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Intellectual Schizophrenia: Culture, Crisis and Education
When this brilliant and prophetic book was first published in 1961, the Christian homeschool movement was years away and even Christian day schools were hardly considered a viable educational alternative. But this book and the authors later Messianic Character of American Education were a resolute call to arms for Christians to get their children out of the pagan public schools and provide them with a genuine Christian education. Dr. Rushdoony had predicted that the humanist system, based on anti-Christian premises of the Enlightenment, could only get worse. Rushdoony was indeed a prophet. He knew that education divorced from God and from all transcendental standards would produce the educational disaster and moral barbarism we have today. The title of this book is particularly significant in that Dr. Rushdoony was able to identify the basic contradiction that pervades a secular society that rejects Gods sovereignty but still needs law and order, justice, science, and meaning to life. As Dr. Rushdoony writes, "there is no law, no society, no justice, no structure, no design, no meaning apart from God." And so, modern man has become schizophrenic because of his rebellion against God.
152 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1961
18 people are currently reading
319 people want to read
About the author
Rousas John Rushdoony
137 books148 followersRousas John Rushdoony was a Calvinist philosopher, historian, and theologian and is widely credited as the father of both Christian Reconstructionism and the modern homeschool movement. His prolific writings have exerted considerable influence on the Christian right.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
June 9, 2016
Livro excelente. Rushdoony destrói a visão estadista da educação, compartilhada por muitos cristãos, cujos pressupostos às vezes se encontram até mesmo em escolas cristãs, além de dar uma aula gratuita de filosofia, teologia e história. Ler Rushdoony nunca é desperdício de tempo, mesmo quando você discorda dele.
February 7, 2017
Com muita competência e erudição, Rushdoony mapeia todo o problema com a educação estatal até a sua raiz numa linguagem simples, objetiva e acessível. Ele chega a dizer, a certa altura do livro, que a resistência de alguns estudantes à educação contemporânea é um indicativo de saúde mental e cultural. Se isto já era verdade na década de 60, que dirá hoje?
Apesar de este já ser um assunto até certo ponto batido entre nós — graças, em parte, ao princípio de declínio da hegemonia esquerdista nas prateleiras de nossas livrarias —, o livro continua atual e necessário, tendo em vista que ainda são poucas as publicações em português que se propõem a tratar do tema a partir de um ponto de vista cristão reformado.
No entanto, é um livro que exige maturidade da parte de quem lê, especialmente no que tange a certas soluções propostas pelo autor. É preciso situar a obra em seu contexto histórico antes de sair por aí defendendo a extinção disto e daquilo outro. O fato de Rush, por exemplo, incluir a Escola Dominical vigente em sua época na lista de escolas a serem extintas não significa que devemos juntar todas no mesmo pacote. Enfim, é preciso acautelar-se das utopias, não importa de que lado do espectro político venham — se do esquerdo, se do direito.
Apesar de este já ser um assunto até certo ponto batido entre nós — graças, em parte, ao princípio de declínio da hegemonia esquerdista nas prateleiras de nossas livrarias —, o livro continua atual e necessário, tendo em vista que ainda são poucas as publicações em português que se propõem a tratar do tema a partir de um ponto de vista cristão reformado.
No entanto, é um livro que exige maturidade da parte de quem lê, especialmente no que tange a certas soluções propostas pelo autor. É preciso situar a obra em seu contexto histórico antes de sair por aí defendendo a extinção disto e daquilo outro. O fato de Rush, por exemplo, incluir a Escola Dominical vigente em sua época na lista de escolas a serem extintas não significa que devemos juntar todas no mesmo pacote. Enfim, é preciso acautelar-se das utopias, não importa de que lado do espectro político venham — se do esquerdo, se do direito.
September 5, 2013
This is Rushdoony's foundational book for understanding education. Readers will find it much easier, and much more engaging than "The Messianic Character of American Education." Though that is a fine work, it is a slow and difficult read, though oftentimes brilliant.
"Intellectual Schizophrenia" deals with first matters, beginning with a brief history of public education in America. He writes that education became the "cure-all" for social problems during the Enlightenment, and remains so today. This messianic concept is irreconcilable to the Calvinistic view of education. Thus, at the outset, the believer and unbeliever are at odds over the teleology, or purpose, of education.
Modern education has become statist by necessity, since in the Enlightenment view, there is no ultimate authority. The state becomes that authority and thus the individual is subsumed under the state, and personal freedom is consequently subordinated to the state, or polity.
The Vantillian antithesis so fundamental to Rushdoony's philosophy is established early. He writes:
"Long before Bacon, man set himself a false ideal for knowledge. Man’s original sin involved the postulate of an ultimate epistemological and metaphysical pluralism which gave equal ultimacy to the mind of man and of God, as well as to time and eternity. Hence, there was no eternal decree, and only time could be the test of anything, together with experimentation and exhaustive knowledge. In terms of this, true knowledge became either illusory or at very best—tentative." p. 19
This pagan understanding of knowledge has crept into the church and pervaded all levels of society. This rejection of God is a turning toward death. p. 27-28
This then becomes the heart of Rushdoony's thesis:
"In every area we have what can only be characterized as intellectual schizophrenia, a split personality. On the one hand modern man, ‘Christian’ and non-Christian, in dealing with the practical necessities of any particular area of science or of learning, must be theistic, must assume the ontological trinity, in that he must posit an eternal decree, a unity in life and learning and a correspondence to ultimate reality of numbers, etc. Let him hold to as radical a relativism as he may, he still acts in terms of an eternal decree.
As a result, he is caught in the tension of intellectual schizophrenia and is a divided person, a house divided against itself. The growing tension of modern life is due precisely to this schizophrenic element in all learning. The more relevant science and learning become to everyday life, the more irrelevant they become in theory. Man is schizoid in his attempt to function apart from God, to use the things of this creation while denying their creator and the eternal decree behind all reality. Man apart from God is guilty of what Van Til calls the Cainitic wish, the desire that there be no God, but whenever and wherever man tries to eliminate God, he ends up by eliminating all reality." p. 30-31
It is only the consistent, epistemologically self-concious Christian that "can teach in the confidence that there is a unity of learning in his school in that the ontological trinity is the presupposition of all factuality, and that all facts are created facts and hence God-given and consistent facts. He can avoid thereby the intellectual schizophrenia of our age, for himself and his students." p. 36
This is actually the purpose of Christian education--"to declare that no fact is a fact apart from the ontological trinity, that all facts are personal facts precisely because they have been created by a personal God who alone is the true source of their interpretation, and that, because the whole created universe came into being by the act of that one God, whose eternal decree undergirds all reality, learning is not illusory and all learning has a fundamental unity." p. 39-40
Once he has established his thesis, he goes on to critique the government schools. Rushdoony's criticism is thorough and absolutely devastating. It is worth quoting at length to give the full context. Public educators beware, this quote will induce either amens, or anger:
"Educationally, the child considered in terms of needs must be given automatic promotions to prevent any sense of inferiority, frustration or maladjustment. Socially, the same child must be guaranteed cradle to grave security lest a psychic trauma be produced. The cure for failure to learn is to devaluate learning, and the cure for social failure is to devaluate success. Inevitably, the only teachers who succeed in terms of such schools are those who share in the basic premises, or supinely permit their propagation with the result that, despite the academic degrees, the teachers are less and less teachers and more and more propagandists of the statist creed. Their obvious inferiority has been substantially demonstrated by the army’s draft deferment testing program, which reveals that not only are prospective teachers the lowest in intelligence and ability of any group, and by a substantial margin, but that those who are headed for school administration are a radically inferior group. As Whyte comments, on analyzing the figures, ‘It is now well evident that a large proportion of the younger people who will one day be in charge of our secondary-school system are precisely those with the least aptitude for education of all Americans attending college.’ Educators are unwilling to admit these facts, and, when forced to, plead that low pay drives away the better prospects. But the falsity of this claim is apparent when it is realized that the same applies to systems with high pay, and the fact that administrators, usually well paid, represent the lowest calibre of all. Money then is not the issue, because at least administration would draw men of intellectual ability and aptitude. The fact is that statist education, resting as it does on a philosophy repugnant to free and responsible men, does not and cannot draw a high level of men. Christian schools, often paying less, are nonetheless able to draw dedicated men and culturally literate men, this in spite of handicaps a young and developing concept in education faces." p. 78-79
He is unwilling to give Christians a pass on the status quo and requires their action--they "must attack the fundamental statist concept." He equates the disestablishment of state churches with the eventual disestablishment of state schools. I thought this was one of the most brilliant insights of the book, that in the former age, "The cause of religion then required compulsion, even as the cause of education now requires compulsion, even as the cause of education now requires compulsion and the state."
This secular age, and "To this culture, compulsory state religion seems radically wrong, but not a compulsory state education. But between the two no real difference exists; both require the compulsive power of the state for whatever the culture deems necessary. Compulsion in religion was in an earlier era a social necessity, even as it now is in education." p. 118-119
Rushdoony then comes to a positive view of education--the Christian view. But even here, he spends more time arguing what Christian education must not be. He warns that "The teaching of the Bible in the Christian school as its basic religious and cultural premise, can be wholly or partially neutralized if certain non-biblical presuppositions govern the teaching." He also writes at length warning against moralism.
"For Scripture, the godly man is the saved man, not the self-consciously good man. It is not a contrast between moral and immoral but between godly and ungodly, holy and wicked, and the moral man, as witness the Pharisees, can epitomize ungodliness. Yet the moralistic construction creeps into Christian thinking." p. 82
As he's written elsewhere, in his "Institutes of Biblical Law," I believe, he uses the example of Rahab in warning against moralism. Though I don't entirely agree with his explanation, it is a powerful argument. p. 83-84
He warns against projecting "modern secularism onto the Bible." It is not a normal view of life, and is irreconcilable with the Bible. p. 85 If God is not God, man is not man, and all becomes "relativity." Instead, "The Bible must be taught in terms of its claimed ramifications, which are far-reaching. The law, for example, is particular and principal." p. 86
This is another great section of the book, as he uses Deut. 25:14 and "the muzzling of the ox" as an example of how biblical law must be understood. p. 86
He brings this together toward the end, arguing that the statist nature of public education is mystical--requiring the individual's mystical union with the whole--mass man. For that is what education is for in the Enlightenment view--the integration of the one into the many. This explains the establishment of the public school, as the church was state-established in the previous age. This explains why there is such opposition today to homeschooling and public education. It is a religious concept, which is why two years later Rushdoony published "The Messianic Character of American Education."
Like all of his works, the book is uneven. There are portions that are slow, but there are pages and pages of brilliance and piercing insight that most authors could only dream of themselves. There is so much in this book that I didn't even mention that are worth writing about, but read the book for yourself, you won't regret it.
"Intellectual Schizophrenia" deals with first matters, beginning with a brief history of public education in America. He writes that education became the "cure-all" for social problems during the Enlightenment, and remains so today. This messianic concept is irreconcilable to the Calvinistic view of education. Thus, at the outset, the believer and unbeliever are at odds over the teleology, or purpose, of education.
Modern education has become statist by necessity, since in the Enlightenment view, there is no ultimate authority. The state becomes that authority and thus the individual is subsumed under the state, and personal freedom is consequently subordinated to the state, or polity.
The Vantillian antithesis so fundamental to Rushdoony's philosophy is established early. He writes:
"Long before Bacon, man set himself a false ideal for knowledge. Man’s original sin involved the postulate of an ultimate epistemological and metaphysical pluralism which gave equal ultimacy to the mind of man and of God, as well as to time and eternity. Hence, there was no eternal decree, and only time could be the test of anything, together with experimentation and exhaustive knowledge. In terms of this, true knowledge became either illusory or at very best—tentative." p. 19
This pagan understanding of knowledge has crept into the church and pervaded all levels of society. This rejection of God is a turning toward death. p. 27-28
This then becomes the heart of Rushdoony's thesis:
"In every area we have what can only be characterized as intellectual schizophrenia, a split personality. On the one hand modern man, ‘Christian’ and non-Christian, in dealing with the practical necessities of any particular area of science or of learning, must be theistic, must assume the ontological trinity, in that he must posit an eternal decree, a unity in life and learning and a correspondence to ultimate reality of numbers, etc. Let him hold to as radical a relativism as he may, he still acts in terms of an eternal decree.
As a result, he is caught in the tension of intellectual schizophrenia and is a divided person, a house divided against itself. The growing tension of modern life is due precisely to this schizophrenic element in all learning. The more relevant science and learning become to everyday life, the more irrelevant they become in theory. Man is schizoid in his attempt to function apart from God, to use the things of this creation while denying their creator and the eternal decree behind all reality. Man apart from God is guilty of what Van Til calls the Cainitic wish, the desire that there be no God, but whenever and wherever man tries to eliminate God, he ends up by eliminating all reality." p. 30-31
It is only the consistent, epistemologically self-concious Christian that "can teach in the confidence that there is a unity of learning in his school in that the ontological trinity is the presupposition of all factuality, and that all facts are created facts and hence God-given and consistent facts. He can avoid thereby the intellectual schizophrenia of our age, for himself and his students." p. 36
This is actually the purpose of Christian education--"to declare that no fact is a fact apart from the ontological trinity, that all facts are personal facts precisely because they have been created by a personal God who alone is the true source of their interpretation, and that, because the whole created universe came into being by the act of that one God, whose eternal decree undergirds all reality, learning is not illusory and all learning has a fundamental unity." p. 39-40
Once he has established his thesis, he goes on to critique the government schools. Rushdoony's criticism is thorough and absolutely devastating. It is worth quoting at length to give the full context. Public educators beware, this quote will induce either amens, or anger:
"Educationally, the child considered in terms of needs must be given automatic promotions to prevent any sense of inferiority, frustration or maladjustment. Socially, the same child must be guaranteed cradle to grave security lest a psychic trauma be produced. The cure for failure to learn is to devaluate learning, and the cure for social failure is to devaluate success. Inevitably, the only teachers who succeed in terms of such schools are those who share in the basic premises, or supinely permit their propagation with the result that, despite the academic degrees, the teachers are less and less teachers and more and more propagandists of the statist creed. Their obvious inferiority has been substantially demonstrated by the army’s draft deferment testing program, which reveals that not only are prospective teachers the lowest in intelligence and ability of any group, and by a substantial margin, but that those who are headed for school administration are a radically inferior group. As Whyte comments, on analyzing the figures, ‘It is now well evident that a large proportion of the younger people who will one day be in charge of our secondary-school system are precisely those with the least aptitude for education of all Americans attending college.’ Educators are unwilling to admit these facts, and, when forced to, plead that low pay drives away the better prospects. But the falsity of this claim is apparent when it is realized that the same applies to systems with high pay, and the fact that administrators, usually well paid, represent the lowest calibre of all. Money then is not the issue, because at least administration would draw men of intellectual ability and aptitude. The fact is that statist education, resting as it does on a philosophy repugnant to free and responsible men, does not and cannot draw a high level of men. Christian schools, often paying less, are nonetheless able to draw dedicated men and culturally literate men, this in spite of handicaps a young and developing concept in education faces." p. 78-79
He is unwilling to give Christians a pass on the status quo and requires their action--they "must attack the fundamental statist concept." He equates the disestablishment of state churches with the eventual disestablishment of state schools. I thought this was one of the most brilliant insights of the book, that in the former age, "The cause of religion then required compulsion, even as the cause of education now requires compulsion, even as the cause of education now requires compulsion and the state."
This secular age, and "To this culture, compulsory state religion seems radically wrong, but not a compulsory state education. But between the two no real difference exists; both require the compulsive power of the state for whatever the culture deems necessary. Compulsion in religion was in an earlier era a social necessity, even as it now is in education." p. 118-119
Rushdoony then comes to a positive view of education--the Christian view. But even here, he spends more time arguing what Christian education must not be. He warns that "The teaching of the Bible in the Christian school as its basic religious and cultural premise, can be wholly or partially neutralized if certain non-biblical presuppositions govern the teaching." He also writes at length warning against moralism.
"For Scripture, the godly man is the saved man, not the self-consciously good man. It is not a contrast between moral and immoral but between godly and ungodly, holy and wicked, and the moral man, as witness the Pharisees, can epitomize ungodliness. Yet the moralistic construction creeps into Christian thinking." p. 82
As he's written elsewhere, in his "Institutes of Biblical Law," I believe, he uses the example of Rahab in warning against moralism. Though I don't entirely agree with his explanation, it is a powerful argument. p. 83-84
He warns against projecting "modern secularism onto the Bible." It is not a normal view of life, and is irreconcilable with the Bible. p. 85 If God is not God, man is not man, and all becomes "relativity." Instead, "The Bible must be taught in terms of its claimed ramifications, which are far-reaching. The law, for example, is particular and principal." p. 86
This is another great section of the book, as he uses Deut. 25:14 and "the muzzling of the ox" as an example of how biblical law must be understood. p. 86
He brings this together toward the end, arguing that the statist nature of public education is mystical--requiring the individual's mystical union with the whole--mass man. For that is what education is for in the Enlightenment view--the integration of the one into the many. This explains the establishment of the public school, as the church was state-established in the previous age. This explains why there is such opposition today to homeschooling and public education. It is a religious concept, which is why two years later Rushdoony published "The Messianic Character of American Education."
Like all of his works, the book is uneven. There are portions that are slow, but there are pages and pages of brilliance and piercing insight that most authors could only dream of themselves. There is so much in this book that I didn't even mention that are worth writing about, but read the book for yourself, you won't regret it.
May 19, 2009
On the plus side of good.
April 22, 2025
This is not the day and age to succumb to despair, to the lies that no thing save mere conversion has any eternal significance, that the world and everything in it will be destroyed and reset only when it reaches the peak of chaos and wickedness and persecution of the Church. Such a future is not what God has envisioned, and such pietistic, self-willed pessimism must be pulled out root and stem and replaced with the joyous, mirthful, relentless onward march of the Gospel, the full counsel of God's Word, and Christ's Church, until every area of life from the inward souls of men to the most powerful of governments and rulers and laws be subjected to the standard and authority of Jesus Christ himself.
As Van Til has said, emphasized anew by Rushdoony, culture is religion externalized. Hence the true "Christian-ness" of any expression of the Christian faith will ultimately be seen in its fruits, good or bad or lack thereof. True Christian faith, doctrine, and orthodoxy must definitionally produce a godly, biblical culture around them. As individual good works are the inevitable fruit of true individual faith, so godly culture is the inevitable fruit of true corporate Christianity. Let's all roll up our sleeves and joyfully, prayerfully, get to work. Our risen and triumphant Lord has asked, and He will receive the nations as His inheritance.
As Van Til has said, emphasized anew by Rushdoony, culture is religion externalized. Hence the true "Christian-ness" of any expression of the Christian faith will ultimately be seen in its fruits, good or bad or lack thereof. True Christian faith, doctrine, and orthodoxy must definitionally produce a godly, biblical culture around them. As individual good works are the inevitable fruit of true individual faith, so godly culture is the inevitable fruit of true corporate Christianity. Let's all roll up our sleeves and joyfully, prayerfully, get to work. Our risen and triumphant Lord has asked, and He will receive the nations as His inheritance.
February 1, 2024
I decided to start reading Rushdoony as he is pretty foundational to a lot of reactionary Christianity today. I plan to work my way through as much of his writing as I can. This had in embryo a lot of the arguments against public education that you see today. A lot of narratives of decline and critiques of modernity and the Enlightenment that you can read elsewhere from better scholars. Nowhere in the book does he deal with material issues of education in the United States. Rushdoony argues for eliminating public schools, which would lead to millions of children receiving no formal education at all. But this isn't really a problem for him, as he doesn't believe true knowledge is possible outside of "Orthodox" Christianity (by which he means a very particular strain of Calvinism, he cites almost no one outside of that tradition).
It's a very good book for understanding where a lot of right wing arguments against public schools come from. As for learning anything useful about education in the United States, either at the time of publication or today it's near useless.
It's a very good book for understanding where a lot of right wing arguments against public schools come from. As for learning anything useful about education in the United States, either at the time of publication or today it's near useless.
December 25, 2020
R.J. Rushdoony writings always seem to present outside-the-mainstream ways of looking at the topics he deals with. His book on philosophy that I read recently, The One and the Many took a creative look at the way Trinitarianism provides a view that balances individualism and an Eastern pantheistic view of reality. In this book, Rushdoony takes on modern American education, especially public education, in the early 1960s.
The main point seems to be that public education is attempting to do on a basis of atheism or at best religious indifference, what only can be done with an understanding provided by a theistic worldview. He writes, "... nothing is understandable except in terms of Christ... All secular learning is involved in a fundamental contradiction: it must act on the assumption of a unity of law and meaning while denying the very existence of it or its implications." The schizophrenia he speaks of refers to the attempt to value truth without a philosophical construct that gives meaning to the facts being taught.
Since the traditional sort of education which aimed not just at training in job skills, but in helping individuals become who they were intended to be as bearers of the image and likeness of God cannot be achieved without a theistic world view, an alternate ultimate goal has taken over education: the creating of model citizens who conform to the majority views of the culture. The state has an obvious stake in this, and thus it takes on this role of conditioning students in the values currently in vogue. The indoctrination in climate change hysteria is a clear example that came to my mind. We see it even more recently in the attempt to replace traditional concepts of gender and sex or even regarding race with what the elites hope to impress on the upcoming generation. Rushdoony saw these trends and warned against them by promoting the idea of the Christian school as an alternative to public education.
And by Christian school he did not mean schools run by churches. He meant schools formed by free association of Christian parents who wished to provide education based on true Christian principles, not just imitations of public schools with added classes in religion and morals. It was not to be just more than public school education, it was to be fundamentally different from it.
Rushdoony's Christian Reformed views sometimes struck me as extreme. His view of what the church is and how it should engage with the wider culture was not what I believe to be the full truth. He complains about the way the Roman Catholic Church ruled all of Western society in a monolithic way, and uses this as an analogy to the state's rule over all society today, but at the same time states, "Christians can be satisfied with nothing less than a Christian organization of society." He seems to be all for pluralism when it provides benefit to the church, but opposed to it otherwise. It seems to me that's a bit of schizophrenia of his own.
But there are some really good points that he makes. Here's an example of something he quotes from the American Council on Education: "To call supernaturalism a religion and naturalism a philosophy and on that basis to exclude the one and embrace the other is, we think, a form of self-deception." His conclusion goes beyond pointing out this problem with public education to actually pointing to "the one answer not faced... the abolition of the public school system."
He also takes aim at moralism, the teaching of ethics apart from an understanding that children are in need of regeneration, not just in need of behaviour modification. He goes so far as to state that the Sunday school, with its emphasis on teaching virtue apart from evangelization, is an evil at odds with what the Gospel teaches. He wants Sunday schools eliminated for that reason! It sounds extreme, but I think he is making a very solid point with how religion is taught to youth.
Rushdoony is good to read because he always looks at things from a perspective new to me. And though there are things about which I strongly disagree, the exposure to his thoughts expands my understanding and broadens my horizons.
The main point seems to be that public education is attempting to do on a basis of atheism or at best religious indifference, what only can be done with an understanding provided by a theistic worldview. He writes, "... nothing is understandable except in terms of Christ... All secular learning is involved in a fundamental contradiction: it must act on the assumption of a unity of law and meaning while denying the very existence of it or its implications." The schizophrenia he speaks of refers to the attempt to value truth without a philosophical construct that gives meaning to the facts being taught.
Since the traditional sort of education which aimed not just at training in job skills, but in helping individuals become who they were intended to be as bearers of the image and likeness of God cannot be achieved without a theistic world view, an alternate ultimate goal has taken over education: the creating of model citizens who conform to the majority views of the culture. The state has an obvious stake in this, and thus it takes on this role of conditioning students in the values currently in vogue. The indoctrination in climate change hysteria is a clear example that came to my mind. We see it even more recently in the attempt to replace traditional concepts of gender and sex or even regarding race with what the elites hope to impress on the upcoming generation. Rushdoony saw these trends and warned against them by promoting the idea of the Christian school as an alternative to public education.
And by Christian school he did not mean schools run by churches. He meant schools formed by free association of Christian parents who wished to provide education based on true Christian principles, not just imitations of public schools with added classes in religion and morals. It was not to be just more than public school education, it was to be fundamentally different from it.
Rushdoony's Christian Reformed views sometimes struck me as extreme. His view of what the church is and how it should engage with the wider culture was not what I believe to be the full truth. He complains about the way the Roman Catholic Church ruled all of Western society in a monolithic way, and uses this as an analogy to the state's rule over all society today, but at the same time states, "Christians can be satisfied with nothing less than a Christian organization of society." He seems to be all for pluralism when it provides benefit to the church, but opposed to it otherwise. It seems to me that's a bit of schizophrenia of his own.
But there are some really good points that he makes. Here's an example of something he quotes from the American Council on Education: "To call supernaturalism a religion and naturalism a philosophy and on that basis to exclude the one and embrace the other is, we think, a form of self-deception." His conclusion goes beyond pointing out this problem with public education to actually pointing to "the one answer not faced... the abolition of the public school system."
He also takes aim at moralism, the teaching of ethics apart from an understanding that children are in need of regeneration, not just in need of behaviour modification. He goes so far as to state that the Sunday school, with its emphasis on teaching virtue apart from evangelization, is an evil at odds with what the Gospel teaches. He wants Sunday schools eliminated for that reason! It sounds extreme, but I think he is making a very solid point with how religion is taught to youth.
Rushdoony is good to read because he always looks at things from a perspective new to me. And though there are things about which I strongly disagree, the exposure to his thoughts expands my understanding and broadens my horizons.
May 11, 2016
This is a great book (I read the english version). Certainly appropriate for the age in which we live.
March 17, 2022
Challenging material. There is a lot to think through on this one as the subject matter and delivery are dense but wide spreading. Too much to highlight, but if you have any consideration of what it means as a Christian to educate your children, I would recommend this book. I feel like it pairs well with How Should We Then Live? by Francis Schaeffer and Love Thy Body by Nancy Pearcey. Take concepts from those books and then laser focus them on education. That’s how I’d describe Rushdoony’s Intellectual Schizophrenia.
May 5, 2023
It was ok. Discusses the problems with state education.
States pretty clearly that the institutional church is just an aspect of THE church. That it doesn’t hold authority over other spheres of society. This sadly elevates the father to an equal level of authority as elders and pastors. The church has no real authority over its congregation and we shouldn’t be surprised by a lack of discipline or an exiting of any member challenged on their sins.
States pretty clearly that the institutional church is just an aspect of THE church. That it doesn’t hold authority over other spheres of society. This sadly elevates the father to an equal level of authority as elders and pastors. The church has no real authority over its congregation and we shouldn’t be surprised by a lack of discipline or an exiting of any member challenged on their sins.
July 25, 2018
Excellent work on the influence of Education
Today's society is indeed schizophrenic, and Rushdoony describes how our statist education encourages more atomization of the individual, dependence on the state, and destruction of the family. Good book, even if the Puritan/Calvinist perspective was sometimes hard to swallow.
Today's society is indeed schizophrenic, and Rushdoony describes how our statist education encourages more atomization of the individual, dependence on the state, and destruction of the family. Good book, even if the Puritan/Calvinist perspective was sometimes hard to swallow.
December 24, 2018
Some good critiques against modern state education. Rushdoony's low view of the church seems concerning though.
Want to read
June 21, 2019Recommended here.
November 29, 2021
For intellectuals by an intellectual, and very helpful at understanding people who are hard to understand... also very pro-home schooling.
February 15, 2017
Good book - prophetic in many ways. If the evangelical church would have heeded this wisdom 60 years ago, we wouldn't be in the mess we are today.
November 26, 2022
"When this brilliant and prophetic book was first
published in 1961, the Christian homeschool movement was years away and even Christian day schools were hardly considered a viable educational alternative. But this book and the authors later work "Messianic Character of
American Education" were a resolute call to arms for Christians to get their children out of the pagan public schools and provide them with a genuine Christian education.
Dr. Rushdoony had predicted that the humanist system, based on anti-Christian premises of the Enlightenment, could only get worse. He knew that education divorced from God and from all transcendental standards would produce the educational disaster and moral barbarism we have today. The title of this book is particularly significant in that Dr. Rushdoony was able to identify the basic contradiction that pervades a secular society that rejects Gods sovereignty but still needs law and order, justice, science, and meaning to life. As Dr. Rushdoony writes, "there is no law, no society, no justice, no structure, no design, no meaning apart from God." And so, modern man has become schizophrenic because of his rebellion against God."
published in 1961, the Christian homeschool movement was years away and even Christian day schools were hardly considered a viable educational alternative. But this book and the authors later work "Messianic Character of
American Education" were a resolute call to arms for Christians to get their children out of the pagan public schools and provide them with a genuine Christian education.
Dr. Rushdoony had predicted that the humanist system, based on anti-Christian premises of the Enlightenment, could only get worse. He knew that education divorced from God and from all transcendental standards would produce the educational disaster and moral barbarism we have today. The title of this book is particularly significant in that Dr. Rushdoony was able to identify the basic contradiction that pervades a secular society that rejects Gods sovereignty but still needs law and order, justice, science, and meaning to life. As Dr. Rushdoony writes, "there is no law, no society, no justice, no structure, no design, no meaning apart from God." And so, modern man has become schizophrenic because of his rebellion against God."
November 1, 2016
I read this in a college class. The arguments he makes are still valid today.
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