“It is virtue, then, direct virtue, which is the hard and valuable part to be aimed at in education. If virtue is not settled in the student, to the exclusion of all vicious habits, all the education in the world will do nothing but make the student worse or more dangerous.”
John Locke
quoted by R. L. Dabney in On Secular Education
“A general state education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another, and the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in government.”
John Stuart Mill
19th Century English Economist, Author of On Liberty, Principles of Political Economy
“I am sure as I am of the fact of Christ’s reign that a comprehensive and centralized system of national education, separated from religion, as is now commonly proposed, will prove the most appalling engine for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief, social and political, which this sin-rent world has ever seen.”
Professor A. A. Hodge (Princeton Theological Seminary in 1887)
“The Puritans exemplified maturity; we don’t. Spiritual warfare made the Puritans what they were. They accepted conflict as their calling, seeing themselves as their Lord’s soldier-pilgrims…not expecting to be able to advance a single step without opposition of one sort or another…Today, however, Christians in the West are found to be on the whole passionless, passive and one fears, prayerless. Cultivating an ethos that encloses personal piety in a pietistic cocoon, they leave public affairs to go their own way and neither expect nor, for the most part, seek influence beyond their own Christian circle… [but] the Puritans labored for a holy England and New England – sensing that where privilege is neglected and unfaithfulness reigns, national judgement threatens.”
J. I. Packer
“A society which is predominately Christian will propagate Christianity through its schools: one which is not, will not. All of the ministries of education in the world cannot alter this law.”
C.S. Lewis
