THE MARQUIS DE SADE AND MODERN "PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION"
BY CHARLES W. MOORE
A couple of years ago in discussion on Canada's CBC Radio, teacher and
liberal activist Heather Jane Robertson argued that the educational system's
client is society--not parents.
I doubt that many listeners, or probably even Ms. Robertson herself,
realized that the ideological position she advocating owes much to the
philosophy of Donatien Alphonse François--better known as the Marquis de
Sade. In his "La Philosophie dans le Boudoir," Sade wrote:
"Do not think you can make good republicans so long as you isolate in your
family the children who should belong to the community alone.... If it is
wholly disadvantageous to allow children to imbibe interests from the family
circle, which are quite different from those of their country, it is wholly
advantageous to separate them from
their family."
HUMANIST CONSPIRACY
In 1990, Dr. Mary Jo Bane, Assistant Professor of Education at Wellesley
College, asserted: "In order to raise children with equality, we must take
them away from families and communally raise them." If children can't be
taken away physically--yet--Sade's ideological heirs like Robertson and Bane
are determined to separate them culturally and intellectually from their
parents' values, when the latter conflict with secular humanism. These
educators speak for a widespread humanist conspiracy to subvert our
educational institutions and turn them into indoctrination-mills for the
leftist, social-engineering worldview.
An extreme and paranoid observation? Consider this statement by prominent
U.S. educator John Dunphy in "A Religion For a New Age," The Humanist,
Jan.-Feb. 1983:
"The battle for humankind's future must be waged and won in the public
school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their roles as the
proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity that recognizes and
respects the spark of what the theologians call divinity in every human
being. These teachers must embody the same selfless dedication as the most
rabid fundamentalist preachers, for they will be ministers of another sort,
utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in
whatever subject they teach, regardless of educational level--preschool, day
care or large state university. The classroom must and will become an arena
of conflict between the old and the new--the rotting corpse of
Christianity... and the new faith of humanism."
Dunphy is at least forthright about what must be attacked for his vision of
humanist utopia to be realized--echoing T.S. Eliot's dream of "systems so
perfect that no one will need to be good." "The Bible is not merely another
book, an outmoded and archaic book," writes Dunphy, "it has been and remains
an incredibly dangerous book." It would be wonderful if more of its nominal
adherents had as much respect for the Bible and its power!
CHILDREN WHO BELIEVE IN GOD MENTALLY ILL?
Secular humanism is anything but a "neutral" ideology--it is the foresworn
and implacable enemy of Christianity and all other traditional religious
faiths. James Curry, former president of the American Humanist Association
concedes that "Humanism is a polite term for atheism." Writing in Ms.
magazine, arch-feminist Gloria Steinem expresses the view that "By the year
2000 we will--I hope--raise our children to believe in human potential, not
God." " Any child who believes in God is mentally ill," asserts social
psychologist Paul Baldwin in his book "The Social Sciences." Baldwin goes on
to brag that national mental health programs are being developed to help
children who believe in God to have "healthier, more balanced," mental
attitudes.
Parroting Baldwin, Harvard University education professor Chester Pierce
reportedly tells his teachers-in-training: "Every child in America entering
school at the age of five is mentally ill, because he comes to school with
certain allegiances toward our founding fathers, our elected officials,
toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, toward the
sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It is up to you teachers to
make all of these sick children well by creating the international children
of the future."
PARENTS DICTATORS AND SUPPRESSORS?
This poisonous conspiracy of left-wing extremist subversion in the education
establishment is not just a post-1960s phenomenon. Dr. Brock Chisholm, the
Canadian psychiatrist who was the World Health Organization's first
Director, and also President of the World Federation for Mental Health,
wrote in 1946: "The concept of right and wrong is a barrier to developing a
civilized way of life and should be eradicated. Children have to be freed
from... prejudices forced upon them by religious authorities.... Parents are
dictators and suppressors of the child's better nature.... Sex education
should be introduced--eliminating 'the ways of the elders,' by force if
necessary." It is frightening to imagine that Chisholm may have actually
believed this corrosive humanist drivel.
John Dewey, who probably had more influence on modern North American
educational theory than any other individual, was a signer of the original
"Humanist Manifesto" in 1933. This guru of "progressive" education left no
ambiguity as to where he stood:
"There is no God, and there is no soul. Hence there are no needs for the
props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, their
immutable truth is also dead and buried," wrote Dewey in "Living
Philosophies" (1930).
LIBERTINE DEMENTIA
Robertson, Bane, Dunphy, Curry, Baldwin, Pierce, Chisholm, and Dewey are all
philosophical heirs of the Marquis de Sade, who hated Christianity and was
several times imprisoned for blasphemy. Sade ended his days in a mental
institution, declared to be suffering from "libertine dementia," an
affliction which has become pandemic in out time. Regrettably, the diagnosis
has fallen into disuse now that the inmates are running our social asylum.
Meanwhile Christianity has been banned and purged from public education,
while the religion of secular humanism is taught unopposed as the "new
gospel." And make no mistake, as John Dunphy affirmed--humanism is a
religion. The Humanist Manifesto declares: "Religious humanism considers the
complete realization of human personality to be the end of man's life and
seeks its development in the here and now.... The central task of mankind is
the quest for the good life"
SYSTEMATIC CAMPAIGN TO SUBVERT CHILDREN'S MINDS
If you agree with the humanist creed, your children will receive excellent
religious instruction in public school. If you are a Christian (or a
follower of any other traditional religion), then your kids are being
systematically indoctrinated with religious principles and values that are
hostile and antagonistic to your beliefs. There is no such thing as "values
neutral" humanism. The systematic campaign to subvert children's minds being
waged by the humanist ideologues who dominate our educational establishment
is unacceptable, to say the very least. Parents must act forcefully to take
back control of their children's education. At present, homeschooling or
religious private schools are the only effective means of innoculation
against the liberal-humanist virus.
--
Atheism teaches that there is no God, hence no God-given rights. That
ideology coupled with a system that believed in the superiority of the state
at the expense of the individual was murderously synergistic.
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