Education Week carries a piece on TC Pinkney, with photos and a bit more biographical information. Pinckney is a former Southern Baptist vice-President, and, as has been widely reported, he has put forward a resolution for the next Southern Baptist convention that members remove their children from public schools. The main reason given is the “acceptance” of homosexuality in public schools, although the teaching of science that contradicts the Bible is another of Pinckney’s worries.
Over the past few days this blog has chased up several references to find out where Pinckney is coming from, and has unearthed several interesting characters: Dan Smithwick, who runs an organisation which allows you find out if your children have been educated into socialism by means of a test; Marshall Fritz, a Catholic libertarian who sees all public education as socialistic and Soviet; and Ray E. Moore of Exodus Mandate. Today I note another of Pinckney’s fellow travellers, whose book Is Public Education Necessary? Pinckney is photographed reading in the Education Week report: Samuel L Blumenfled.
Blumenfled is quite a polymath. Although an ex-publisher (with an honorary PhD from Bob Jones), his main area is child education, where he (quite sensibly, I’ll concede) promotes phonic reading and rails against the use of Ritalin. However, as his essays on WorldNetDaily and elsewhere show, he has other area of expertise, including understanding the Middle East (Palestinians are Nazis and the parents of suicide bombers should be executed), and psychoanalysis (On Al Gore: “His body language reflected excessive anxiety about his ability to win the debate. His sychopathic behavior indicates that he does suffer from a mental disorder.”). Plus, he has a deep knowledge of the history of higher education, uncovering the conspiracies against Christianity emanating from there – ranging from the influence of Unitarians and humanists through to two (at least) secret societies. First, the Skull and Bones:
Most interesting of all is how The Order has managed to gain control of American education. Three members of The Order were responsible for this development: Timothy Dwight (1849), professor at Yale Divinity School and later 12th president of Yale; Daniel Coit Gilman (1852), first president of the University of California, first president of Johns Hopkins University, and first president of the Carnegie Institution; and Andrew Dickson White (1853), first president of Cornell and first president of the American Historical Association. All three also studied philosophy at the University of Berlin.
Second, the Rhodes Scholarships:
[Rhodes’s] network was the outgrowth of the secret society created by British diamond king Cecil Rhodes to carry out his fantasy of an Anglo-American federation that would form the core of a future world government, strong enough to impose peace on the rest of the world. Do we have proof that Cecil Rhodes created such a secret society and set up the Rhodes Scholarships as a means of recruiting future world leaders to his cause? Yes, we have proof. We have nothing less than the New York Times of April 9, 1902, which carried a front page story about a “Wealthy Secret Society” that would “Work to Secure the World’s Peace and a British-American Federation.”
Like Marshall Fritz, Blumenfeld also had links with the late theocrat Rousas Rushdoony (Gary North’s father-in-law, by the way). In a memorial piece, Blumenfeld recalls that:
For years [Rushdoony] had strongly urged Christian parents to take their children out of the public schools and home school them or place them in good Christian schools. He was a champion of educational freedom because he knew that religious freedom could not exist without it. In his book, “The Messianic Character of American Education,” first published in 1963, he recognized that the war between humanism and Christianity was a struggle unto death, and that the humanist control of the public schools gave the enemies of Christianity a decided advantage over believers.
My book, “NEA: Trojan Horse in Education,” covered much of the same territory as did Rushdoony’s book, but from a different angle. Therefore, we were in concert on all matters pertaining to education, home schooling, the need to get government out of education.
Rushdoony as a champion of “religious freedom” is a bit hard to take, but there are some interesting questions here: just to what extent is Christian Reconstructionism making inroads into the Southern Baptists and other conservative Christian denomiations? With the Left Behind books as bestsellers, one would have thought that “Rapture Ready” premillennialism was flavour of the month. Yet it would seem that the ideas of postmillennialists, who see Christ returning after Christians take dominion of society, are also gaining currency. Is there a blending of the two positions? Have recent events made some Christians more optimistic that they can take control, so making premillennialism less popular?
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