Lectures on Education

Anarchy & Education

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Education

Lesson: Anarchy & Education

Genre: Speech

Track: 83

Dictation Name: RR123A1

Location/Venue:

Year: 1960’s-1970’s

Last summer, a man who had heard me speak two or three times called me long distance from another state. He was speaking rather slowly and under some emotional tension and strain, and he said, “I felt that I had to call you and tell you what happened. I decided this summer to go back to school to get another degree, and I have not been in school for some few years. I knew that things weren’t entirely all they should be in the academic community, and so I choose this particular academic community in a somewhat out of way area, in a small city,” and he said, “I am staggered by the experience. One of the professors I am doing graduate work under is the epitome of blasphemy. His hatred of Christianity is intense. He is foul-mouthed, he is obscene, but I am required to take a course from him.” And he said yesterday afternoon he was picked up in the town park, walking through the park stark naked, soliciting men, women, and children. Within half an hour after his arrest, he was turned loose and he was in class this morning, carrying on as usual, and he said, “I am in a state of shock. What’s happened to education?”

Anarchy and education are very closely related today, and even where there are no riots, the fact of anarchy increasingly marks education. What the reason for this? It would be easy to spend an hour and two hours just reporting some of the incidents that are commonplace on college and university campuses today, many of which really do not bear repeating in mixed company, but such a recital would only underscore the futility of facts without a faith. An endless recital of what’s going on does not give you the key to understanding those things, nor to coping with them. What is the key? How are we going to understand what is happening in all education today?

There is a word that gives us the clue. This word is very popular in university circles. Dr. Clark Kerr{?}, at the time the first riots broke out at the University of California some years ago now, was very much given to the use of this particular word. The word is simply this: multiversity. Multiversity. “The University of California,” he said, “is a multiversity,” and across country, college and university educator pick up the word. It was exactly what they wanted. What does multiversity mean? Why did they feel the word was so important to them?

In order to understand the significance of the word multiversity, and multiverse, because the word multiverse is used on all levels of education today, from kindergarten on up. Let’s look at the old word: university. The word university comes from universum, universus, which means whole, a unity. Why is this word objectionable? The word is objectionable because it presupposes the God of scripture, the sovereign God who is creator of heaven and earth and under whose law all things subsist. The very idea of a universe is a Christian idea, a biblical idea. The very idea of a university is born out of Christendom. There was no such thing as a university in the ancient world. The university was a Christian product. It was born because the church taught the world that there is one God, maker of heaven and earth, who has created the universe as a unity, totally under his law, so that the whole universe and every fact therein exists because of God, totally exists because of him. The scriptures declared, and these church fathers taught that not a sparrow falls but your Father in heaven knows it, has ordained it. The flowers of the field, they are a part of God’s sovereign decree. The very hairs of our head are all numbered and known to God. Not a hair falls apart from his sovereign decree. What this faith did was to create, for the first time, the concept of a universe, everything one, under one law, one God, so that the biblical principle one Lord, one faith, one baptism, was carried into the entire scientific and educational world. One Lord, one law, one universe, all things therefore comprehensible because they are a unity.

It was because of this concept that the institutions of higher learning were called universities. It was a coined word, a manufactured word, to set forth the oneness of everything under God. It was for this reason that theology was called “The Queen of the Sciences,” because theology taught faith in this one God, one law, one universe, but what we have had in recent years is a revolt against the idea of a universe and a university.

Steadily, for the last few generations, the university has rebelled against the idea that there is one law and one universe. Evolutionists began to breach the idea of one law and one universe. They began to posit, of course, evolution out of primordial chaos, and then after awhile, having posited a stream of evolution, they decided that that pointed too much to a universe, too, and if you have a universe, you somehow hint of a God, and so they began to speak of a multi-origin of man. Man did not have one common ancestor. The different races arose independently, so man has many origins.

I was very much amused a few years ago when Dr. Lammerts, a geneticist, a Christian man of science, was appointed to the Civil Rights Commission of a city in California. There was immediate protest from the Negro community at the fact that a scientist was on the commission. They asked for the right to cross-examine him. The Negro civil rights leaders who cross-examined him were without exception, atheists, but they withdrew their objections when they found out that Walter Lammerts is a Christian and a creationist. Because the question, Do you believe in the multi-origin of man? Do you believe that the Negro races came out of a separate ancestry and therefore, have no relationship to other races? At that one point, they broke with the idea of a multiverse. But the multiverse is a part of the faith of modern man, and the multiversity is a revolt against the university. The multiversity posits the idea of an open universe, a universe in which all kinds of data exist. It’s a mixed bag. There is no overall binding law, not even the law of gravity. There are many varieties of laws, many conflicting strands. This open universe is open to everything, but God.

Thus, in this open universe, the primitive man’s magic may work, and witchcraft may work, because the universe is not a unity. It’s a multiverse, and it might not work here in Virginia, but somewhere else it might work, because there is no unity of being.

Well, as a result, the modern university, having become a multiversity, is open to everything. It will teach Marxism. It will teach golf{?}. It will teach, and just recently as we saw last night, has given a degree in magic. It does teach, in many places now, astrology, witchcraft, occultism, you name it. If enough of you are interested, you can go to almost any major university, and ask for and get a course in almost anything, not just black studies. Virtually anything will be taught, except orthodox Christian faith, because that teaches that we have a universe, one law, one God, one universe, and this is intolerable. It threatens the existence of the multiversity.

This concept of a multiverse, moreover, has been propagated so thoroughly, has saturated the curriculum so radically that, from the kindergarten on up in the public schools, the concept of a multiverse is taught. Now many of the teachers are not even aware of what they are teaching, but it is the concept of a multiverse.

A kindergarten teacher, not too long ago, came to me in some frustration, and she said, “You know, I’m getting a lot of things in my course, and I’ve gone back, in California we have a law that all teachers must, I think every third year, go back and take some work. This is to keep them brainwashed.” But she said, “The peculiar thing is that at the beginning of the course, our professor began by saying there are no facts, no ideas that we can educate for, either in the kindergarten or on any level of the school. There is no absolute truth. There is no unity in the universe. One fact we have is that the world is a mixed bag and there is continual change, so you educate for change. You educate your children to the fact that there is nothing that’s certain, except change.” And she said, “That was a strange thing to say.” And I said, “Not at all. He is being very honest in terms of his faith.” And she said, “Well, would you help me make sense of my notes? He went on then and said a lot of other things,” and I said, “Well, let’s see your notes,” and the notes were very clear. Once you recognized the fact that he was proclaiming his faith in a multiverse, and everything that kindergarten teacher was getting, as well as all other teachers who were there, was a philosophy of a multiverse which was to be taught from kindergarten on up.

Now do you understand why the students riot? Why they are anarchistic? Why they refuse to submit to any disciple? After all, who has any right to impose their law on them? It’s a multiverse, and each man can call himself his own universe in this multiverse, and how can someone take the laws out of his particular world and impose them on your world? This is the ultimate in sin.

As a result, what we are seeing today is the culmination of a highly developed anti-Christian system of education from the kindergarten on up, which teaches the sovereignty of the individual man, anarchism, each man their own universe living in a multiverse, so that “Don’t fence me in. I am my own god, my own law, my own universe. You live in your universe, and then we can live at peace in this multiverse.” Therefore, let us destroy anything that tries to bind man, and the University of Paris and the Sarabon{?} riots of a couple of years ago, when the students took over the university, in the auditorium there was a sign in French that read “No Smoking,” and the students wrote in big letters over it, “It is forbidden to forbid.” They had learned their lesson well. They lived in a multiverse, and in a multiverse, it is forbidden to forbid. Every man his own law.

The artists, very early, caught onto the philosophy of the modern world, in a multiverse. This is why the artists spearheaded the modern revolt, as more intelligent than their fellow men, however perverse. Very early they formulated this. The futurist, Marinetti, in dedicating an exhibition of work some years ago in Paris, raised the battle cry, “Destroy syntax, sabotage the adjective.” Why? Because, he held, why should there be any laws of grammar, laws of speech? Who has the right to impose laws? It is forbidden to forbid. It is a multiverse. A little later he went to Berlin to dedicate a museum, and there he raised the battle cry, “Destroy the museums. Burn down the libraries.” Why? Because the museums set a standard by holding aloft the great works of the past, and the libraries tell us, here is wisdom, here is learning out of the past, and why should man be bound by anything. It is a multiverse. Man should therefore, be free, and because it is a multiverse, you have the new math and you have the new grammar, and because it is a multiverse, you are told, as a parent, that you are not to teach a children if your child is in a public school. You have no right to bring the laws out of your old dead world into their fresh, young world. After all, it’s a multiverse.

Marcel Duchamp, one of the greatest figures in the world of modern art, caught the essence of the idea of the multiverse very early. His famous Nude Descending the Staircase, in the Armory show, in New York, 1916, I believe, expressed very well his philosophy as did his later world. He was creating a totally private art. He was not trying to communicate something to anyone else. Progressively, in fact, he did everything to prevent communication, because to try to communicate was to try to say a universe existed, and so Marcel Duchamp finally quit painting, and he spent many years thereafter, (he died just recently), trying to create a new language. Now, this was a most interesting experience. The purpose of this new language was to destroy meaning because meaning points to a universe. It was to give him an opportunity to express himself without you being able to understand. So, the new language he worked on for years barred communication, but it was a failure, because not only could it not communicate to any other man which would mean there is a universe, but he could not use it again, because he would say there is a law even in his world. Destroy syntax, sabotage the adjective, wage war against meaning, against communication, because communication says you have a universe.

This throws a light on one of the most famous sayings that preceded World War 2. At the time, some of the older generation were shocked by it. Most of the world forgot it. It was too much in tune with everything. It was a sentence by Molotov of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was bitterly hostile to fascism and national socialism, but what did Molotov say of them? That they were wrong? No. Fascism is a matter of taste. A matter of taste. That’s logical. If there is no universe, and there is no law and there is no meaning, no truth, no right or wrong, it’s a matter of taste if you are a fascist, a national socialist, a communist, a democrat, a republican, or what have you. Just a matter of taste. Similarly, it’s just a matter of taste if you are a pervert, or if you’re against perversion. You have, therefore, no ground for any absolute rejection of everything. Education, therefore, must be into a multiverse, into an anarchy of God. Many gods, as many gods as there are men.

Statist education thus, has been highly successfully. The students are denied a universe in God. Each pursues his own will, in riots, in narcotics, in anarchism, but a world without meaning is very quickly a world without life. Gunther Stent, one of the most prominent scientists of our time, has written a book on what is happening to science, and he sees, in the fairly near future, the death of all science. Why? He writes as an atheist, but he feels very keenly the plight that atheism has worked itself into, and he says what we are beginning to realize is that, having destroyed meaning and being incapable of recovering meaning, we have made science also meaningless, and it becomes a little more difficult each year to get graduate students who will become scientists. In the not-to-distant future, we will face a very serious shortage in all the basic sciences. In a meaningless world, what is the difference between being a physicist and a clerk? Except money, and if you can maker money in other ways, including robbing, why not do it. In a world without meaning, what is the difference between one note and another? None, he said, and therefore, music is beginning to disappear, and the result is, he said, “Because we are not in an age of increasing meaninglessness, we are going to see the death of science, the reduction of man to barbarism, and in a century or two, the disappearance of mankind.

I believe it was this March, shortly after the book came out, that the Natural History Magazine reviewed the book. They gave it over two pages of very careful analysis, and as they summarized Dr. Stent’s conclusion, they said Dr. Stent is an optimist. It will not take that long for mankind to disappear in this age of meaninglessness.

This is the world we live in. The multiverse and the multiversity, and the multiverse school all educate into anarchy, and we have a duty to educate into God, his law, and his universe. It’s not enough for us to be conservatives and to be Christians. We must be consistently Christian. We must apply the whole counsel of God and his absolute and sovereign law to every field of life. We must develop in the years ahead, because ours will be the only education. As the multiversity from kindergarten up reduces the educational world around us to total anarchism, we must supply a truly Christian philosophy, a biblically–oriented science, art, literature, in every area of life to lay down the guidelines. There is no other force for reconstruction, save us. The multiversities are educating into anarchy and death. If we do not educate into life, no one will. This is why this school and every such school, every organization like Chalcedon, every group that is trying to develop a systematic philosophy in terms of scripture, and to apply it to a particular area of life, offers us hope of reconstruction. It does not exist outside of biblical faith. We can reconstruct. To do so, we must be prepared to work, to give, and to rethink all things in terms of the sovereign God and his word. Will you do it?

[Audience] Thank you, Mr. Rushdoony. Now we have opportunities for questions. Don’t be afraid to ask a question. He knows all about {?}

[Audience] Do you get tired of {?} shut him off. Mr. {?} are you here? Do you still have that question?

[Audience] I’d like to yield the floor to someone that has something {?}

[Audience] Alright. Mr. Robinson?

[Audience] In theory, do you {?}

[Rushdoony] No, the logic of their philosophy drives them deeper and deeper into anarchy and self-destruction. There’s a very interesting work on church treasures of France. It’s a study of Medieval church art, and the historian of art who writes a very long introduction to the book before you have the very magnificent plates, analyzes what has happened in the modern world, and he says the reason why we have these magnificent cathedrals and church art was that, for centuries, through the Reformation, through the 17th century, man’s perspective was God-centered. Therefore, the world was unified. It had a truly one world perspective, but he says, beginning with Louis XIV, the world became state-centered. Instead of God, the state became man’s working god, the center of his life. Then he said what has happened in recent years is that from being state-centered, and our politicians still haven’t gotten the message, the modern world has become individual-centered, totally anarchistic, and therefore, it’s falling apart, and there is no philosophy, no idea on the horizon which can bring man next to man, bind him to man. I believe it was Monday night that I cited the development of philosophy in the last 150 years, in Existentialism, from Kierkegaard, with his dread of God, his fear and hatred of God, God as the enemy, to Heidegger, the German Existentialist who felt that the enemy was death, God didn’t count, to Sartre, the great contemporary Existentialist, for whom the enemy, the thing to dread is the other person, because he challenges your own claim to be a universe, and to be god, and so he said, ”The other person for me is the Devil.”

Now, this is the kind of thinking that saturates the modern world. As a result, with this kind of philosophy gone to seed now, how are you going to redeem the modern school? It has no philosophy left. It has denied the concept of truth. There is a very brilliant sociologist, a German, who came to this country and taught at Dartmouth, Eugene Rosenstock Husey{?} who, some years ago, as he analyzed American education after coming here, said that progressive education and the philosophy of John Dewey is comparable to Confusionism in China, and it will lead to the Chinafication of the United States, that is, into a dead level where no progress is possible because it’s a world without meaning. He was partially right, but he failed to recognize that you could go on down into total collapse, and that’s the direction we’re taking. So, there is no faith to lead to anything in the public schools, none whatsoever. In fact, one professor of education in a state university system, with whom I was arguing one day, he was defending statist education, and at a certain point he threw up his hands and he said, “Alright, the argument’s all on your side. There is no future.” And he said, “I wish I could get in a Christian school movement because that’s where the future is going to be made,” but he said, “Unfortunately, I can’t believe in what they teach.” I thought this was quite an interesting admission. He saw no hope in the public schools. He wished he had the faith to get into the movement that’s going to control the future.

[Audience] Along that line, you might be interested to know that a number of these writers {?} are from public school teachers and public school principles who realize {?} facilities are {?} and want to start Christian school. {?}

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] No, they are individual professors in many of the universities, and I know some of them and there are a fair number of my mailing list, who are trying, sometimes really heroically to do this.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] There are a number of smaller schools that are making a stand in terms of evangelical Christianity, but none of them are analyzing this philosophy and developing a consistent counter-philosophy, and this is what is needed. It’s not enough, you see, to say, “We hold to the old time religion. We stand for Christian teaching,” when you are teaching philosophy in the philosophy department that is Existentialist. I’m not saying all these schools do this, but you have to develop a systematic philosophy of the curriculum in every department, and this is not being done. I think it will be done in the next few years. I think we are going to develop that sort of thing and I, for one, am trying to head up a little movement to develop that kind of thing, and for this reason, I do talk to a great many educators, but this is the great need, to develop new institutions of learning. At one major university right now, because it does self-consciously seek to be a multiversity, a professor of education who is very highly regarded by the students, the most popular man of the department, has just been notified that come next June, he’s being fired. Why? Well, he assigned a couple of my books and held to the standard of a universe, and the God over this universe, and they found it intolerable. Also, he taught that Christian schools offer far more hope for the future than state schools, and he suggested that if the state schools wanted to educate, they should stop taking tax funds and strike out and develop a real philosophy of education. That was intolerable.

[Audience] I gather from what you say that if the academic world was being run {?} towards {?} Christianity {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, it will be a battle, and there’s no question that every kind of attempt will be made to destroy the Christian school movement. In some states, they are trying to take them over by offering them various funds from the public budget, because then control follows. On the other hand, one of the things that is working in favor of the Christian schools is that they are growing, and politicians are interested in votes. In the state of California, about five years ago, there were bills introduced in the state legislature designed to cripple seriously every new Christian school, and all the existing ones. However, this last year, when the Christian School Association of California had its annual meeting and banquet, the speaker was Governor Reagan. Now, Governor Reagan doesn’t care about Christian schools at all. He’s 100% a politician, maybe 110%. But he knows where the votes are, and he knows that the Christian school movement is a rapidly growing movement in the state of California, and it commands a tremendous amount of votes.

As a result, where there are votes, you go to a banquet and you speak, and you praise them, and you walk around them, because you don’t want to offend those people. So, the answer is more growth. After you grow a little more here in Virginia, you’ll find the governor and a lot of other people ready to come to your banquets and speak, because they’re interested in votes, and they know where the voters are. They also know that the parents who put their children in Christian schools are more likely to be people of affluence, and more dedicated and more ready to get out and work. So they think politically.

[Audience] Amen. John Henson.

[Audience] Mr. Rushdoony, is it possible that some of the {?} conditions we see today in American education {?} governmental schools {?} certain conspiratorial groups or {?} groups {?} the nation as a whole and using it as one mechanism for a {?}. Can you comment on that?

[Rushdoony] Yes. The question is, are certain conspiratorial groups behind the educational chaos. The answer is, they are very clearly there working, but they are not responsible for it. They are using it, using it to their advantage, but it would have been there if they never existed. One of the easiest ways to determine this is to go back to Karl Marx’s time and to find the seeds of that philosophy in this country before Karl Marx was even known here, or to go back to 1900 and read some of the books that were written by Ferguson, who was the chief editorial writer before Brisbane. Some of you remember Arthur Brisbane, don’t you? Well, Ferguson preceded Brisbane, and the stuff Brisbane turned out would have made Marx look rather pale by comparison. In other words, we had that philosophy here, home-grown.

Alright. Now, when conspiracies work, what do they do? Well, I’ve used this illustration once before this week with a smaller group, and I’ll repeat it now because I think it bears repeating. I normally go without a cold, sometimes two, three years. If my resistance is good, if I’ve had plenty of rest, I never catch a cold, but if my resistance is lowered, I don’t have to be near someone who’s coughing and sneezing. I’ll catch a cold. There are cold germs around us all the time, but when my resistance is up, I can be in a room full of people who are blowing their noses and hacking, and coughing, and it doesn’t phase me any, I don’t get a cold. Now, it’s the same way with the country. The trouble with many people is they look at the person who has the infection to pass on, when the key is the health of the other person. America is being infected by many, many ideologies and conspiracies today, but it’s always had those in our midst, never more than in the time of Washington and Adams. Never in our history had various foreign conspiracies been in more high places, had more agents, and worked harder and spent more money per capita in the United States than then, but they didn’t accomplish anything. Why? Because the spiritual health of the people was very real.

Now, the key today is the spiritual health of the people. You can never have a hothouse country in which you’ve isolated it from all kinds of conspiratorial and ideological infections. That’s an impossibility. Short of heaven, you’re never going to have that kind of world, and we’re always going to be falling under the sway of such infections if we concentrate on the source of infection rather than the source of health, the sovereign God and his word, if we try to fight that, instead of building up our health.

Now, I know people who are always fretting about catching a cold, and they spend a small fortune buying all kinds of pills and medicines, and dosing themselves endlessly, and they’re always sneezing, and wheezing, and sickly. If they spent a little more time building up their health these infections would be no problem. This is our problem today, you see. I mentioned, I think, last night that if the money we had spent from 1919 to the present, in fighting communism, had been spent on Christian schools, we would have a generation of Christian school children running the country today, because the untold millions that have spent here, I know one man, worked for him for a time, I don’t know how many millions he had. I knew it was over $50 million, and some others who worked for him estimated it was well over $100 million, and when I was there, he was down to his last $13 million, and it had all been spent on the conservative cause, and he told me, he said, “I haven’t accomplished a thing. I’m giving up.” He hadn’t, he hadn’t, because not one man had been changed, made into a Christian. Not one child had been given a Christian education. It had all been negative, you see? That’s futile.

[Audience] I read an interesting little article the other day called “Don’t Flatter the Communist,” by Leonard Reed, perhaps some of you have read his writings, and he was talking about the campus riots, and he said that, sure, there are people who are out organizing this, communists and so forth, but he said it’s because the people are ready to be organized. He said, Did they organize you or me? because we believe in the freedom philosophy {?}, and I thought that was very good. Well, {?}

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. Right. There is a movement in Canada which is addressing itself to this matter, and there are some excellent men connected with it. The philosophy they hold to is basically Deweyavertian{?}. Unfortunately, they have capitalized more often on the weaknesses of Deweyavert{?} than on the strength of Dr. Deweyavert{?}. As a result, they have, instead of a biblical philosophy, a natural law philosophy. They are weak on inspiration. They are weak on creationism, and they are moving into some rather alien channels, so that right now, their thinking is becoming more and more socialist every day. It’s regrettable. There are some brilliant men in the movement, but because their thinking hasn’t been systematically biblical, they are definitely going astray.

[Audience] It seems to me that you have {?} successes, {?} that we might get into a position that some of our statist people are in. That is, that we wind up just coping {?} numbers, and is it possible that we are thinking in terms of as much independence of autonomy that we can {?} the overall framework {?} administrators and teachers. That is, you give a principle perhaps of the transcendent image of God, and in composition, I try to think of how I might both work this out with form and content, restricting forms, liberating content on one assignment, reversing on another assignment, so that we use both the cleverness of the child and also the disciplines of the {?}. Seems to me that if we’re not careful here, what might happen is if guys like me go back to the standard lesson plan, or if preachers like Mr. Jessie{?} go back to the standard sermons, or our administrators go to the administrative handbooks that are put out by these triumphant Christians, it seems to me that the wonderful thing about this place here is that we haven’t arrived, but under God we are moving.

[Rushdoony] All I can say is “amen.”

[Audience] {?} I was just talking, Mr. Rushdoony, {?} today and one of the things he was saying was how we need to keep books {?} future, and not falling into the {?} of the past. {?}

[Audience] Alright. Any other questions? This is your last opportunity. Did you have any questions?

[Audience] How does a chicken lay blue eggs?

[laughter]

[Rushdoony] That’s a good question. All I can say is that’s the kind of egg God ordained that that chicken should lay, and it’s a beautiful light blue egg. It’s a South American chicken.

[Audience] You know, I wouldn’t believe it either when I {?}

[laughter]

[Audience] There’s is a farm out there, makes {?} everything. We have this funny looking animal, and he said, “Do you know what that is?” and I said, “I don’t know. Is it a ferret?” “Nope.” I said, “Is it some sort of a weasel?” It turned out to be a honey bear. It’s the funniest looking thing I ever saw, but he really has a chicken that lays blue eggs. Well, that was a good question. We’ll put that in the school paper.

[Audience] {?} paper. too.

[Audience] {?} I don’t know how many of you have tape recorders. Well, let’s see, any other questions now? I think that was choice. I think we can end our lecture series right now.

[Audience] I’m going to ask Mr. Rushdoony if he would close our lecture series with prayer. Before he does, I want to thank you all for coming, and those of you who have been invited out to our home, if you’ll gather here a little later, we’ll have a little caravan down {?} Road. It’s a little hard to find, but there will be some opportunity for you to visit Friday night, so I guess we don’t have to rush home for that. We want to thank you for coming to Virginia, again. We’ve been richly blessed and we hope that God will prosper you in your future labors.

[Rushdoony] Thank you. Let us bow our heads in prayer. Unto thee, O Lord, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, do we give thanks for all our blessings. We thank thee, our Father, that our times are in thy hands who doest all things well. We thank thee that we have been called to victory and are more than conquerors through Christ that loved us, and that this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith.

End of tape