Category: Historical Events

Events in History that led us to the place where we are today in education.

Original Intent for American Education

August 18, 2019

The majority of Americans who refer to education in this nation, think only of public schools as we know them today, but that’s not how education started in America, and a quick look at history reveals two educational systems. The first educational system was the original intent of our founding fathers. Known as the Father of Public Education, Horace Mann is responsible for implementing the second public school system, the major system we have in the United States today. This is the system that is predominant in our country today.

From the standpoint of the founding fathers, the original intent was for schools to be founded and funded by local communities. The first laws on education were passed in the 1640s in the Massachusetts Bay Colony where the Pilgrims lived. The laws required that parents saw to it that their children knew how to read the Bible and to be able to understand the laws of the land. It was clear that parents were to be the ones who oversaw the education of their children.

The primary system consists of the secular public schools we have today funded by taxpayer money and steeped in socialism and social issues. The original system is what our forefathers intended at the inception of this nation. To pray effectively for America’s education, we must look at the history behind how we got to our present the failed state of education and pray for the restoration of the original system.

We have an early glimpse as to the value early colonists placed on education by the laws the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed in 1643-1643. These laws required parents to educate their children and other children , The Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed of the first laws regarding education. In 1643, they passed a law that required parents to teach any child under their care to read and to work with numbers. If parents failed to educate their children, the government could remove them and place them in a home where they could receive a good education.

Most schools Early settlers used a Bible-based education, held high moral standards for the students, and stressed hard work and academics.

The Bible Although Massachusetts stressed education, the same was not necessarily true for the other colonies. Schools, if they existed at all, were organized by town councils, local churches, urban charitable societies, or put together with a rotation of the town’s citizens as teachers. More often than not, the Bible was the only textbook available in a classroom. Mandatory attendance was not required, which resulted in a high rate of absenteeism. The demands of children to sustain the family’s subsistence by helping with household chores, working in the fields, and assisting with a family business often took precedence over schooling.

The original system intended by our forefathers barely holds a glimmer of hope but can be revived.

Conclusion for Original Intent for Education of Children in the Colonies: The original intent of education from the standpoint of the Founding Fathers was for children to be taught the Bible in such a way that their lives were to be lived by God-given principles, knowing God as their creator, and ultimately knowing Jesus as their Lord and Savior.
Westward Expansion Spreads Secular Education (1812-1860)
From 1812-1860, education took a drastic turn in America away from its original intent. The diversion occurred as a result of two people: Horace Mann and Catharine Beecher.

Horace Mann served in the Massachusetts Legislature from 1827-1837, at which time he resigned to take the position of the newly created Massachusetts office of Secretary of Education. Horace Mann was raised in a Christian family but rejected Christianity and became a secular humanist and attended a Unitarian church. While running for office in the state legislature, Mann made a campaign promise to the Unitarians that he would start secular public schools funded by taxpayer money, which he did during his time as Secretary of Education. He is known as the Father of Public Education. Mann hated Calvinism with a passion and fought the churches who opposed his new school proposal. The Calvinists of the day feared the long-range effects of secular education and stated, “We do not need this central, all-absorbing power; it is anti-republican in all its bearings, well-adapted perhaps, to Prussia, and other European despotism, but not wanted here.” (The Christian Witness 1844)

Opposition to public schools was so prevalent that Horace Mann and his supporters secretly organized the placement of people in communities for the sole purpose to lobby in such a way to sway public opinion toward government schools.

Catharine Beecher’s father, Lyman Beecher, pastored a Presbyterian church in Ohio. As a pastor, he opposed the spread of Unitarianism, preached predestination, preached a conversion experience, advocated for the gradual elimination of slavery, and fought against the forming of secular public schools. All of her life, his daughter, Catharine expressed great opposition to the idea of conversion and a personal relationship with God. She instead embraced logic and reasoning as redemptive qualities. She refused to convert and embraced the belief that public works could serve society as well as a private faith.

In 1803, America under President Thomas Jefferson completed the Louisiana Purchase, which gave America 828,000 square miles of land for expansion. The humanistic concept of Manifest Destiny fed into the ideas of the two secular educators, Horace Mann, and Catharine Beecher, who seized the opportunity to secularize the settlers and their children in the newly acquired territory. They Europeanized the heathen and uncouth inhabitants of the new land, thereby creating a new secular society, devoid of Christianity in the new territory.

Horace Mann and Catharine Beecher joined forces to promote a new teaching profession for women. Beecher and Mann saw women as the best way to expand their new religion of secularism throughout the country and particularly felt that teaching was a great profession for unmarried women. They coined the term “missionary teachers” to entice women whose mission would be to educate “ignorant and neglected children” of the frontier. The ideal school fashioned after Prussian schools that Mann admired, were based on the teaching of humanistic philosophy.

Mann particularly liked to hire women teachers because women willingly suffered the hardships of frontier life and worked at a small fraction of the cost of a male teacher. He often bragged at how much money he saved by hiring women. As people moved west, frontier schools sprang up like wildfire through the new territory.

Conclusion for the Original Intent of Public Schools Funded with Taxpayer Money: With the formation of public schools, education was taken from the church and local communities and put under the direction of the government. Those who attended church held to a high standard of morals that Mann and Beecher wanted to be taught, without any teaching on religion and certainly not a salvation experience.

If any two people can claim credit for changing American social, academic, and ultimately political direction from libertarian to one governed by the state, the credit must go to Horace Mann and Catharine Beecher. They redefined public education as America’s new, more gentle church and female teachers as the ministers of American morality.
They were able to overcome the Church’s objections and teach a secular, watered down religion that attempted to retain moral content without referring to Jesus or conversion. They were on a passionate mission, well-financed with taxpayer money, and had the social backing of the Harvard Unitarian elite.

Note: On April 26, 2017, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to begin the process of returning school control to state and local officials. If carried through, President Trump’s order is a major step in returning schools to the original intent of our founding fathers.

The Creation of a Perfect storm in Education

June 15, 2018

Prayer for Protection from DisastersOver the past 20 years, school shootings have almost become common place. Most of the shootings fade into the distant past as a new shooting takes place of the last as the worst in history. How did we get here? What happened in America that over the last two decades school shootings have become common place? Who broke that dam of evil? And more importantly, how do we stop the killings?

Below I’ve listed three historical events that led us to this place:
1. The Theory of Evolution Introduced in Education—In the mid 1850s Herbert Spencer proposed that education should draw on new scientific principles to make teaching more efficient as well as pleasant for the child. He proposed that learning was subject to the same laws that shaped the evolution of human beings from simple organisms could be used to shape the development of each child from the earliest moments in life to adults. Out of these concepts, came a new branch of science called child psychology. New discoveries in child learning techniques should give helpful information on how to be a more discerning and caring parent or teacher. The problem with this new branch of science was that it was founded in Darwinism/evolution. Learning disabilities in children began to take names. Eventually, the medical community came up with a myriad of diagnoses for those disabilities, which leads us to the next issue—that of drugs.
2. Drugs—What came in the 1960s and onwards were a plethora of new drugs on the streets of our cities as well as through the pharmaceutical industries. The street drugs appealed to those who desired to check out of a materialistic culture. The pharmaceutical drugs treated children’s psychological issues as well as learning disabilities. We became a nation that medicated her children.
3. We lost our moral compass. Meanwhile the school curricula was steadily undergoing a major shift with the removal of the God of the Christians from the classrooms. With no concept of a creator and therefore no accountability to a higher power, no value is placed on life. When life is cheap, killing the innocent becomes prevalent. When children who grow up deprived of knowing God as a creator are legally drugged there is a recipe for disaster.

These “winds” are some of the strongest influencers that created a “perfect storm” in our educational system.

The answer lies in prayer, but not just a blanket prayer that says, “our thoughts and prayers are with you.” The answer lies with those who know God and the power of the Name of Jesus. Now is the time for believers to come together in unity, in order to pray targeted, strategic prayers that will turn our educational system and consequently our children back to God. Jesus said, “If you believe, all things are possible to him who believes.” Let’s come together in agreement to take the Mountain of Education!

Are we all animals? Funny you should ask….

June 13, 2018

In the history of America, the period of 1880 to 1933 were pivotal for this nation’s education. New theories of how to educate children were being birthed at ivy league colleges that would gradually trickle down to be taught in every school room in America. It was a time of great change—and not for the betterment of our children in our schools.

One of the more prolific change agents was Edward L. Thorndike. Mr. Thorndike graduated from Harvard in 1897. While at Harvard, he began investigating instinctive and intelligent behavior in chickens. He wrote a dissertation for his degree in education on “Animal Intelligence.” In 1911, his work was published as a book. His theories still stand today as a benchmark in educational psychology.

Edward L. Thorndike believed in evolution and wrote in his book, “His [man’s] instincts, that is, his inborn tendencies to feel and act in certain ways, show throughout marks of kinship with the lower animals, especially with our nearest relatives physically, the monkeys. His sense-powers show no new creation. …” Dr. Thorndike wrote concerning teaching, “The best way with children, may often be, in the pompous words of an animal trainer, ‘to arrange everything in connection with the trick so that the animal will be compelled by the laws of his own nature to perform it.’”

The theory of evolution, applied to the mind, was used by Thorndike and other evolutionary psychologists as a basis for building a new theory of learning by conditioning. This method of teaching completely omits any consideration or training of the spiritual component of a child. Score one more huge win for humanism in American education! The truth is, if our children are trained as animals, we should not be surprised when they are without a moral compass and act accordingly.

Prayer for the Mountain of Education During the Month of Sivan

May 23, 2018

When settlers came to America in the early 1700s, they established schools with Judeo-Christian instruction that instilled in their children a strong Christian foundation. These schools taught individualism and personal responsibility, traits that prepared their children for the rigors of frontier life in the new world. It wasn’t until 1884 that the first public school was established as the fulfillment of a campaign promise to the Unitarians by Horace Mann, known as the Father of Public Education. As the newly elected Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, Mann promised he would start schools totally funded by tax payer money without religious instruction. Beginning in 1884, America had two school systems. In the beginning, there wasn’t a lot of difference between the two because the teachers were from the local communities and were strong Christians, but over time the two systems have diverged with totally different objectives.

The month of Sivan is the month of twins. As a result of Horace Mann’s actions we now have twin educations streams – one secular and one religious. During this month, we choose to nurture America’s Godly educational inheritance with our declarations, prayers, proclamations and decrees. This is also the month of Firstfruits, cause, alignment, strength and clear vision.

• We decree and declare that the Godly stream of America’s education flourishes. We speak life into that Godly stream and command it to live, grow and mature so it will feed the minds of our youth with God’s Word.
• We decree that the Mountain of Education to come into alignment with the intents and purposes of God.
• We speak to schools, teachers and administrators who serve God in America’s schools and we decree that you go from strength to strength.
• In this month of Firstfruits, we decree that new revelation will be given to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. She will share her revelation with those in her team who are new wineskins and who will receive the Firstfruits of her revelation, and align themselves with God’s mindset.
• We decree and declare as this is a month of giving, our students will be given an education second to none in the world.
• We decree that Secretary DeVos and each member of her team will find his/her place of strength during this time, and they will move from strength to strength. That strength will open doors for them to share new battle plans.
• We declare that those in leadership will see clearly what needs to be done to reform education in America.

Nancy Huff
HAPN Mountain of Education Leader

To Repair or Replace the Foundation?

May 4, 2018


America has had two educational systems in our past. One foundation can be restored, the second foundation is beyond repair. The one on which we put our emphasis will determine the future of our nation.

The foundation of our original schools—Our country began with schools that included religious instruction. As settlers came to America, one of their first community endeavors, after constructing a church, was to start a school. They often utilized church facilities and local teachers who held the religious beliefs of the community.

The foundation of public schools—Because some of our founding fathers were Unitarian and considered themselves more “enlightened” than their religious counterparts and wanted schools that embraced the new humanistic thoughts of the day that were being discussed in the public squares of Europe and Prussia. They wanted these schools funded with tax payer money. Eventually, they found a willing elected official to help them—Horace Mann, who later became known as the Father of Modern Education.

Horace Mann ran for Secretary of the Board of Education in Massachusetts and in 1837 fulfilled a campaign promise to the Unitarians to build the first public school funded with tax payer money and without religious instruction. At first, the schools didn’t appear to be any different from the religious schools of the day, as most of the teachers in the 1800s and 1900s held strong religious beliefs. But as time progressed, humanistic teaching trickled down through the generations until we are at the point that it is unlawful to have any religious instruction in public schools.

It has taken decades, but the second foundation has eroded to the point where we as a nation can no longer ignore the broken condition of our public schools. Students who fail, cause our nation to be at risk as our citizens become less educated and less moral. Humanists tell us, if they just had more money, public schools could be repaired, but there is never any mention of utilizing that money to repair the cracked foundation by putting God back in our classrooms.

The spiritual battle is evident—If you want to see a violent reaction to the suggestion of reorganizing public schools, just mention, Charter Schools, Vouchers, or even our Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. These reactions are indications of a spiritual battle that is waging in the heavens. Public school defenders emphatically state that tax payer money should go exclusively to support public schools with no tax payer money used to educate the children in any institution that has religious instruction. We must reframe our argument and say, “Tax money should be used to educate the children of this nation in any manner the parents see fit.”

Let us pray that those who embrace Jesus will walk in the truth of Isaiah 58:12, “Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins and will raise up the age old foundations…” It is not the time to despair because of resistance, it is the time to press forward in prayer. If we pray, in the not too distant future, we will shout in victory as foundations are restored!