William J. Federer is a nationally known speaker, best-selling author, and president of Amerisearch, Inc., a publishing company dedicated to researching America’s noble heritage. This article was adapted from his daily American Minute blog.

America’s founders understood the importance of education to sustain self-government. They believed that each person is an independent moral agent personally accountable to God for their actions.

Education took place through homeschooling, tutors, and academies. Institutions of higher learning also had the purpose “to train a literate clergy” and prepare missionaries to reach the Indians. Among those founded during the early colonial era was Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1636).

When Harvard was thought to have drifted from teaching students Puritan orthodoxy, ten Congregational ministers, headed by Rev. James Pierpont, founded “Collegiate College,” in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1701. In 1718, it was renamed after large contributions from Elihu Yale, a Boston merchant who made a fortune in Madras, India, with the British East India Company.

Pierpont’s daughter, Sarah, married Jonathan Edwards in 1727.

Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening

Edwards was born in 1703, and entered Yale in 1716, at the age of 13. As a student, he was fascinated with the philosophy of John Locke and the discoveries of Isaac Newton.

In 1720, at age 17, he graduated valedictorian of his class. He taught students at Yale from 1724-26 as a “pillar tutor,” and was ordained in 1727.

Edwards served as a “scholar-pastor,” studying 13 hours a day, at the Congregationalist Church in Northampton, Massachusetts. There, he assisted the head pastor, his grandfather, Puritan Rev. Solomon Stoddard, the first librarian at Harvard University. In 1729, Solomon Stoddard died, leaving Jonathan Edwards as sole pastor of one of the largest congregations in Massachusetts.

Edwards preached “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in 1741, fueling the First Great Awakening in which tens of thousands came to Christ. The revival, largely among young people, was so widespread that history credits it with helping to unite the colonies prior to the Revolution.

The Great Awakening revival led to the founding of more universities, including Pennsylvania, Princeton, Columbia, and Brown – all Ivy League schools.

In 1758, Princeton elected Jonathan Edwards as its President. He tragically died within weeks as the result of a smallpox inoculation.

The Battle for Our Future

Edwards’ grandson, Timothy Dwight, was the fourth president of Yale. Dwight helped check the spread of liberal French infidelity on college campuses.

The atheism of French philosopher Voltaire laid the groundwork for the French Revolution. Naive students were slow to connect that society without moral restraints would end in lawlessness. France’s bloody Reign of Terror, 1793-94, saw over 40,000 people beheaded.

Dwight warned that Voltaire’s agenda included controlling the education of the youth: “The means . . . were . . . the education of youth . . . books replete with infidelity, irreligion, immorality, and obscenity.”

Like modern-day programing of computers, many in the past understood that education gives youth their identity and their purpose. Therefore, it was necessary to gain control of education in order to bring future generations into a socialist system.

Students must give up the concept of “the individual” inherent in Judeo-Christian worldview, and replace it with the concept of identifying with “a group.” “The group” is then controlled by the dynamics of peer-pressure, or “socialization,” where students modify their behavior in order to “fit in” and be accepted. The authority figure, in this case the teacher, dictates what behavior is acceptable in the group. Being rejected or ridiculed by “the group” is the ultimate fear, as it then results in a loss of all self-esteem and self-worth.

The communist tactic of deconstruction is to separate students from their past by portraying negatively the country’s founders; get students into a neutral point of view where they are open-minded; then brainwash students into accepting the socialist future.

Dr. James Dobson addressed the National Religious Broadcasters, Feb. 16, 2002:

“If they can get control of children . . . they can change the whole culture in one generation. . . . There is a concerted effort to manipulate the minds of kids. . . . A stem cell is a cell in the human being . . . that in the very early stages of development it is undifferentiated. In other words, it’s not yet other kinds of tissue, but it can go any direction depending on the environment that it’s in . . . Do you understand that children are the stem cells for the culture?”

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