While many Christians are preoccupied with debunking conspiracy theories in “The Da Vinci Code,” a recent book says a real conspiracy is taking place in America’s public schools.
Marlin Maddoux, a pioneer of Christian talk radio whose posthumous Public Education Against America: The Hidden Agenda came out this spring, claimed cultural Marxism has infiltrated the public-education system, using brainwashing techniques similar to those used by Chinese communists on American POWs during the Korean War to deconstruct a Christian worldview taught in churches and homes.
In a chapter titled “The Public Education Conspiracy,” Maddoux, who based the book on interviews over the years with guests on his “Point of View” radio program, told the story of Antonio Gramsci, founder of the Italian Communist Party.
Differing with leaders of the Soviet Union, Gramsci believed spreading communism by armed revolution would never work. He instead advocated a strategy of subverting a nation’s heritage by taking over cultural institutions, like education, churches and the media.
While Gramsci died in a Fascist prison in 1937, Maddoux said, his ideas lived on in a German communist school in Frankfurt. Professors fled Hitler for America, where they established what became known as the Frankfurt School at Columbia University.
The Old Left was replaced by the New Left, made up of the brain trust of the radicals of the 1960s. They picked up where there predecessors left off, Maddoux said, deconstructing American society via a frontal attack on evangelical Christianity.
That mindset, he alleged, is behind today’s political correctness, and it assaults schoolchildren through psychological manipulation techniques with innocent-sounding names like Outcome Based Education, Values Clarification, Behavior Modification and Cooperative Learning.
The philosophical underpinning of each, Maddoux said, is the “Hegelian dialectic,” developed in the early 19th century by German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel rejected the notion of absolutes of right and wrong, saying that new truths are constantly formed in a cycle of an assumed truth (thesis) that is challenged by a competing truth (antithesis) and merges into a third truth he called synthesis.
The new synthesis, or compromise, in turn becomes the thesis challenged by another antithesis, and so on, meaning that truth is not fixed but instead ever evolving.
Hegel’s dialectic, Maddoux said, plays out every day in America’s classrooms, often facilitated by sincere teachers who don’t have a clue about the nature of the process or the harm it does.
Challenging children to move beyond preconceived ideas toward consensus, he said, creates a scientific term called “cognitive dissonance,” a disorienting psychological confusion used effectively to brainwash American POWs during the Korean War.
A latecomer to the exodus movement, Maddoux eventually concluded for a variety of reasons that Christian parents should remove their kids from public schools.
“Let me say up front I applaud the brave Christian men and women who are trying to use their teaching positions to be salt and light in public school classrooms,” he wrote. “We need more Christians in this setting making an impact on the lives of children.”
“But the heart of my concern is not about the teacher,” he continued. “The real issue is the curriculum and indoctrination that your child is receiving in spite of how nice the teacher is.”
“You see, people who do not share our values control the curriculum,” he maintained. “Their primary aim is to remove our values from society, and they are using the public school classroom to achieve their goals.”
Bruce Shortt, a leader in the Exodus Mandate anti-public school movement, gave a glowing review of Maddoux’s book May 3 on WorldNetDaily.com.
“If our children are in public schools, we have delivered them into the hands of the enemies of Christianity and Western culture,” Shortt said. “If we continue to offer our children up as living sacrifices to the Moloch of government education, we know what the results will be, and it will be our fault.”
Shortt, along with Missouri layman Roger Moran, has recommended a resolution calling for an “exit strategy” from public schools be considered at next month’s Southern Baptist Convention in Greensboro, N.C.
Shortt failed in an effort two years ago to get an SBC resolution advocating a mass exodus from public schools, but last year succeeded in getting a resolution urging parents and churches to investigate their local school districts for anti-Christian influences like homosexuality.
The resolution, which must clear a committee in order to come to the floor for a vote, calls on SBC agencies to “assist churches in the development of exit strategies from the government schools” that give particular attention to “the needs of orphans, single parents and the disadvantaged.”
Bob Allen is managing editor of EthicsDaily.com.