Brief History of Education

-Article from: Considering Homeschooling Ministry, http://www.consideringhomeschooling.org/publicschools.html
For the first 200 years of education in North America, the primary goal of schooling was to foster religious devotion. The original Puritan and Separatist colonists, inheriting the Reformation's concern that everyone be able to read the Bible, opened schools for the purpose of teaching children how to study the Scriptures. A biblically literate population was seen as the best insurance for a successful society. Our founding fathers recognized that education should primarily serve to encourage faith in Christ. They acknowledged that civilization's health and very existence depended on people who understood and lived Christian principles.
George Washington said, "True religion affords government its surest support. The future of this nation depends on the Christian training of the youth. It is impossible to govern without the Bible." Noah Webster wrote, "The education of Youth is an employment of more consequence than making laws and preaching the gospel, because it lays the foundation on which both law and gospel rest for success."
In the 1830's, however, secular concepts began infiltrating the worldview of US citizens. Horace Mann, the "Father of American Public Education," conceived of an educational system without any religious creed (faith). This was the beginning of a long process of excluding God from public education. From this time on, education was seen increasingly as a tool to indoctrinate the public with secularism and humanism. Secularism seeks to remove God's existence, or at least His relevance, from reality. Humanism centers the universe on humanity, making man, rather than a divine creator, its most important being.
"Education is thus a most powerful ally of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday schools, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?" wrote Charles Francis Potter, signer of the 1933 Humanist Manifesto & author of Humanism: A New Religion. Consider a Christian Home Education for your children. No other environment can provide the safety of a whole Christian worldview and Biblical education.