

Lower Test Scores

Increased Drug Usage

Cultural Morons

A Collectivist Mentality

The Voucher System

Internationalism

A Barnyard Mentality

Here are a few more. Dewey has given us students who know all about drugs; pornography; rock and roll stars; dirty words and signs; abortion; the evils of capitalism; and, about Brooke Shields maneuvering her buns in a pair of Calvin Klein sucker jeans, but who themselves are ignorant of their great American cultural heritage, and who can't sing God bless America. That's what progressive education has produced, and don't you kid yourself that it hasn't.

We have students who are more educated by the violence; crudity; obscenity; immorality; and, pseudo sophistication they see on television than anything of the gentleness; the manliness; the womanliness; and, the refinements that can be found, and should be found, in school.

We have the spirit of rebellion permeating school children against constituted authority as an infringement on students' rights. We see it here in a Christian school, where we have some kid who is brought under restraints because of his misbehavior and his conduct, and he goes home to his parents, and these parents call on the phone, and then they feel us out to see how far they can go in maneuvering on behalf of this kid, to cut us off at the pass and take up for him, so that he learns his lesson to be rebellious against constituted authority. Their parents have picked up the spirit of the Dewey age as well.

One of the worst things about the Dewey product is that public school classrooms have degenerated into mental health clinics, with the teachers acting as the mental health clinicians, and they're treating their patients, the students. They see the students' behavior as something which must be reconditioned from middle-class values (that is, biblical values) to those of humanism. This is the reason for the pressure to have children enter school at earlier years, in order to get them into the clinic sooner, away from their parents, so that the correction can be made. They can be reconditioned. The Dewey supporters design programs to begin in kindergarten to cure the child of this insanity of middle-class values instilled by his parents.

Biblical Values

Judgments

Deuteronomy 11:28 says, "And a curse if you will not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn aside out of the way which I command you just this day to go after other gods, which you have not known."

On secular humanism, Isaiah 3:4-5: "I will give children to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them." Oh, if that isn't progressive education – kids ruling over the adults: "And the people shall be oppressed, everyone by another, and everyone by his neighbor. The child shall behave himself proudly against the ancient (against the adults), and the base against the honorable." The bum; the slob; the incompetent; the violent; and, the criminal are against those who are responsible and orderly.

Isaiah 3:9: "The show of their countenance does witness against them, and they declare their sin like Sodom. They hide it not." There is progressive education. You don't even hide your sin: "Woe unto their soul, for they have rewarded evil unto themselves."

Isaiah 3:12: "As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them." There is your educational system – women to rule in place of the authority of men: "Oh my people. They who lead you cause you to err and, destroy the way of your paths." God says, "When you turn against Me, one of the things that will happen is that you'll find women dominating and ruling you, so that the women themselves are destroyed from their womanliness."

Psalm 37:12-13: "The wicked plots against the just, and gnashes upon him with his teeth. The Lord shall laugh at him, for he sees that his day is coming." Oh that's a great verse. Can you imagine how God must shake His head as He listens to these ignorant intellectual fools that we've been describing, and their ideas, and how God shakes His head, and He says, "Boy, you don't know what you're in for." And God has to laugh at our stupidity for listening to them.

Psalm 37:17-18: "For the arms of the wicked shall be broken, but the Lord upholds the righteous. The Lord knows the days of the upright, and their inheritance shall be forever."

Then in Romans 1:22-23, there is the sophisticated arrogance of those who reject the Scripture, and tell us that we must use human intellect to find out what is really true about God instead of the revelation of the Scriptures: "Because when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful, but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened; professing themselves to be wise, they became fools."

Then Romans 1:28: "Even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind to do those things which are not seemly; being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, whisperers, backsliders, haters of God, insolent, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenant breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful, who, knowing the judgment of God, that they who commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them." There you have progressive education summarized.

One more is Jeremiah 17:5: "Thus says the Lord, cursed be the man that trusts in man, and makes flesh his strength, and whose heart departs from the Lord." This means trusting in these men such as we've been describing: "For he shall be like the shrub in the desert, and shall not see when good comes, but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in the salt land and not inhabited. Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord and whose hope is the Lord (the Bible doctrine man), for he shall be like a tree planted by the waters that spreads out its roots by the river, and shall not see when heat comes, but her leaf shall be green, and shall not be anxious in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit." What a tremendous picture! The Bible doctrine-oriented, super grace person, right in the midst of every crisis, and in the midst of every parched condition of the human race, is going to be prospering and flowering and bearing fruit. "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. Who can know it? I, the Lord, search the heart. I test the conscience, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings."

So, what's the antidote to this? One thing: the only antidote to progressive education is Christian education such as Berean Christian Academy. Berean Christian Academy is moving out to meet the need in a very dramatic and great way. It has needs that are monumental now in the way of a physical plant (in the way of a classroom building) in order to do that job. The other day I was in Dallas near Dallas Seminary, and I stood across the street, and I watched that huge new seminary building going up – the student center. Of course, the thought came to my mind that I'm sure comes to the mind of a lot of people: Is that a worthy investment when the rapture is right at hand? If Hal Lindsey is right, we've got a matter of months before us. Is that a worthy investment for the seminary to be putting a few million dollars into that building? Is it a worthy investment for a school to be erecting properties like that?

As I stood there, the thought hit me suddenly. It's not just until the rapture, because the thought struck me that one of the biggest things that is going to have to be done after the rapture is a monumental reeducation of the human race. They are going to have to be reeducated from the progressive education concepts, and everything else of the men that we have looked at have represented, to divine viewpoint. And Dallas Seminary is putting up a building that is going to be used throughout the millennium. I just hope they're building it good, because they'll get an awful lot of wear on a building in 1,000 years, and they're going to have to be cranking out the men of God who are going to be the teachers to reorient the human race. They are going to be, just as we are going to be, in the period of the millennium.

If Berean academy puts up a new school building, it's not going to be just until the rapture. Somebody is going to use it for a little bit (seven years). They're going to get a little bit of knocking around out of it. We're going to have to come in, and Gilmore Holt is going to have to refurbish it. But after we get it put back in shape, eventually, we're going to go with the thing, and we're not going to just throw it aside. We're going to be here as one of the key agencies of reeducating the human race. That's why we need a building. That's why we need somebody to give us $500,000 dollars now to get a building with a 500-seat auditorium in it, ready-to-go and rolling, so that we can really have the facilities with which to do the job of Christian education, and the job of Bible doctrine instruction. Our role is far, far in the future. We've got to stop thinking about from now to the rapture. That's wrong. It's from now to the beginning of eternity. That's what we are engaged in, and that's what you and I are called to do.

So, pray for the expansion of this athletic field. There used to be two lots. One of them is gone now. They're building warehouses on them. There's one more left. Over the years, we've tried to get people to try to negotiate to purchase those. I've never been able to get to first base. Now, one of them is gone. It would be a pity if we couldn't get the other one. Hopefully, in time, now that it's for sale, we will be able to expand, but it takes a lot of money to do it. Now is the time to put up the school building. If there is anything that Easter ought to be all about, it ought to be the realization that the world doesn't know what this day represents. Only we, who are oriented to doctrine, know that. And it is incumbent upon us to get the word out in the way that God has equipped us, and has prepared us, and has enabled us, and has given us the experience such that we can do better than most people can do it.

Dr. John E. Danish, 1977

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