Published Monday, August 21, 2023

A note from

OCPAC FOUNDATION PRESIDENT

BOB LINN

CORRECTING OUR CULTURAL LENS

Last week, Tyler Kingkade, a national reporter from the Los Angeles office of NBC News, contacted me about my support of the policies of Ryan Walters. Among other things on his mind were the recommendations that were made that Oklahoma’s classrooms display a copy of the Ten Commandments.

I have no idea what will be said in his article. I do know that on the phone, this Iowa native was a complete gentleman. He did his undergraduate work as an Iowa State Cyclone, so he is a member of Oklahoma’s beloved Big 12 fraternity. He was polite, asked only reasonable questions, and seemed anxious to understand the policies making front page news in Oklahoma’s educational arena.

I was compelled to point out that the currents of secularity which have overwhelmed academia in America do not represent the larger picture of Western Civilization and its point of maturation in America.

In 1635, the first public school in America was founded in Boston, Massachusetts by Rev. John Cotton, a Puritan pastor. Bible reading was required. A year later, Harvard University was founded specifically to spread Christianity across America.

In 1647, because reading the Bible was considered so important, both Massachusetts and Connecticut passed the “Old Deluder Satan Law.” It required that children be taught to read in order to prevent secular ideologies from deluding them as a result of an inability to read the Bible.

Beginning in 1647, and for the century which followed, the most popular educational text in America was the 1687 New England Primer. As any good Puritan (Calvanist) text should, it began teaching the alphabet with the phrase:

And, so on, with Biblical imagery

from A to Z, the lesson of the

English alphabet ended thus:

It included, of course, both the Ten Commandments and the Shorter Westminster Catechism.

It makes me proud that my Alma Mater, Indiana University, known so well for its basketball history as well as for its famed school of music, also proudly displays in its library of historic documents a section dedicated to the New England Primer.

We are all familiar with the name Horace Mann. He is known as one of the founders of America’s public (common) school system. In 1848, he published his Twelfth Annual Report.

The importance of what he sought to do with American schools was stated with dramatic clarity when he said of “common” education that it may become:

The most effective …

of all the forces of civilization.

Evil men know this well and it is, in part, the foundation of political tyrannies from Lenin to Mao.

This is why no government should be allowed to control the education of any society. It allows them to train the next generation of voters.

Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world.

~Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.

~Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

_____________

The separation of Christianity from the public

soul of American culture has warped

the lens through which academia,

media, and statecraft are viewed.

America’s founding was not based on the atheistic materialism of the Marxist tyrants who have left the stage of world history a bloody mess. American prosperity and liberty is based on its Christianity. So, it was quite natural, in 1848, for Horace Mann to add to the comments above by saying:

Moral education is a primal necessity of social existence. Practical morals can never be attained without religion. Our public schools … earnestly inculcate Christian morals and founds its morals on the basis of religion [Christianity]. It welcomes the religion of the Bible. One of the moral beauties, of the Massachusetts system ... The Bible is in our common schools by common consent.

1835

In 1835, university language professor and preacher, William Holmes McGuffey, was hired by Truman and Smith Publishers to write a series of educational reading books for students.

From the foreword of McGuffey's 1836 Reader:

The Christian religion is the religion of our country.

From it are derived our prevalent notions of

the character of God, the great moral

governor of the universe.

On its doctrines are founded the

peculiarities of our free institutions

McGuffey added:

The Ten Commandments and the teachings

of Jesus are not only basic but plenary

(complete in every way).

McGuffey's Readers were the most

popular school textbooks in America.

For more than 120 years

From the period extending from 1836 to 1960

The McGuffy Reader sold a million copies a year

McGuffey's Eclectic Sixth Reader, 1907, included this:

While most nations trace their origin to barbarians, the foundations of our nation were laid by civilized men, by Christians ... The memory of our fathers should be the watchword of liberty throughout the land; for, imperfect as they were, the world before had not seen their like, nor will it soon, we fear, behold their like again. Such models of moral excellence, such apostles of civil and religious liberty ... To ridicule them is national suicide.

Lincoln referred to him as

Schoolmaster of the Nation.

In McGuffey's 5th Eclectic Reader, 1879, is a lesson titled:

Religion

The Only Basis of Society

How powerless conscience would become without the belief of a God .

Erase all thought and fear of God from a community, and selfishness and sensuality would absorb the whole man.

Appetite, knowing no restraint ... would trample in scorn on the restraints of human laws ... Man would become ... what the theory of atheism declares him to be -- a companion for brutes.

In my interview with Tyler Kingkade, the NBC national journalist, I was asked about the way in which bringing the Ten Commandments into the classroom of Oklahoma’s public schools was appropriate.

In my response, I pointed out the fact that no single text in the history of the human race has so impacted cultures the world over as has the Bible.

No single man in the history of the world has so impacted cultures as the Bible's protagonist. The calendars of the nations are based on the date of his birth.

It is not possible to appreciate the world’s greatest literature without at least a cursory knowledge of the world's most sought-after book, the Bible. Shakespeare, Melville, Samuel Clements (aka Mark Twain), Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky all referenced the Biblical text.

Perhaps the greatest novel every written, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, quoted this Biblical text from Jesus Christ on its Title Page:

“Verily, Verily, I say unto you, unless

a grain of wheat falls into

the ground and die,

it abideth alone:

But if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”

~John 12:24

I told my new friend from NBC that the Communist Manifesto was the second most impactful text ever written and should also be required reading in our public schools.

Obviously, as the 20th century bore out for all to see, the materialism of the Manifesto's atheism failed to produce the soothing cultural balm known to those cultures which were instead impacted by the Biblical text.

Ignorance of either of these two major texts represents an education steeped in academic incompetence. The inability to be conversant on either Karl Marx or Jesus of Nazareth represents an incomprehensible level of ignorance.

Our children are in school to glean the wisdom of our past.

Otherwise, we are not educating. We are indoctrinating.

______________

THANKS TO BILL FEDERER

Special thanks to Bill Federer for much of the research which underlies this article. And, thanks to Bill for the constant work he does to keep America educated and to hold before us those things which are primary in importance and which bring glory to Christ.

Find Bill Federer in the American Minute.

CONTENTS

STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION

Meeting this week

TWO WEEKS FROM NOW AT OCPAC FOUNDATION

Markwayne Mullin

LAST WEEK AT OCPAC FOUNDATION

Dan Fisher

JOIN BOB & JANE LINN at

STATE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION

THIS THURSDAY

August 24, 2023

Meeting 9:30am

Arrival time: 8:30am

THE FOURTEEN YEAR SAGA OF

TULSA PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN THE NEWS

Watch here

The far left seeks to combat the work being done by Ryan Walters and the State Board of Education to remove pornography from our schools, to remove racist ideology , and to re-focus on academics.

They show up each month and were it not for the many of you who also show up, the news media would have a field day. Actually, they do anyway.

However, Ryan Walters and the board need your presence to balance the room.

Jane & I will show up at 8 AM in order to have a place in line. We encourage you all to show up by 8:30. It is for the future of our children.

SEE BOARD AGENDA HERE