“Things reveal themselves passing away,” wrote Irish poet William Butler Yeats, reviving an old folk saying about how changing times bring into sharp focus the dying old ways that were once taken for granted. On another occasion, he wrote in his 1919 “The Second Coming”: 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world …

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. 

Yeats’ analysis describes our world too, but our situation is much worse than in 1919. The culture is in steep decline, and conservatives and Christians suddenly realize that our unique history and constitutional system embody what is good and beautiful about America. Many are battling to reverse the slide into the moral abyss. They know now what is being lost in the transformation of Western Civilization. We grasp desperately for the past the more we see it passing away. 

We have been warned. Just as the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel warned the children of Israel and Judah to turn from sin lest they be carried into a Babylonian captivity (Jeremiah 29:10-13), so Christian leaders and theologians have warned us over the centuries not to accept the imposition of state-sponsored and tax-subsidized public schools in our nation. For the first 220 years of American history, from 1620 to around 1840, we had an entirely private, Christian, parochial, and homeschool model for educating our children. From 1837 to 1840, the state of Massachusetts under Horace Mann set up the first public-school model. The system spread rapidly, and by 1900 was the dominant K-12 education model in America. Churches gradually gave up their “private” or parochial schools. 

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