Miscellaneous

Washington Legal Seminar (part 1)

 

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels, and Sermons

Lesson: 1-2

Genre: Talk

Track: 1

Dictation Name: RR330A1

Location/Venue:

Year: 1985

Our next speaker is Rousas John Rushdoony, R.J. Rushdoony. I’ve known Rush since I was an early Christian, I was at the Light and Power House, I believe it was 1975, and this gray haired gentleman came in and spoke to the students there, and a lot of the material I’ve been hearing about Christianity- I had only been a Christian less than a year- seemed to be nonsense, and Rushdoony made sense, so I followed him outside, in fact there were two people, me and another one- there were probably 200 people- followed him outside, because he talked about law. And Rushdoony’s philosophy from that time on has been a very strong influence in my life, in fact my last book, Parents Rights I do dedicate to Dr. Rushdoony.

Dr. Rushdoony is the president of Chalcedon, and I know many of you are on his mailing list, if you are not we are going to make it available, a signup sheet so you can get on R.J. Rushdoony’s mailing list, he probably puts out one of the most informative and scholarly and academic newsletters in eh country.

Rush has written over 30 books, some of his leading books that you have on your list are the Messianic Character of American Education which is a book about public education, Rushdoony was writing and talking about public education and its problems before most people were even thinking about it. His other books listed on here, I would say The Politics of Pornography is probably the best book I have ever read on the pornography issue, if you want to understand pornography read that book.

I was at a meeting several years ago, and I won’t say who was at the meeting, but it was a meeting of about 10 leading lawyers and law professors, and we all talked about our common interests and people that influenced our lives, and one of the law professors there from a leading law school leaned over to me after the meeting and said: “Do you realize that everyone in this room has been influenced basically by one man?” He said: “Different people here have been influenced by different people, but the one stream of influence is R.J. Rushdoony in terms of law.” The fact is that the book The Institutes of Biblical Law is probably the book on Biblical law, there is a fellow at Dallas Theological Seminary that has written a book on Biblical law, and he was asked why there were so many Rushdoony quotes, there are a lot of people that are concerned about Dr. Rushdoony’s strong stand on Biblical law, and he said: “Because that is the only book out there.” So it is the leading book, and it is a book that I say everyone should have on their bookshelf.

One other personal note; Rush has become a very good friend, he serves on the board of directors of the Rutherford institute, and Rush is a very kind man; for two years, and I just said this in our luncheon, the reason that I was kept alive essentially is because Rushdoony sent me $600 a month for two years which really was my staple of income, and there were days when I ran up to the mailbox to see if that money was in there to make sure, and it always was. So he puts his money where his mouth is, and is probably one of the greatest theologians of this century: Dr. Rushdoony. (Applause)

[Rushdoony] Most people today recognize that statist education is in crisis. There is a growing suspicion, even bitterness against public schools, and it comes from many areas. As a matter of fact, more books have been written against the public schools by the leftists than by conservatives and Christians. These Liberal and radical critics, while they are eager to preserve and reform the public school, are highly critical.

One such critic, writing of the groups with an invested interest in statist education says and I quote: “They claim an ideological neutrality, but this is not an honest claim. Their ideology is self-perpetuation, the consequence in terms of dry and jargon written verbiage is worse than mere futility. It is a decorated impotence that chokes off all imaginative fury, all bravado, and all sense of an imperative to strong, mandated deeds. The teachers union suffers from another inhibition. If they concede the true size of the problem, how can they avoid the risk that this may be imputed to their failure?”

These words were written by Jonathan Kozol in Illiterate America, a book published this year. One of a number of books, and by no means the strongest in its statements. Kozol states that there are 25 million American adults who are illiterate. Another 35 million who are barely literate or are functionally illiterate. These 60 million adults are more than 1/3rd of the adult population of the United States. Is Kozol exaggerating? Not at all. There are some who give not only like figures, but even somewhat higher statistics. As a matter of fact some of the worst statistics came out of a Senate community and were announced a few years ago by then Senator McGovern, and Senator McGovern- a former school teacher by the way- made the statement that the public schools had demonstrated that they were good at only one thing: separating the tax payer from his money.

Although most of these 60 million or more are whites, proportionately Blacks and Hispanics are worse off. Sixteen percent of the white adult population is illiterate or functionally illiterate; 44% of the Black and 56% of the Hispanic adult population. The functional illiteracy of blacks who are 17 years old is 47%, and is expected in five years to be 50%.

Now there are some, and Kozol is among those because I chose him as not one of the most forceful and extreme of the critics, who are ready to say that it is a serious problem, but it has always been with us, that from the early days of the Republic we have had problems with illiteracy. Others of course disagree with this and produce evidence to indicate that we now have the highest rate of illiteracy in the history of the United States. Kozol is right to this degree, we had problems in the past. We had of course the slave population in earlier years, largely illiterate. We had large numbers of immigrants who came over here and could neither understand nor speak nor write English. On the other hand, these immigrants very quickly in night schools picked up the English language.

After slavery, even with segregation black schools however much criticized by some, did a better job than the schools are doing today. Black illiteracy has risen dramatically in the last 25 years. Moreover, in the past illiteracy was on the margins of society, among immigrants, among blacks, slave peoples; among Indians on reservation. Now illiteracy is central to our society. Schools in the best neighborhoods are turning out functional illiterates, as well as the ghetto schools.

So that, we have a problem the dimensions of which we have never seen before. Moreover, it is reflecting itself in our national life. Herbert Hoover was the last president to write his own speeches, perhaps the last one who could. Now given the fact that with radio and television the exposure of a single speech is far greater and it cannot be repeated endlessly across the country, all the same there is a difference in the literacy of the occupants of the Whitehouse, and of our Vice Presidents. As a matter of fact a book written in the past five years, a biography of a man who ran more than once for the presidency, and was also a vice president of the United States just a few years ago, a book written by an aide and a speech writer after his death, said that his speeches had to be written in very simple, basic English because otherwise the man would not have been able to read them.

Others have written books by ghost writers with their name on it, that sometimes they are apparently not able to ready; these are men who have run for the Whitehouse or have been prominent in our national life. In fact, one of our staff members, Otto Scott brought up a question to a very prominent American member of at least one cabinet in the past few years, and the man retorted immediately that: “That was a ridiculous idea and totally impractical.” And Otto said: “Well, I got it out of your book.” The man had not even read his ghost written book, and did not know what he had advocated.

Obviously we have a problem of functional illiteracy. It is beginning to reflect itself in one area after another. Fewer people read newspapers than did 50 years ago. Moreover, Book publishing is beginning to feel the effects of the growing illiteracy. As a matter of fact, most of the books that publishers now publish have as their main market libraries; when you realize that there are about 4,000 county libraries, innumerable city libraries, a few thousand college and university libraries, all in the business of buying books that are recommended by various groups like the A.L.A. and the New York Times Book Review, and like groups; a book may sell a dozen copies to individuals like you and myself, and go into a couple of fair sized printings just selling to libraries. The net result is that today the book market is a contracting one. The level of culture has fallen dramatically. The capacity of people to grasp ideas and to respond to them has been lowered.

We are finding this kind of situation: a man who as pastor was instrumental in bringing to Christ someone who was a fairly notable athlete, gave him a Bible to read and the man in some embarrassment admitted that he could not read. And so the pastor then sat down and taught him the alphabet, and how to read. The man, a white man, had been given social promotions all the way through school and had gotten ahead on his athletic ability after he left high school, and had never learned how to read.

You are all familiar with the very serious case when at a major university- I was tempted to say ‘at a major football university’ It came out that there were top athletes, football players known from coast to coast, and in one or two cases All Americans, who confessed that they could not read. Unusual? Hardly.

Moreover, there is another very serious fact: never before in history has there been less need for unskilled labor. In my lifetime the change there has been dramatic. Many things were done by hand that are no longer done. When various pipelines were laid when I was a boy, it was men working by hand, ditch diggers, vast numbers of them from coast to coast who did all that work. Now a backhoe does it in a very short time.

In one area of life after another the unskilled worker has no place. Very few jobs remain for him, and yet our schools are in the business of producing more unskilled labor than ever before in the history of the United States. People who do not have the capacity to function in a highly technological society. The implications of this are frightening. We cannot maintain our preeminence as a technological society without literacy. In many of the fast food chains now they are beginning to introduce cash registers which have on them an illustration rather than a number, so the high school graduates they hire can punch a hamburger instead of an amount. This tells you how critical the problem is.

It also tells you something about the reason for the hostility against the Christian school and the homeschool. They are turning out the literate population- very literate. Increasingly outstanding in their performance on the college and university level. On top of that, the fastest growing area of the Christian school movement today is in the black community, where black parents are intensely concerned because they see the state school as destructive of their children and their family life, so they are moving into this area with passion and fervor. In fact, nearby in Virginia there is the main office of the black foundation for Christian education. The head of it, the Reverend (Melvin Hodge?) of Baton Rouge Louisiana is doing remarkable work in the large Christian school he has there with hundreds of students, in fact public school teachers send their children there to get an education.

But given the fact that the future of our country rests on a literate population, on people who can assume skills because they have mastered the basic tools, you can see why the Christian school is a threat. The leadership by default will very soon begin to pass into the hands of Christians, and so we have from coast to coast an assault on the Christian school; it is the enemy. And on the homeschool- it is the enemy. Because it is training a cadre of young people who can assume leadership, whereas the public school cannot produce leadership. Increasingly, only illiterates.

The state school movement began as a great crusade for the salvation of America. Its founders, men like Horace Mann and James G. Carter and Charles Sumner and others were Unitarians who believed in salvation by education rather salvation by Christ. They predicted as they began their crusade in the early 1800’s, that given a century of state control of education, crime and poverty and all other problems would disappear, and if any jails were left in the United States they would be museums, so that people in the 1930’s, 40’s, 50’s, and thereafter would go to them to realize how primitive conditions were, that people had to be locked up once in the United States.

Well, since then we have seen a snowballing, not of lawfulness, but lawlessness; to a degree unrealized in Horace Mann’s day. We have seen the spread of illiteracy as a result of state control, and a destruction of morality. The results have hardly been favorable to statist education. The slogan of the early promoters of statist education was this: “It costs less money to build school houses than jails.” It costs less money to build school houses than jails. This sounded very good. But in 1876 Dabney responded to this: “But what if it turns out that the states expenditure in school houses is one of the things which necessitates the expenditures in jails?”

At the same time, a deputy Attorney General of the United States, Zach Montgomery in The School Question documented the fact that as state control of education spread, crime increased. A very interesting fact. Was it a coincidence, or an essential connection? Because it could be merely a coincidence; we need not say that because these two things occurred simultaneously that there was a necessary connection.

One of the most able of contemporary writers on the problem of crime, Morgan O. Reynolds, in his study of criminology today in the United States, a book published just this year, notes and I quote: “The family, schools, and churches are the main institutions for value formation.” The family, the schools, and the churches; and what Reynolds had to say was that our problem is the fact that in recent years all three have failed in their responsibilities, the family, the church, and the school. The fact that the public schools, let us say in Zach Montgomery’s and Dabney’s day were not what they are now, nor in my school days were what they are now, is due to the fact that the church then and the family were stronger.

And so we need to ask ourselves a question. Could it be that the state control of education not only undermined the school, but also the authority of the family and the church? Who should control education?

Historically, church and state have fought for that power. The state gained the victory. But parental control of the family is the determining power, has always been healthier for education. Because when an institution controls something it gives that school an institutional emphasis. It becomes a church school rather than a Christian school. It becomes a state school rather than an educational center. State controls means politicization and secularization.

I know that some years ago I had a very heated argument, in the past 10-12 years with a professor of education; and finally he said in some heat: “Well, it is true the Christian schools are doing a better job.” But he said: “We could too if we didn’t have a state legislature mandating this and that for us all the time, and throwing additional things into the curriculum, and keeping the teachers from teaching.” And I said: “But that is the whole point of the discussion. The schools should be free to prove themselves with the people.” “But,” he said: “then what about the poor?” and I had to rejoin: “Most of the schools today are middle class or lower class, most of the Christian schools and homeschools; and some of the most dramatic instances of such schooling are beginning to take place in ghetto areas where no one believed good education could take place.” Why? The free market is important. What parent will scrimp and save, work sacrificially to provide a schooling for his child that produces illiteracy? And who loves the child more than his or her parents? This is why I do believe that the Puritans of the future, the people who are going to provide the leadership may well come out of the black community. Why? Because as I travel and as I visit some of these Christian schools, these black Christian schools, I find an intensity of feeling among those parents that I find nowhere else. They speak with tears about what the school means to them, and if they are in other Christian schools which are mixed in their student body, what you find is that the black students are the A students. Why? More pressure from the home, the parents telling the children: “Look, unless you are going to be a bum like your cousin or so and so, you are going to work; and I am paying for you schooling, and it had better be good.”

And they meet that expectation.

Now there is nothing that the public schools can do that can match that kind of motivation. That is why in a generation you are going to see some dramatic changes in this country, because a new leadership is going to be forthcoming from those Christian schools.

The idea of a secularized education of course is moth inadmissible, and impossible. Education is an inescapably religious discipline, because education is the transmission of the basic values by the older generation to the young, and those values and skills are religiously governed; they are inescapably religious. Columbia Teachers College 20 years and more ago spoke of education as a religious discipline, they used Paul Tillich’s definition of religion which is a very good one, about the only good thing I think that Tillich ever had to say. He said: “Religion is ultimate concern.” Religion is ultimate concern. And some courts, I believe, have used that definition. Whatever is ultimate for you, whatever governs your life, that is your religion. And Columbia Teachers College was right, education deals with ultimate concern. What is important? What should the child learn?

Our basic education on all levels is a Liberal Arts curriculum, and we have forgotten what that means; Liberal means, from the Latin, ‘Free’. The art of being a free man. That is what a Liberal education is about, and statist education produces a statist person not a free person, that is why the Liberal arts curriculum is in disarray. It is no longer concerned with freedom.

As Dabney said in 1897, quoting him again, and I quote: “A state religion is logically involved in state education.” A state religion is logically involved in stated education. Quite wisely, the Catholic church in the early years of state education, opposed the public schools as a semi protestant establishment. They were right; the sad fact is that the Protestants had Christian schools galore all over the United States, but out of stupidity because Christians can be stupid- in fact some feel I think that it is a gift from the Holy Spirit, they cultivate it so- (laughter) Because the Catholics attacked the public schools, they started dropping their Christian schools wholesale, and favoring the state schools that they had opposed up to that point. And they wiped out their school movement, except for a few groups, Lutheran and Reformed, and later (abadist?).

What they did not bother to recognize was that the Catholics were right, the public schools were a religious establishment; that although they began in those days and until not too many years ago with a little bit of Bible reading, usually from the Psalms, and a prayer, they were essentially a Unitarian establishment. Their books were carefully written to favor a kind of vague Christianity which stressed moral concerns but didn’t say much about Christ except to leave you with the general idea: “He was really a wonderful kind of guy.” And of course, we have abandoned even that.

James G. Carter, Horace Manns associate, was honest enough to say that the purpose of public education was to: “create an engine to sway the people.” That was old fashioned language for saying ‘a means of brainwashing the people.’

One radical critic has written a book on public education, Greer, in which he calls attention to the fact that indeed this was its purpose; that for years education was geared to giving the basics, the three R’s, to a vast number of immigrants who are pouring into the country, in order to fit them for the employment, the job market, and to keep them in place as good, law-abiding Americans. So patriotism and the three R’s were basic. And usually in those days they were giving a good education in 3-4 years, that is why Lincoln could be so highly literate with about three years of schooling. Then it was stretched out as one economic depression or recession after another hit, to keep the children in school a little longer and off the job market, to eight years. And then with the Great Depression of the thirties when I was in school they stretched it in one state after another to high school. And it was interesting, because when they kind of law went into effect and with no jobs, a lot of people went back to high school.

I played lightweight football in high school, heavy weight football was made up in our school of people who were being disqualified during the season as they reached 21 and were considered too old to play; and the same was true of our basketball and baseball teams, and they were really men, most of them, who weighed 210 and so on, and they would compare favorably with University football teams in size and weight and ability. That is because they were people who had come back to school. They were being kept off the job market if they were in school, kept off the job market.

At the same time what was in the curriculum began to be watered down, so that within a year or two after I finished my schooling, to take care of all these who were being held the curriculum was watered down, and it extended to the junior college and then through the university, so that today we have a watered down education, we work to keep people off the job market as long as possible because the establishment said: “Greer wants it that way.”

Well there is a measure of truth to what he had to say. The school has become a holding tank for people they don’t want on the streets, but the school has become in the process less and less competent, less and less able to teach; because it has become a child care and a youth care center, and ‘let’s hold them here because what will we do with them otherwise?’

There is very clearly, and I believe we need to recognize it, a class and a race perspective here. ‘These people are not good enough unless we keep them here and keep them off the streets, because their parents couldn’t handle them and the job market can’t handle them, and they are never going to amount to much, so we need not worry too much about whether or not they are educated.’

Education is inescapably religious. Whoever does it, Catholic or Protestant or humanist, the establishment of religion by means of the state control of education is morally and legally wrong. If Protestants and Catholics and Humanists and Mohammedans and Buddhists want to have their children educated, let them educate them themselves. The Christian community has enough buildings to house every person in the United States who would like to go to church. It can create enough schools if we give them the freedom to do so. And let me say again, the schools by and large that are being built and established are not being established by the affluent, but by people of modest means, or those we regard as ‘under privileged’ and they are doing some of the most remarkable things in free, independent schools.

The humanists in earlier years were rightly critical of the earlier attempts in Western history by one church or another to impose their churches perspective on everybody, and I trust that we all agree that that was wrong; that it was a major step to break with that. But such criticism on the part of the humanists is hypocrisy given the state control of education, and the use of state coercion against Christian parents, schools, and children.

In the past decade approximately I have been in more states and more trials than I can remember, as a witness. The brutality of these trials is sometimes horrifying. Parents served with a warrant, told they are to pack their children’s belongings in suitcases, because after the court hearing their children are going to be taken from them and placed in foster homes. Parents facing criminal charges because they educate their children at home, or in a Christian school; even though it can be documented that those children are far ahead of the public schools. Earlier this year I was in one trial of two families who were educating their children at home. The state brought in to prove how retarded these children had to be in their education someone from the state board of education a couple of states distant. The results were so dramatically favorable that the state moved to suppress its own witness. The testimony had to be introduced because the state attorney made a mistake in a question he asked of one of the mothers which opened up the door for that testimony. But the interesting fact was that besides the things tested, those children were getting a lot that the test didn’t cover; they had become- and they were aged, two of the children 7 and two 9, one each 7 and 9 from both families- they were becoming proficient in Spanish and in German, and no grade school tests anyone for that. A remarkable job was being done.

Interesting by the way, the state attorney demanded of me: “Was I favoring civil disobedience?” and I said: “Yes.” And he said: “How can you justify that?” and I said: “Well, this country was started with civil disobedience, and every great forward stride has begun with civil disobedience.” (applause)

The judge, who looked like a caricature of what you see as the worst judge on television, ruled against the parents. This is being appealed and has not yet been heard. The courts sometimes are willing to consider a defense of Christian schools and homeschools in terms of the free exercise of religion, and at times also on non-establishment in the sense of no control over the religious character of such schools. But thus far they have refused to open up the question: “Are state schools also in fact an establishment of religion?” [tape ends, continued part 2]