After Decades of Failure, American Educators Fear a Christian Invasion More than Anarchy

Back in the days when schools taught something more than self-pity, indignation and jumping to conclusions, many teachers required that students read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1863 poem, “Paul Revere’s Ride.” For generations of Americans, its opening line, “Listen, my children, and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,” was, perhaps, the single best-known line of poetry. Reading the entire poem, even in the cynicism of the early twenty-first century, evokes much of the tension of April 18, 1775, as Paul waited in the Charlestown cemetery to notify “every Middlesex village and farm” of the coming peril.

By the time I reached elementary school in the early sixties, both poetry and patriotism were fast fading from America’s classrooms. Paul Revere’s Ride was more likely to be ridiculed than revered by the time I reached high school, and I—regrettably—never taught the poem in my thirty-four-year teaching career. Given those facts, I doubt Brooke Schultz’s teachers read the poem to her, either.

An Impassioned Warning

Brooke Schultz is a staff writer for Education Week, “covering policy and politics in Congress and statehouses.” If you are an administrator in an American public school or district, Education Week is probably a part of your required reading.

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Regardless of whether she ever read Longfellow’s poem, her June 17, 2025 piece, “Christianity Is Ramping Up in Public Schools. Where Is This Headed?” carried distinct notes of Mr. Revere. It is easy to imagine Miss Schultz traversing Massachusetts on horseback, shouting her alarm.

The Christians are coming! The Christians are coming! The Christians are coming!

Her warning, of course, is not so succinct. Educators do not prize brevity. “[S]tate school boards, legislatures, and other education officials are greenlighting a series of measures that would infuse Christianity into public schools…. It’s a wave created by advocates who want to see how far they can push the church-state divide with a somewhat pliable U.S. Supreme Court and a favorable executive branch.”

The Situation in Texas

Despite alluding to the President and the often conservative majority on the Supreme Court, the great villain of the piece is the State of Texas. Specifically, Miss Schultz lays four sins against secularism at the door of the Lone Star State. They allow “religiously associated chaplains” to advise students, they approved a curriculum that includes Biblical passages, they may pass a bill allowing schools to “carve out” prayer time from the busy academic day and they are considering a requirement that schools post the Ten Commandments.

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Not only is Texas brazenly offending against the morally neutral order of the day, but it is also a “snapshot of a larger effort fanning out nationally.”

In typically leftist fashion, neither Miss Schultz nor her Education Week colleagues have the self-perception or modesty to ask why several states are taking such steps. Nonetheless, the current state of secular education indicates that such an examination is warranted.

Steadily Increasing Deterioration

Perhaps the best place to begin is June 25, 1962. On that dark day, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Engel v. Vitale, sometimes known as the school prayer case. The reaction to the Court’s prohibition of school-initiated prayer ran along lines that would become familiar in the decades that followed. Catholics and Evangelical Protestants opposed it with slogans like, “When our schools abandon God, God will abandon our schools.” Secularists and liberal Protestants applauded the construction of a new wall separating Church and State.

This blow was the strongest salvo to date of a long-standing attempt to excise Christian values and morality from the schools. As its influence spread, it became common for some teachers to deride religious views as uneducated whims and superstitions that students would be well advised to abandon. As time passed, skeptics and atheists on school faculties were increasingly free to work their views into instruction, while principals warned Christian teachers to leave religious opinions at home.

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At first, the effects were minimal. Over time, though, the character of schools gradually changed. Honesty, obedience and respect were the values that deteriorated most quickly. Any parent knows these qualities must be taught early in the life of children and enforced consistently as the child matures. When the school, or even a single teacher, becomes an impediment, the task becomes far more difficult.

The Myth of Secular Morality

Some educationists might argue that these values can be taught without a religious base, as they are essential to “real world” success as well as in the spiritual realm. While that may be true, the purely secular mindset does not possess the tools necessary to teach them. “Why,” a child might ask, “should I be honest to someone who lies to me? Why should I obey when my teacher has no power or inclination to punish me? Why should I be nice to people when I don’t even know them?” The non-religious answers to those questions are far weaker than those backed up by morality based upon religion.

Of course, the roof didn’t fall in all at once. The “baby boomers” taught “Generation X,” which, in turn, taught the “millennials” and “Gen Z.” Each generation fell further and further from the beneficial effects of being raised in a society that transmitted Christian values, even to students who were non-believers. The effects increased geometrically. First, standards of behavior deteriorated, then academic standards followed. Today, even the idea that truth exists is foreign to many—young and old alike—and anarchy is a common state of being.

So, yes, Miss Schultz, Christians are trying to restore Christianity to public schools. Our children—and your children, too—are far too precious to abandon them to the secularists without a struggle. You and your ilk have ruled the schoolhouse far too long for any good you might have done. Be gone!

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