J.G. Machen on the public schools

A quick post from "Christianity and Liberalism"

(Skip to the end if you only care about Machen!)

Today, a quick post motivated by two happenings - one, our summer “teaching training” for the classical Christian school at which I will be teaching this Fall begins today, so that puts schooling especially on the brain. And two… you know they say you should read old books, and they’re right, because I opened my copy of Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism a couple of nights ago and $200 fell out! Apparently last time I had been reading it I had just been to the bank and used the money as a bookmark, and then forgot about it. “It pays to read Machen”, someone told me in the Presbycast forum.

One thing I appreciate about Machen is that “freedom” is still a good word to him. I think it was Kevin Sorbo (yes, Hercules) who early in COVID wrote that “you are being conditioned to view your freedom as selfishness”. But if COVID put that mindset into overdrive, it had already been around for many years, and many Christians have bought into that distortion. There is, their mind tells them now, this thing called the “common good”, which is good, and potentially opposed to the common good at every turn is this thing called “freedom” or “individual liberty” which is, at best, highly dangerous and to be kept under control. The “common good” is all the vitamins and minerals a body needs, “individual liberty” is the ice cream sandwich we might let you have if you’re not too fat and it doesn’t bother anyone else, but it isn’t of much value by itself.

By contrast, Machen seemed to believe that freedom was necessary for humans to develop into vibrant humans, with thriving souls. Just before the big quotation from Christianity and Liberalism below, he expresses concern that,

… in the interests of physical well-being the great principles of liberty are being thrown ruthlessly to the winds. The result is an unparalleled impoverishment of human life. Personality can only be developed in the realm of individual choice.

He means “physical well-being” there very generally - thanks to science, maybe thanks to state policy, food is more readily available, you have a slightly better home over your head, etc., but the spiritual concerns of life have been neglected and, in fact, aggressively dismissed as irrelevant.

I may have mentioned this in a previous post, but I am also charmed that he was dismayed by things like… the government turning wild lands into parks, and signalized crosswalks. The state putting a maintained, mulched path through the forest is a step too far for you, Machen? But I appreciate people who recognize the growing danger when it is still newly born. He lived in a nation that was, I don’t know, maybe a tenth as regimented and regulated as it is now, yet he already saw how that was going to diminish the human spirit. And now we live with that diminishment. Now many of us are not even conscious of what has been lost.

Partially on the subject of that diminishment, and without further commentary (for is it needed?), I give you Machen on the public schools… this was actually not written yesterday, but rather in 1923, 99 years ago, if you can believe that.

When one considers what the public schools of America in many places already are - their materialism, their discouragement of any sustained intellectual effort, their encouragement of the dangerous pseudo-scientific fads of experimental psychology - one can only be appalled by the thought of a commonwealth in which there is no escape from such a soul-killing system… A public-school system, in itself, is indeed of enormous benefit to the race. But it is of benefit only if it is kept healthy at every moment by the absolutely free possibility of the competition of private schools. A public-school system, if it means the providing of free education to those who desire it, is a noteworthy and beneficent achievement of modern times; but when once it becomes monopolistic it is the most perfect instrument of tyranny which has yet been devised. Freedom of thought in the middle ages was combated by the Inquisition, but the modern method is far more effective. Place the lives of children in their formative years, despite the convictions of their parents, under the intimate control of experts appointed by the state, force them then to attend schools where the higher aspirations of humanity are crushed out, and where the mind is filled with the materialism of the day, and it is difficult to see how even the remnants of liberty can subsist. Such a tyranny, supported as it is by a perverse technique used as the instrument in destroying human souls, is certainly far more dangerous than the crude tyrannies of the past, which despite their weapons of fire and sword permitted thought at least to be free.

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