communism and for a time Russian schools were run on a John Dewey basis until the whole system broke down through its inherent weaknesses. No one would deny that John Dewey has social vision, but that social vision did not include God. Any social morality (not operating on a police state basis) that has been known to exist in this world has had to depend ultimately upon spir itual and religious sanctions, as man is not usually interested in being good for society’s sake. This leads to the third point, namely, that educators have long envisioned American public schools as the one agency that could build for the future by anticipating the needs of the future, and since one of the greatest needs in any country is public morality based on private character, we are now discovering that something is wrong. Spending, as we do, five times as much for crime and its suppression as we do for education, and enormous sums they are, we come to the interest ing discovery that the more we spend for education, the more we have to spend for crime. Does education then produce crime? The answer is no, it does not; neither does it prevent it ex cept as it is an education in which spiritual values are integrated with all the various phases of education. Other wise there are no ultimate sanctions for moral control that seem to operate effec tively under conditions of stress. Edu cation merely implements man’s moral, spiritual and social attitudes. There are a number of angles from which this topic must be considered and perhaps we shall do well to consider first that of the state. A democracy, at least the kind of democracy envisioned by Washington and Jefferson, was re garded as impossible except as public enlightenment was a part of the pro gram. For this reason, the freedom of the press and freedom of speech as well as freedom to educate the young were heavily emphasized. But our founding fathers talked of enlightenment and education as being a competitive thing and not a monopoly. Whoever had light of any kind was entitled to spread it, and if as a result of this freedom, dark ness was also spread, it was expected that in the long run light would drive out darkness. It was not in any way intended that education should be the monopoly of the state, or that it should impose controls that would substantially make it so. In some respects our fore fathers seemed to have a much clearer appreciation of the kind of people that we are and must be, in America, than do some of our present thinkers. They appreciated, for example, that we all belong to minorities, that a majority is an entirely temporary thing and that it is infrequent indeed that an individual is likely to belong to as many majority groups as he does minority groups. Let us consider this a moment: An individ ual is born into a family. If he is the only child, he is still a minority. If there are other children, he is even more in the minority. His family is a minor- Page Eight
ity group in a community. His family is undoubtedly a minority in his church, just as his church is a minority with reference to the total religious popula tion of the country. If he is an agnostic, he is still in a minority religiously. If he votes the Democratic ticket and thereby helps make the world tempora rily safe for the Democrats, he may at the next election become a member of the minority group as Republicanism again undertakes to save the nation. What we are saying is that in mat ters of education or in fact any im portant matter, minorities are our chief concern, and there is no such thing as a mass educational program which would be acceptable to everyone, any more than there is a religious program which would be acceptable to everyone, or, in fact, a one-party system of gov ernment which would be acceptable to everyone. We would go even further to say that the genius and the strength of any people is the degree to which minor ity groups are to be encouraged to work out their own concepts and peculiar genius of thinking and that it would be the business of the state to take no sides in this matter, but merely to guar antee a fair field to all. If then, a mi nority group’s contribution cannot meet competition by its own merit, it will not need to be suppressed under ordinary circumstances, but will die of its own inherent insufficiencies. Of course we are talking about things that are not evil and inherently vicious by their very nature. Here we come to a point of emphasis. Is it not generally con sidered that our greatest menace not only to progress but to the stability and internal security of our country is a general moral breakdown? We have it in high places and we have it in low. We especially have it among the young. Any group, therefore, which would find itself in a position to emphasize or even over-emphasize moral and spiritual liv ing among our young, thereby adding a preserving salt and leadership to our demoralized and bewildered youth, should not this type of minority con tribution be highly beneficial to democ racy as a whole? The Christian day school as it is being organized throughout the entire country is exactly this sort of institu tion. In many places it is in addition to its spiritual and moral emphasis, doing work at least equal to the public schools of the community. In some places it is not efficient as yet. But if it could be shown that such schools were academ ically inferior to the public schools and would continue to be so, and this cer tainly can by no means be shown, their moral and spiritual emphasis might still make them the most valuable contribu tion that could be made to American life. There is another angle, however, which must be considered, namely that of the parent. Parents are becoming in creasingly disturbed, not only at the apparently uncontrollable moral de- standardizations that take place in the lives of their young people, but because
they feel that in many public schools there is a deliberate attempt to prepare the minds of their children in a way of thinking that is completely antagonistic to Christian doctrine and life. Perhaps we should explain a little more clearly. It does not seem to occur to the indi vidual who has accepted evolutionary philosophy as the basis for his thinking that he has been obliged in doing so to give to this hypothesis a superior validity to that of Christian doctrine and teaching. We are assuming that the intelligent person will concede that whatever becomes the final criterion of truth in its largest possible sense as sumes in his thinking the significance of a faith or a religion. If Scripture must be explained in such a way as to make it consistent with the evolutionary hypothesis, then evolution has a su perior validity, and at least from our viewpoint is a basic component o f that person’s religion. When children and young people therefore find it difficult to avoid in doctrination in our public schools along these lines, the evolutionary teacher, to us, is assuming the prerogative of en forcing upon our children his religious viewpoint. I am very sure that many such teachers do not think of it in this way. In fact, many take the so-called liberal viewpoint and assume that a compromise may be reached between Christianity as it was believed by the early church, and the evolutionary hypothesis as it is believed by perhaps the bulk of educated and semi-educated people today. But we are a little inclined to take the attitude of Walter Lippman who years ago, in his Preface to Morals, pointed out that Humanism is a logical system if you accept its premises. Fun damentalism is also logical if you ac cept a different set of premises, but that Liberalism is neither fish, nor flesh, nor good red herring, and has no con clusions that necessarily follow from its announced premises. In any sort of compromise, as we have discovered in dealing with Joseph Stalin, we determine final authority and valid ity by discovering who does not make the concessions. And in any brand of liberalism that I have known about it was not evolution but Christianity that made the concessions. There are one or two objections to the Christian day school that ought to be noted in this brief discussion: It is quite frequently expressed by Christian teachers in public schools that we do a disservice to the child himself and to other children by this segregation of children from evangelical homes into such schools—to other children, because the presence of these children who are usually of a superior type morally and spiritually in that we have lowered the total moral level by that much. It is conceded that this is true. But adolescent and pre-adolescent children do not exist primarily as missionaries under condi tions where the odds are overwhelming against them; where they find them selves at a disadvantage in promulgat- T H E K I N G ’ S B U S I N E S S
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