Why History Matters

and why Christian history

matters in particular

by Ted Byfield
General Editor
The Christian History Project
Why History Matters
And why Christian History
matters in particular

By Ted Byfield
© Ted Byfield, 2008

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 “The democracies are losing the freedom
which gives meaning to democracy, because
they are losing that sense of direction which
gives meaning to freedom.”
– Hilda Neatby

“When men stop believing in God, they don’t

believe in nothing. They believe in anything.”
–G.K. Chesterton

“Beware of false prophets, which come to

you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly they
are ravening wolves. Ye shall know
them by their fruits.”
—Jesus Christ (Matthew 7:15)
 To John E. Hokanson
friend, benefactor, and believer
 The 'simple rules,' without
which we perish

lease examine carefully the following five statements. They

P represent the kind of thing that may be heard any day in

any office or job site, living room, board room, kitchen or
pub, spoken by wealthy people or street people, literate people or
illiterate, men or women, children or adults.

“Okay, so we’ll meet there at five o’clock.”

“I’ve got to return this shovel. It’s Charlie’s.”

“She’s been in hospital for a week and I haven’t even visited her.”

“No twelve-year-old should be out this late.”

“But that’s what he said happened.”

The point to note is that each of these statements implies a kind

of expectation. The other person is expected to be there at five
o’clock. If you borrow a shovel, you’re expected to return it. Just
as people are expected to visit the sick, to control the whereabouts

1
of their children, and to tell the truth. All five statements, that is,
take for granted a kind of code of conduct, or standard of behav-
iour, that everybody can be assumed to recognize and respect.

Simple morality, one might say. Simple perhaps, but also indis-
pensable. A world in which no one could be expected to keep
promises, to return what they borrow, to comfort the sick, to care
for their children and to tell the truth would be a world that could
not function. In the long run, these rules of conduct are as essen-
tial to our well-being as the food we eat and the air we breathe.
They are the glue or thread that holds a civilization together. Sus-
taining them, which means sustaining their authority to guide and
govern what we do, is necessary if the civilization is to survive.

Something else is noteworthy. No previous civilization ever has sur-

vived; all past civilizations have perished. And the chief symptom of
impending collapse was that respect for the rules began eroding. The
glue failed, the thread broke, and they were gone.

The rules of our own civilization—usually referred to as “the West”

– originate in the ancient world. From the ancient Israelites, we de-
rived our ideas about God. From the ancient Greeks, we derived our
ideas about government. And from the ancient Romans we derived
our concept of the civil law.1 These three strains were combined by
the Christians into a unified whole known as Western civilization.
Though certainly not without flaw, it has produced the most just,
the most technologically proficient, the most compassionate, and
the most prosperous society the world has ever known. And while
it has become intellectually fashionable to deplore and denounce it,
especially by critics living comfortably within it, the rest of the world
seeks fervidly to emulate it or, better still, to move into it.

1. See. W.G. de Burgh, The Legacy of the Ancient World, Oxford, 1924.

2
However, this influx of other peoples does not pose the threat to
the West that is sometimes voiced. Indeed, Western society has
been receiving and accommodating peoples from without ever
since it began. Rather, it faces two other stresses, both of which
could destroy it, though the second is much more insidious than
the first.

The first has come as the product of its success. Technological

change, almost all of it innovated by the West, has been so aston-
ishing, so swift and so sweeping over the last two centuries of the
second Christian millennium that it threatens to sweep away
everything that went before as obsolete, including many of the old
rules for human behaviour.

And yet they are as essential as they ever were. People must still
be expected to do what they say they’re going to do, whether
they’re running a biochemical experiment or a trapline. They are
still expected to return what they borrow, whether it’s a shovel or
a digital recording device. Their responsibility to the stricken is as
imperative as it ever was, and so is the expectation that they can
be relied upon to care for their family, and to tell the truth.

So the necessity for the old rules is still very much there. In fact, a
case can be made that it is more pressing than ever. The very com-
plexity of our new technological world makes it much more vulner-
able to subversive attack than was the old world. Knock out several
major power plants and you could paralyze much of twenty-first-
century eastern North America. Computers would stop. Airports
would stop. Subways would stop. Elevators would stop. Gasoline
pumps would stop. Furnaces would stop. Lights would go out. In
northern cities in a severe winter, thousands would soon be in dan-
ger of freezing to death. Such swift and vast devastation would have
been impossible in the nineteenth century. Technological society, that

3
is, depends for its very survival on a high degree of behavioural con-
formity among the citizenry, something that terrorist movements
have discovered and effectively exploited.

But the other strain on “the rules” has proven far more lethal. For
it strains them, not as an incidental effect of its activity, but because
straining them, indeed effectually abolishing their foundation, is
one of its central goals, what from the beginning it set out to do.
What am I implying? Some kind of secret conspiracy to destroy our
society? Not at all. No secret, no conspiracy. For what it has sought
to do, it has been utterly candid about from the beginning. More-
over, it has taken over most of the levers that control the social ma-
chine, recruiting to its cause some of our best minds and most
effective communicators. Curiously, however, very few of the latter
seem to realize what they are actually communicating. And as the
more astute among them become vaguely aware of this, their acute
discomfort becomes evident. They tend to push the thought aside
as something they do not wish to contemplate.

A deceptively
unspectacular revolutionary

o ascribe all this mischief to one man is, of course, exces-

T sive. Yet one man undeniably played a major role in the so-
cial and cultural revolution of America in the twentieth
century. True, he was powerfully influenced by others who came be-
fore him—Rousseau, Hobbes, Darwin, Spencer—and helped by a
coterie of like-minded revolutionaries who worked diligently along-
side him. As in all revolutions, his message was carried by thousands
of disciples who often went beyond anything the original visionary
had proposed, though what they were doing was derived directly

4
from what he taught. To most of these, however, he is today little
more than a name. Very few have actually read what he wrote, let
alone approve of what he was setting out to do, though they have
often strenuously, if unwittingly, helped him do it.

The man in question is the educator and philosopher John Dewey.

The bare facts of his curriculum vitae are deceptively unspectacular.
From a family of modest income, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from
the University of Vermont in 1879, taught three years in high school
and quit, received a doctorate from Johns Hopkins in 1884, taught
at the University of Michigan, then became a faculty member of the
University of Chicago in 1894, soon after it opened, and established
there experimental elementary and high schools. After a clash with
the university administration he left for Columbia University in 1904
where he taught philosophy until his death in 1952.

Creditable enough, but hardly the track record of a man who

would more profoundly affect the culture and thinking of Amer-
icans than any twentieth-century president. However, that was
because he knew something that no president since Thomas Jef-
ferson has ever fully understood, namely that the way to funda-
mentally reshape a society is not by changing its citizens, but by
changing their children—more specifically, by radically changing
those who teach their children. For the teachers could change
the children, and the children would become the citizens and
voters of tomorrow.

Dewey’s agenda was not, in its ultimate goal, educational. It was

political. Like the founders of America, indeed of all the Western
democracies, he was obsessed with the idea of freedom. But his ob-
ject was to establish a new kind of freedom. While people were free
to vote and many were free to choose paths that could lead them to
wealth and comfort, they were not in Dewey’s view truly free.

5
All but a few advanced thinkers were prisoners of traditionalist
thought and morality that prevented them from achieving genuine
freedom and becoming their “true selves.” It was this kind of free-
dom that he sought for all. He had achieved it himself; he wanted
to confer it on everyone. He envisioned a new civilization, liber-
ated from its ancient taboos and enslavement to outdated creeds
and codes of conduct.

Once delivered from this old morality, humanity would reach

through science destinies vastly beyond present human imagination,
he said. And the road to this nirvana lay not through some Marxist
or Fascist revolution, but through an educational one. To Dewey, you
didn’t need the politicians. If you could change the way the people
thought, the politicians would have no choice but to go along with
the new order. Over his lifetime he published some sixteen books,
enunciating convulsive changes in education that would render the
new schools unrecognizable to those who had attended the old.

His vision was embraced, indeed devoured, not initially by teach-

ers, but by “educators”—those who teach teachers—a species that
Dewey’s era virtually brought into existence. Decade after decade
a torrent of Deweyite disciples poured forth from Columbia Uni-
versity Teachers College, skilfully administered by Dewey’s sen-
ior lieutenant in the revolution, W.H. Kilpatrick. What could be
more impressive than an education degree from Columbia? They
rapidly infused his ideas into the new “faculties of education,”
themselves largely a product of Deweyism. These gradually sup-
planted the old and hopelessly hidebound “normal schools.”
Meanwhile, Dewey himself carried his ideas to the world in what
he saw as personal “missions.” He favoured such biblical terms,
sometimes referring to his message as “the gospel.” It proved a
gospel eagerly embraced in the Soviet Union.

6
Its principles became the foundational assumption of the new edu-
cators.2 The schools, they knew, must be used to work a wholesale
rejection of all the old ideas about human nature. The concept of
good and evil must be abolished, wrote Dewey. Such qualities as
honesty, courage, industry and chastity must no longer be cherished,
while things like malice, vindictiveness and irresponsibility need no
longer be deplored. Such conduct is merely the response of the in-
dividual to the conditions around him. Indeed nothing should be
transmitted to students from the legacy of previous generations.
Whatever moral conclusions the student may reach, he must reach
solely on the basis of his own experience.

Most important, he must not see himself as somehow “judged” by

what he does or doesn’t do. The idea of individual “blame” must
be eradicated. He must regard himself as part of a community, part
of “the public.” If a crime is committed, the criminal must not be
considered responsible. The community as a whole must have
somehow failed him. So too must the idea of the “will” be abol-
ished. The concept that the individual “chooses” between good and
evil leads only to the defeat of “selfhood.” There is no such thing
as the human “will,” he said, and the old moral boundaries be-
tween good and evil have become obsolete and invalid. Moreover,
gender stereotyping must be stopped. There must be no such thing
as boys’ books and girls’ books, or boys’ games and girls’ games,
because such distinctions serve to perpetuate the old order. His ideas
would “destroy many things once cherished,” Dewey allowed, but
that was the unfortunate price of human progress.

2. A comprehensive and understandable critique of Dewey’s work was written by Henry

T. Edmondson, professor of political science and public administration at Georgia State
University and director of the Center for Transatlantic Studies. It is is entitled John Dewey
and the Decline of American Education, published by Intercollegiate Studies Institute,
Wilmington, Delaware, in 2006.

7
 The convulsive change
in the schools

s the 20th century unfolded, these concepts began taking

A deep root in the education faculties and appearing in the

schools. Gradually, the teacher ceased being an authority
figure in the classroom. She must instead become a guide, a coun-
sellor, a friend, said Dewey. Student desks must be rearranged in
such a way as to overcome any suggestion of managerial leader-
ship. The students must learn to lead themselves. Any attempt by
a teacher to impose structure—pass/fail, good/bad, right/wrong—
must be viewed as a form of “pedagogical abuse.”

Indeed, all semblance of superiority or inferiority must vanish.

Report cards must no longer carry grade standings. Anything that
suggests standards of performance must not appear. Children
must not be criticized for making “mistakes,” nor be admonished
to “sit still” because this may thwart their inner impulses. Check-
ing those impulses must be considered another form of “abuse,”
for they are the means by which the child expresses creativity.

No student should be singled out for a distinctly good perform-

ance, nor certainly for a distinctly bad one, because the whole idea
of good and bad must be removed form the child’s mind. “Self-es-
teem” must be encouraged in every possible way, but never pred-
icated on actual performance. The student should esteem himself
because he is a self, not because he has actually accomplished any-
thing. Learning to read must be considered a useful thing, but not
a primary essential. What ultimately matters is not what skills the
child acquires, but whether he is becoming a “social being.”

Similarly, in the higher grades “critical thinking” must be fostered,

but it consisted of encouraging the student to question and challenge

8
the assumptions of the old order, especially those of his parents. A
young adult who had learned to challenge the qualities and moral-
ity revered by his parents was deemed to be “thinking critically.”
One who continued to respect and adhere to them was not think-
ing critically. His education had plainly failed him.3

In the 1940s, an unforeseen development sharply checked the ed-

ucational revolution, notably the Second World War. Suddenly
qualities like honour, courage, duty, tradition and responsibility
became not only praiseworthy, but crucial. Without them, the
Western democracies would certainly lose. By the ’fifties, how-
ever, the war was safely over, and the revolution in the schools re-
sumed with full vigour. Old teachers resisted. Indeed, some
courageously continued to battle the Deweyite revolution for the
next half century. But such opposition was soon swept aside by the
tens of thousands of young teachers pouring forth from the new
faculties of education. These saw themselves as the harbingers of
a new kind of society, with a new kind of citizen, that they were
commissioned to bring into being. Entire school systems embraced
the new ideas. Dewey himself, before he died, became a hallowed
figure, the man who had liberated America from the narrow in-
tolerance and vicious bigotry of its past. At his ninetieth birthday,
tributes came in from all over the world, for by now his works
had been translated into eight other languages.

3. Lest anyone conclude that children today are no longer under such influence, he should
observe the current books for young people by Neale Donald Walsch, regularly on the
New York Times best seller list, with such titles as Conversations With God and Conver-
sations with God for Teens. Typically, “God” is represented as approving pre-marital sex,
sexual deviation, and whatever other sexual conduct commends itself. In one instance, a
girl asks about God’s forgiveness of sin. Walsch portrays “God” as replying: “I do not for-
give anyone because there is nothing to forgive. There is no such thing as right or wrong
and that is what I have been trying to tell everyone.” However dubious the Divine cre-
dentials, it’s certainly what John Dewey was trying to tell everyone. Conversations With
God is currently being made into a Hollywood movie.

9
As the American public system embraced the new “progressive”
aims and methods, Canadian educators were at first nervous. They
feared that Canada’s natural conservatism would sharply resist
such innovations. They soon discovered, however, that Canada’s
supposed commitment to conservatism was actually a commitment
to conformity. Canadians would do whatever respectable author-
ity approved. When it became evident “reputable educators” were
urging these changes, that’s all they needed to know.

Pleasant young men

of mediocre intelligence

rom the start, it is true, there were discordant voices in the

F U.S., some of them authoritative. Parents and students, said

one, “must be induced to abandon the educational path that,
rather blindly, they have been following as a result of John Dewey’s
teachings.” That voice belonged to President Dwight D. Eisen-
hower. A more raucous note was sounded by the acerbic Christian
novelist Flannery O’Connor: “My advice to parents is… Anything
that Wm. Heard Kilpatrick & Jhn. Dewey say to do, don’t do.”

Canada produced its critics too, first and foremost among them a
notable historian, Dr. Hilda Neatby of the University of
Saskatchewan whose critique of Deweyism, So Little for the
Mind, (Clarke, Irwin, Toronto, 1953) stirred rage across the
Deweyite establishment, already securely ensconcing itself in var-
ious provincial departments of education.

Dewey, wrote Professor Neatby, “is not only unintentionally anti-

intellectual, he is, it seems, quite deliberately anti-cultural… even fe-
rociously amoral in his method and discipline.” Deweyism “is not

10
liberation; it is indoctrination both intellectual and moral.” Dewey
had translated the mantra “education is life” into “an injunction to
the school to take over every part of a child’s life and every function
of society. The family and church are ignored or patronized.”

Moreover, she continued, there is strong evidence that Deweyism is

being ruthlessly forced into the school system, and any challenge
to it is harshly rejected in the education faculties. She quoted one
Canadian student’s impression: “The atmosphere there curiously
prefigured the authoritarian state. Any independent thought, any
deviation from the Moscow line (for Moscow read, Teachers’ Col-
lege, Columbia) is criminal non-cooperativeness and sabotage…
Native common sense has no validity, and the candidate for certi-
fication who attempts to use it is warned of the consequences with
a candour and directness which Molotov (a senior Stalinist lieu-
tenant) could not have improved on.”

The result, said Professor Neatby, was that the most competent
students were discouraged from the teaching profession: “The
soldier, the doctor, the business executive and the technician
who wish to get on can do so by continued study and practice
in the field which they have chosen. This is not true of the
teacher. He must bid farewell to culture and genuine intellec-
tual pursuits, and concentrate upon the endless minutiae and
jargons which we dignify with the name of pedagogical stud-
ies.” The result was sadly evident in the departments of educa-
tion: “The stars of the educational firmament today are too
often bright young men of neat appearance, pleasant personal-
ity and mediocre intelligence.”

Her book was studiously ignored in education circles, where she was
personally shunned. Searching the Canadian news media of the day,
she could find almost no interest in the changes being implemented

11
in the schools – a couple of editorials in the Victoria Times Colonist,
a protest from one columnist in the Globe and Mail, little more—the
absence of criticism suggesting a general acquiescence with the new
methods. Canadian newspapers would have grave cause to rue this
20 or so years later when their “penetration” of the market (mean-
ing the percentage of the population who buy newspapers) began a
slide which has never been arrested. They resignedly blame televi-
sion. That was certainly one factor. But the other was the general il-
literacy which the new schools were engendering and which the print
media did nothing to resist. Too late, they discovered, people who
can’t read, can’t read newspapers.

Fifteen years after the Neatby book, Deweyism made its greatest
advance in Canada through an Ontario study co-chaired by Mr.
Justice Emmett Hall4 and a former Ontario high school teacher
and Education Department consultant named Lloyd A Dennis.
The “Hall-Dennis Report,” issued in 1968, became a Canadian
beacon of Deweyite philosophy. Children are portrayed as in-
variably good; punishment as invariably bad. Poor performance
by children is the fault of the system or the teacher, not the child.
Learning should never be an unpleasant or arduous experience.
Democracy should begin in the classroom. The teacher’s chief task
is to understand the child, not to convey knowledge or skills.
Exams must go, grade standing must go, punishment must go,

4. Emmett Matthew Hall (1898-1995), one of Canada’s foremost jurists and leftwing re-
formers, was a socialist in conservative clothing. After a youth spent on a Saskatchewan
dairy farm and a long career as a Saskatchewan lawyer, he became known as an admirer
of rough frontier values and the spirit of free enterprise. Opponents of medicare rejoiced
in 1964 therefore when he was appointed to head an inquiry into a possible state-run
health care system for Canada. To their horror, he recommended that socialist
Saskatchewan’s system be extended to cover the whole country. Though certainly not with-
out its detractors and problems, Medicare has enjoyed substantial public support in
Canada ever since. Mr. Justice Hall’s infatuation with Deweyism is harder to comprehend
and would hasten the educational catastrophe.

12
and the child himself should a have a considerable voice in
whether he passes or fails.

The report was thoroughly eviscerated by Dr. James Daly, an asso-

ciate professor of history at McMaster University, who in his book,
“Education or Molasses?” challenged nearly all its recommenda-
tions, concluding that it was founded on an astonishingly naïve view
of human nature, that it evaded the central problems of teaching
morality in a pluralistic society, and encouraged rebellion against
existing authority, while offering nothing whatever to replace it.5

The inconvenient obstinacy

of mathematics

uch negativity was, of course, dismissed as the death moans

S of a dying culture. Not so easily dismissed was the system’s

inability to cope with such formidable obstacles as reading,
spelling, English grammar and mathematics. Spelling was partic-
ularly distasteful to the Deweyite because it suggested a “right
way” (and therefore “wrong ways”) to compose a word. There
were such things, that is, as spelling “mistakes.” These, said the
Deweyites, should be either overlooked by the teacher or observed

5. Alberta had a parallel for the Hall-Dennis Report that emerged in 1971, the year the
Conservative government of Peter Lougheed took office.Written by the University of Al-
berta’s dean of education, Walter Holmes Worth, the “Worth Report” directed the new
government’s education policy for several years until, it was said, one of Lougheed’s chil-
dren brought home from high school a book on “The Future.” Examining it, Lougheed
asked his son what it was. “It’s about the future,” came the reply. “We’re studying the fu-
ture.” “The future?” gasped Lougheed. “You hardly know anything about the past!” In-
quiring, he found the book had been chosen to help fulfill the recommendations of the
Worth Report. So for the first time, he actually read this document. Concluding it was
“sheer nonsense,” he ordered changes in Alberta’s education policy, and the province was
soon leading the country in efforts to repair the chaos created by its venture into Dewey-
ist education.

13
in passing but not “judgmentally.”6 The new kind of citizen did-
n’t need to bother about spelling, even if what he sometimes wrote
began to resemble gibberish.

Grammar posed a further challenge. Ostensibly, it was taught to

enable a student to write confidently. He knew the rules so well
that they became habitual. But to Dewey, a student’s confidence
should not require such a prop. Grammatical rules were part of
the past and could be ignored. The objective, remember, was to
cleanse the youthful mind of the whole concept of “rules.”

But grammar had always been taught for another reason. It was
analytical. It required the student to know whether a group of
words was or was not a sentence. It required him to break sen-
tences into their component parts, to detect the function of each
word, to discern how it worked with the other words to create a
rational whole, the sentence. Its function, that is, was to introduce
the process of reason. But to Dewey this kind of exercise was de-
structive. It conveyed the idea that there was a valid structure, the
rational, to which acceptable human thought must conform. Ir-
rational thought must be rejected. In other words, reason and the
rules of reason were in fact authoritarian—to the Deweyites a very
bad thing. So the study of logic was abolished from the post-sec-
ondary curriculum, and grammar, its introductory discipline, all
but disappeared from elementary and secondary schools.

Which left mathematics. For the Deweyites, this was an awkward

area because it was difficult to teach without allowing for the concept

6. It’s interesting to examine the way the Dewey era has changed the moral value placed
on two English verbs – “to judge” and “to discriminate.” Where we once commended a
man “of judgment,” we now denounce “judgmental” people. Where we once admired a
“discriminating” person, we now deplore and even prosecute “discrimination.” Behind
this philological change, of course, lies the Dewey doctrine that good and bad, true and
false, right and wrong do not exist.

14
of “the mistake,” or even more dastardly, “the wrong answer.” Five-
times-five would equal twenty-five, however much Johnny would
prefer that it equal something else, and even the Deweyites could see
that Johnny might get into serious trouble later with his own per-
sonally developed multiplication table. So it was finally resolved that
the child must himself “experience” the multiplication table, discov-
ering that when he multiplied five times five, things generally turned
out better for him if he took the answer to be twenty-five. However,
great care must be taken to assure that some other answer was not
in any sense “wrong” because “right” and “wrong” did not exist.

Beyond all these problematic areas there remained one other “sub-
ject”7 which, unless very carefully manipulated, had within itself
the power to undermine the entire Deweyite construct. That sub-
ject was history. Though in the past it had often been taught badly
–often limited to the laborious memorization of dates, names and
dull data–Dewey knew that history could also be taught with such
compelling effect upon the student that it would renew in his mind
all the pernicious old ideas (as Dewey saw them) that must be de-
stroyed. “It is possible to employ it as a kind of reservoir of an-
ecdotes to be drawn on to inculcate moral lessons on this virtue
or that vice,” he wrote. “But such a teaching is not so much an
ethical use of history as it is an effort to create moral impressions
by means of more or less authentic material. At best it produces
a temporary emotional glow.”

Notice the implication. It is possible to use historical films on, say,

the Nazi Holocaust to “create the moral impression” that such

7. Dewey opposed the entire concept of “subjects” in education. Learning, he said, must
be “a whole,” and things experienced rather than taught. “Subjects” were purely a man-
made and man-imposed contrivance to establish a “structure” to knowledge. But knowl-
edge is best conveyed without structure, he said.

15
things ought not to happen. Or in Canada to tell the story of Vimy
Ridge or the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway to inspire
admiration for courage or human enterprise and ingenuity. But this
is “the practice of an earlier age.” Since it “is not useful to con-
tribute to the development of the social intelligence,” it is pointless.

History, however, could not be simply dropped wholly from the cur-
riculum. Its absence would be noticed and this would have to be ex-
plained to an audience that might not understand. So instead it was
amalgamated into “social studies” and restricted to what Dewey called
“the relevant.” Thus fragments of it could be summoned here and
there to reinforce a social cause8. But it must not be taught as a coher-
ent story, unfolding era by era across time, because this would confer
on it a dangerous credibility, in other words an authority. So a coher-
ent presentation of the history must be discouraged. Above all, His-
tory’s uncertainties must be emphasized. Since all the existing records
were ultimately somebody’s viewpoint, biased, subjective, essentially
fictional, we can learn little from the past. That was the message.9

8. When I taught in a boys’ school, I remember asking an applicant student: “Who was Sir John
A. Macdonald?” The boy replied, “Why, he’s the man who ordered the hanging of Louis Riel.”
Did he know anything else about Macdonald, I asked. No, replied the boy, he did not. This puz-
zled me. Macdonald was the chief architect of the Canadian confederation, and our first prime
minister, who spread the country from the Atlantic to the Pacific and largely achieved its inde-
pendence from Britain. Why did the boy not know any of this, yet did know of Macdonald’s de-
cision to execute a convicted insurrectionist leader in the West? The boy had a ready explanation.
Riel led a minority group, the Metis, he said, “and we studied minorities in social studies.”

9. The contention that all historical records are somebody’s “viewpoint” has been used to
discredit history as a criterion of established fact. However, the contention is flawed. Here
are four historical statements: 1. “Martin Luther King died. 2. “Martin Luther King was
killed.” 3. “Martin Luther king was assassinated.” 4. “Martin Luther King was mar-
tyred.” The fourth may be a viewpoint; the other three are not. The contention that since
the fourth is a viewpoint, they must all be mere viewpoints is irrational. The historical
record, like our memory, is certainly subject to error. What we recall happening and what
actually happened can differ. But we can scarcely go from there to conclude that our mem-
ory is therefore useless and we’re all no better than amnesiacs.

16
 Dewey triumphant:
The ’Sixties Revolution

y the early ’sixties, the first products of the new elementary

B and secondary schools burst upon the universities, creat-

ing what we know as the ’Sixties Revolution. To describe
that phenomenon is beyond the scope of this essay, but certain as-
pects of it should be noted. As part of the generation responsible
for raising the ’Sixties one, I can write reminiscently. It descended
upon us like a tornado—loud, bewildering, incomprehensible, ter-
rifying, sometimes wantonly destructive, a veritable nightmare.

They were our children all right, but suddenly they had become
unrecognizable. Their dress was strange; they seemed to be adopt-
ing dirt and rags as a kind of uniform. The males began to look
like the females in that their hair grew long, though it was rarely
combed, just as they had beards that they did not trim. Some
began hanging trinkets from the ears and nose, much like savages.
Their music was similarly aboriginal—all tempo and no dis-
cernible melody, inane lyrics (inane to us, anyway) and best sung
through the nose, rather than from the throat. To be properly en-
joyed, it must vibrate the whole premises from which it originated,
and be audible at least one half block away.

The young revolutionaries placed a great emphasis upon what they

called “love.” Though the scope and meaning of the word was never
actually defined, they were sure of one thing: their parents knew noth-
ing about it. It apparently applied exclusively to under-empowered
social groups and underprivileged peoples whose interests they cham-
pioned aggressively. Whether they significantly furthered the well-
being of those groups has been debated ever since. It certainly opened
for them greater opportunities which many took advantage of. But it

17
also implanted a sense of entitlement, very new to the democratic
culture. That is, social advance, rather than something to be earned,
became something to be demanded and bestowed, an ominous and
costly departure from the tradition.

Wherever else “love” might be applied, it soon became evident that

the revolutionaries did not reliably extend it to what sociologists call
“interpersonal relations.” In fact, they went on to establish what is
probably the highest divorce rate of any society in human history.

To contend that Dewey sought to create a world in which people felt

no obligation to keep promises, pay their debts, tell the truth, relieve
suffering, and care for their children is, of course, unfair. He was al-
together aware that such rules were ultimately essential. But he dili-
gently sought to destroy the existing basis for them. Children should
be taught to do whatever serves “the community” or the public
good,” he said. But each child was to decide for himself what this
might be. In short, each was to make up his own rules, decide his own
morality, and the byword of the era became, “Do your own thing.”

This was most evident in the sphere of sexual relations. Con-

comitant with the ’Sixties Revolution came the Sexual Revolu-
tion, though its origins were as much technological as educational.
Birth control, that is, became more accessible and dependable.
Men wanted the freedom of sexual license without consequent
marital responsibility. So why should they not have it, demanded
Hugh Hefner through his Playboy magazine, which deftly con-
ferred high-style market acceptance on the hitherto pornographic.

The response of women was the Feminist Revolution, which pre-

sented itself as a quest for freedom from the tyranny of the man. But
the real tyrant, as the woman well knew, was not the man, but the
child. The consequence was a startling plunge in the birthrate, ac-
companied ironically by a demand for the legalization of abortion—

18
an irony because improved birth control should have meant fewer
unwanted pregnancies, not more, and a diminished, not greater, de-
mand for abortion. But the new freedom generated more unwanted
pregnancies than ever, and it was soon discovered that “love” did
not apply to unwanted babies. Though genetic science quietly af-
firmed that some fifty or more physical and mental qualities of the
individual who is to become you or me are determined at the instant
of conception, this was dismissed or ignored. What mattered was
the woman’s “freedom to choose,” nothing else, and Canada went
on to adopt the world’s most unrestricted access to abortion.

But “love” very much did apply to those who practiced what had
previously been deemed the unacceptable. Over a seventy-year
period, such things as adultery, sodomy and extra-marital sex ad-
vanced from the status of criminal conduct in some jurisdictions
to become first legal, then acceptable, then even admirable—so
admirable that to question almost any sexual practice was
deemed an outrageous bigotry.10

Just as “love” was all-important, so too was “peace.” Peace must at

all costs be preserved. This could be done, as one un-emancipated
commentator had dryly observed, “by scoffing at generals and read-
ing newspapers.” By the ’Sixties, peace was to be safeguarded by

10. A “scientific” basis for the Sexual Revolution was furnished by Dr. Alfred Kinsey of the
University of Chicago in two “studies” — Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953). Kinsey was neither a psychologist nor a physi-
cian, but an entomologist. His field of study had been bugs. His reports, however, purport-
ing to describe the bizarre sexual behaviour of average Americans, both shocked and
intrigued a nation, astonished to discover that this must be the way the folks next door carry
on, (though they certainly didn’t themselves). The print media, whose gullibility for anything
claiming “scientific credentials” was then (and still is) monumental, swallowed both reports
whole, and from that point assured the world Kinsey had disclosed what routinely tran-
spired in the bedrooms of America. It was later discovered, however, that Kinsey’s study of
the sex lives of Americans was based on interviews with homosexuals, prison inmates, pros-
titutes, paedophiles, and those who eagerly discussed their sexual predilections with total
strangers. Since these could hardly be called typical, the Kinsey reports were plainly frauds,
but two generations of Canadians and Americans had been taken in by them.

19
holding marches and public demonstrations and by learning to
appreciate the virtues of slave states like Soviet Russia and Com-
munist China. In the great test of the era, Viet-Nam, the ’Sixties
Generation distinguished itself by losing the only war the United
States had lost in its two-hundred-year history.

Though its assumptions were by now becoming embedded in the

culture, the exhibitionist manifestations of the revolution came to
an abrupt end on a fixed date. On May 4, 1970, during a protest
rally at Kent State University, the Ohio National Guard opened
fire on a student crowd. Four were killed and nine wounded.
There was, of course, universal outrage, but it’s notable that there-
after protest marches and rallies rapidly declined and soon disap-
peared. It was no longer fun. It was dangerous.11

The four keys

that control society

y now however, as Dewey planned, the new order had

B spread from the schools to take over the whole culture,

principally through the vastly expanded universities built
by history’s most affluent society, on the proceeds of the greatest
economic advance the world had ever known. What at the be-
ginning of the century had been the theory of a handful of aca-
demics at Chicago and Columbia by the century’s last decades

11. Thomas Carlyle in his history of the French Revolution tells how the Paris mobs, un-
controllable for years, were sharply and permanently subdued by a young French offi-
cer who turned the cannon on them and gave them what he called “a whiff of
grapeshot.” The whole revolution, says Carlyle was at that instant “blown into space by
it, and become a thing that was!” The Kent State incident had the same effect. The young
officer’s name was Napoleon Bonaparte.

20
had become the mindset of an entire generation of journalists,
novelists, musicians, television producers, advertising executives,
“forward-thinking” clergymen and, of course, school teachers.

In this process, however, a certain deception was worked. The ’Six-

ties Generation certainly had the numbers. Their immediate fore-
bears, having survived the Great Depression and then fought and
won the Second World War, had come home to establish the twen-
tieth century’s highest birth rate. But it was not their numbers that
achieved the victory of the revolutionaries. In fact, it later became
evident that they had converted only an insignificant fraction of
their own generation. However, by shrewdly concentrating them-
selves in the four pivotal areas of modern society–the academy, the
media, the bureaucracy and the seminaries of the mainline Christian
denominations, including the Catholics—they were able to misrep-
resent the society as having wholly changed, when most of it had
not. In fact, two incompatible societies began existing side by side
– the minority one portrayed as a majority by the media and the
“advanced” educators, bureaucrats and clergymen, the other by the
increasingly bewildered majority.12

12. One figure revered in anthropological circles for much of the 20th Century was Mar-
garet Mead. Her famous book, Coming of Age in Samoa–describing an idyllic, non-vio-
lent, free-loving Pacific island society, which encouraged pre-marital sex and recognized
few restraining sexual rules at all—became required reading in first-year anthropology
courses throughout the English-speaking world. In 1983, another anthropologist, Derek
Freeman, having lived on the same islands for years, published another study of the
Samoans that refuted Mead’s book in almost every particular. She was the victim, he said,
of a Samoan hoax. The Samoans were in fact an exceedingly puritanical people with rigid
rules against sexual promiscuity, though they had a mischievous sense of humor. Later yet
another senior anthropologist, Dr. Martin Orans, emeritus professor of Anthropology at
the University of California, Riverside, apologized for the way he and his colleagues had
also been drawn in by the hoax. “The greatest fault lies,” he writes, “with those of us like
myself who understood the requirements of science, but both failed to point out the de-
ficiencies of Mead’s work and tacitly supported such enterprise by repeatedly assigning it
to students.” Mead had gone to Samoa, said Freeman, pre-eminently to affirm the social
views of her beloved mentor, Dr. Franz Boas. Boas’s close associate at Columbia for 31
years: John Dewey.

21
One area of learning, however, remained of necessity proof
against the revolution, notably the physical (as distinct from the
social) sciences. Here, facts had to remain facts, and rules had to
remain rules. In physics and chemistry, things were either proven
or they weren’t. Experiments could fail, and so could students.
Mistakes were real. Standards must be sustained. Here, in other
words, authority remained firmly in place. But the humanities,
wallowing in their new boundless “freedom” and captive to
whatever “liberated” interest group could gain access to them,
gradually declined into practical insignificance.

Looking back on his years in high school, one male Canadian

student I know sadly observed: “My literature courses were
courses in feminism, my social studies courses were courses in
socialism, and my sciences courses were courses in environmen-
talism. The only thing they couldn’t wreck was maths. I don’t
want another four years of this in university, and I don’t want to
take science or engineering, so why bother going?”

He was not alone. Over the years of the Deweyite revolution,

university registration as a whole changed from 60 percent male
to 60 percent female. The female majority in the humanities
alone is much higher. Meanwhile, drop-out rates in high schools
run four-to-one male. Most males, one must conclude, can learn
best in a world of right-wrong, true-false, good-bad, pass-fail,
win-lose. The so-called “alpha males”–often the ones with the
liveliest imaginations, the greatest potential and therefore the
hardest to control, meaning the least able to see themselves as
“social beings”–were proving impossible to educate. Some ob-
servers saw an explanation for this. Back to the beginnings of
the human race, rambunctious young males had been controlled
by simply spanking them. But the new Dewey generation was

22
the first one to discover that “violence teaches violence,” so they
used drugs instead and sedated the obstreperous males into
dazed acquiescence. In the process, they somehow managed to
raise what is arguably the most violent generation of children
we have ever known.

The role of drugs in the revolution was not confined to tran-

quilizing rambunctious little boys. The ’Sixties introduced youth
to the world of pot, speed, crack, methadone and other chemi-
cal novelties, in the course of this wrecking the lives of hundreds
of thousands of young people. Surely, one might respond, you’re
not blaming John Dewey for creating the drug scourge. No, not
precisely for creating it, but for undermining and destroying the
moral barriers that would otherwise have obstructed it. Before
his “progressive educators” arrived, the response the pushers
would have encountered among young people would have been:
“We don’t do that kind of stuff.” And by we, they would have
meant their people, their crowd, their town, their country, their
society, and more than anything else their parents, their family
and the members of their church or synagogue. But these were
the very people Dewey had diligently trained them to oppose.
These were “the Establishment.” These were the old “Author-
ity,” the people who must be superseded. So the barriers were
down and the “drug culture” was born—a multi-billion-dollar
industry, both in selling the product and in coping with the mas-
sive crime it brought into being.

23
 The consequence:
an educational catastrophe

ery soon came disturbing reports that kids weren’t actually

V learning much. The schools were costing more. Teacher

salaries, once abysmally low, now appeared altogether ad-
equate. But children didn’t seem to read as well. Many were un-
questionably illiterate and some could not add, subtract, multiply
or divide. Moreover, the schools had become laboratories for eso-
teric experimentation. In the 1960s came “new maths,” which by
the 1970s had been quietly dumped as a failure. “Whole language”
reading instruction came in with the ’Eighties and was mostly out
by the end of the ’Nineties. How many lives had meanwhile been
ruined by this irresponsible dickering, no one cared to say.

Then in 1983, President Ronald Reagan’s National Commission

on Education produced a report that shook the American educa-
tional establishment to the core. It was entitled “A Nation At
Risk.” In clear terms with unassailable data, it painted the picture
of an educational catastrophe, revealing that the American school
system, once one of the best in the industrialized world, was now
one of the worst. There had been a steady drop for some years in
Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores and the American College
Test (ACT). (Canadian schools had no equivalent for such tests.)
There had appeared a growing need for the universities to pro-
vide remedial classes to teach what the elementary and secondary
schools had failed to teach. The performance of American stu-
dents on international test scores was steadily declining. Knowl-
edge of the great works of literature had virtually disappeared and
all tests showed a deepening and repulsive ignorance of historical
fact. Finally, the American level of “functional illiteracy” was
higher than that of any other industrialized nation.

24
Many wondered: How had this whole calamity been allowed to
happen? Where were the defenders of our literary heritage when
our literary heritage was being pitched out? Where indeed were
the historians when their subject was being reduced to at best a
dispensable adjunct of sociology? Even more astonishing: Where
were the Christians when the whole premise of their teaching and
theology was being rendered absurd? (How could Christ have
died for our sins when there was no such thing as sin—or good or
evil, or right or wrong?)

It soon became evident that even Christian schools had been blind
to the fact that what their teachers were being required to learn in
education college to gain the indispensable government “teaching
certificate” was fundamentally incompatible with what was being
taught by the Bible and by their churches. Even most state-sup-
ported Catholic schools in Canada had so obediently embraced
the new ideas that their curricula became largely indistinguishable
from those of the public schools.

But why should this have been surprising? Dewey himself was an
avowed atheist. He saw the traditional teachings of the churches
as a “delusion,” which erected “obstacles to a student’s intellec-
tual and moral growth.” Religion engendered “a slave mentality.”
It recognized “an intolerant superiority on the part of a few,”
while imposing “an intolerable burden on the part of the many.”
To Dewey, Christianity was “ a dying myth.” Christians were
“preoccupied with the state of their character and concerned with
the purity of their motives and the goodness of their souls.” All
this was a form of ”spiritual egotism.” Teachers must strive to re-
move “the crutch of dogma” and “of beliefs fixed by authority.”
They must seek to “liberate” people from Christianity and teach
them instead “the service of the community.”

25
Fifteen years after “A Nation At Risk” was published came a new
report, “A Nation Still At Risk.” It brought the doleful news that
despite supposedly herculean efforts to improve the schools noth-
ing much had changed. Some 30 percent of freshmen entering uni-
versity were in need of remedial courses in reading, writing, and
mathematics, said the report. In California the figure was 50 per
cent. “Employers report difficulty finding people to hire who have
the skills, knowledge, habits, and attitudes they require for tech-
nologically sophisticated positions.” This second report found
that American 12th graders scored near the bottom on the latest In-
ternational Math and Science Study—19th out of 21 developed na-
tions in math, and 16th out of 21 in science. “Our advanced
students did even worse, scoring dead last in physics.”

Why, asked the second report, had the many reforms proposed by
the first report gone unfulfilled? It answered its own question: The
authors of the first had “underestimated the resilience of the sta-
tus quo and the strength of the interests wedded to it.” One of
them, a former Minnesota governor, observed: “At that time I
had no idea that the system was so reluctant to change.” Reluc-
tant yes, but also incapable. Those who run the system were so
deeply infected with the flawed philosophy lying behind it that
they could comprehend no other.

So a doleful conclusion seemed inescapable: The system cannot

repair itself. No significant change in the schools could occur with-
out somehow supplanting the Dewey philosophy which continues
to inhibit any serious restoration of standards. However, to say
that such a sweeping change is impossible would argue against the
first contention of this essay, notably that Dewey and his fellow
educators in fact worked just such a transformation which in turn
went on to transform the whole society. Dewey himself, that is,

26
may have shown us the way to defeat Deweyism. But it would in-
volve a counter-revolution in the faculties of education as con-
vulsive as the one Dewey engineered. And even if such a
phenomenon could be brought about, it would still take at least
two generations to restore the effectiveness of the schools. Do we
have that much time? In the competitive modern “global” envi-
ronment, with the educational performance of other nations soar-
ing above the North American, it seems most unlikely.

There was an even deeper problem, which Dewey himself ac-

knowledged, and for which he offered no solution. A distinct
amorality was becoming evident in society. The “self,” as it came
to be called, was becoming the only value of the “Me Genera-
tion.” The Deweyite schools had successfully abolished the foun-
dation under the old rules, but had found nothing workable to
replace it.

“Science,” Dewey was confident, would supplant the religious and

traditional basis for ethical behaviour. But this is something of
which science is incapable. That is, it can exhaustively describe
how human beings behave. But it cannot authoritatively assert
how they should behave or ought to behave. Sociologists might
draw up rules for an ideal society, but precisely what obligates the
individual to respect those rules? One might reply: “the general
welfare of humanity.” But what obligates the individual to heed
this “general welfare of humanity?” Suppose he elects instead to
“look after No. 1?” Is he wrong? But how can he be wrong if
there was no such thing? Dewey had turned to “science” for an
answer, and science was of necessity silent. So too, it became clear,
were the educators. Only they could save the schools, and they
didn’t know how.

27
 The human instinct Dewey feared

There is, however, another option, not in itself a solution, but

something that would help pave the way to the kind of educa-
tional cataclysm that salvaging the school system will require.
Most people have within themselves an element that few
Deweyites understand, though Dewey himself plainly understood
it and feared it. He no doubt saw it as an instrument capable of
powerfully reinforcing the very beliefs, attitudes, rules and values
that he strove so zealously to eradicate. That instrument is his-
tory. There exists among many humans an understandable desire
to discover how they got here. They know of course the biologi-
cal answer, but as an account of the way in which towns, toilets,
baseball, rocketry, music, fire hydrants, archbishops, fashion
shows, bank robberies, traffic accidents, socialism, television and
all the other zillion things they see around them came about, bi-
ology alone does not offer a satisfactory explanation. Nor do any
of the other sciences.

What does offer it is history. Perhaps that’s why the historical,

properly presented, often has a strange effect upon the modern
psyche. History can become a sort of addiction, a good addiction,
afflicting people of all ages and both sexes, of widely different ed-
ucational levels, of different professional backgrounds, trades or
careers, nationalities or religions. Such an addiction customarily
develops when someone, often with little previous exposure to
history, comes upon some person or event in the past, or perhaps
merely the site of such an event, and finds developing in himself
a keen fascination with this person, place or thing. He yearns to
know more about it. He searches libraries, lays out money to buy
books, and haunts the web seeking out others with a similar in-
terest.

28
It need not be some exotic figure from the past. It can be a per-
sonal ancestor, or a long-dead municipal politician, or even an
abandoned railway line, or a deserted village. It holds, he realizes,
a story, and he wants to know all about that story. So he pursues
it, and in so doing to he begins to make a number of discoveries.
His deserted village, for example, he finds was once a bustling
community with a mayor and council and a school and a volun-
teer fire department. In an odd way, he begins to feel at home in
that village. He knows some of the local people by name.

But he also discovers that almost everything that happened there

was determined by events outside it–by the province or state,
which had a story of its own, which in turn was connected to
other stories involving the whole country and a whole era in
which all these things were going on. So his interest in the village
carries him to things well beyond it, to a whole world of people
and events, all of whom, he strangely begins to understand and
somehow identify with. For he has also found out how similar
they are to the people of his own day, though they lived a very
long time ago. Living conditions certainly have changed, but peo-
ple have not.

Then he discovers something else. He is beginning to develop a

broad picture of the past. His interest in the village has served as
a path leading into a great forest. He has followed the path and
found that it led to other paths, which in turn led to still others,
until he was able to form in his mind a map of a whole section of
the forest. This in turn connected to other sections he did not
know, but which would no doubt all have stories of their own.
Strangest of all, the result of this experience has been to subtly
change his view of the place and time in which he himself is liv-
ing. He once would have called this “the real world.” But now he

29
knows there are other worlds just as real as his, and that other
equally real worlds would follow the one he’s living in. Those past
worlds had much to teach him because they enabled him to see
more clearly what is going on in his own times.

He has found too that good and evil have come into sharp relief.
Some individuals really did shine like a light from a hilltop,
spreading joy and truth wherever they went. Others brought dark-
ness, and in the clash between the two the fate of their society was
gradually being decided. He finds that those holding the popular
view were frequently deluded, where those widely regarded as de-
luded were in fact on the right track. Often, supposed steps for-
ward were actually steps back, and while the majority might rule,
the majority could often be dead wrong. Through it all he dis-
covers that good and evil, far from mere matters of opinion, were
the qualities upon which everything, every event, ultimately
turned. And he realizes too there is one profound difference be-
tween that earlier time and his own. Dealing with the past, he
knows how the story turned out, what finally happened and why.
Dealing with his own time, he does not know. It is still being de-
termined. But now he can play an informed part in the outcome.
Thus history serves him.

Beyond all this, he discovers something else. He is not so afraid. He

finds that the terrors of the present are not so terrible any more,
because humanity has survived them before and he has (so to speak)
watched them do it. He finds that current human attitudes and sup-
posedly unprecedented ideas and events are often very precedented
indeed and are simply coming back for the umpteenth time. He is
living, he now realizes, in what’s actually the latest chapter in a very
long book. He knows something about the earlier chapters, and he
realizes that this gives him an extraordinary advantage over those
who do not. It is not an accident that most of the great leaders of

30
the Western world were keen scholars of history. They shared the
addiction.

Now such an addiction wholly defeats Deweyism and for an un-

derstandable reason. While the great philosopher claimed to set
men free by liberating them from the “shackles” of the past, the
effect was to deliver them into the bondage of the present, mak-
ing them prisoners of what the Germans call the Zeitgeist, the
spirit of the age. Dewey had led them to believe that the here
and now, the going thing, the current style, the “acceptable”
view, the latest “rage” was the only reality that existed. Thus
fashion not freedom came to determine how they lived in a
world where morality was a matter of “lifestyle” and truth a
matter of viewpoint. They could not judge the world they lived
in because they had no way to get out of it to look at it. He had
locked them in. One way out was that path into the forest, so he
made sure that few ever found it. History, he ruled, must be con-
fined to “the relevant.”

The dawning rediscovery

of the past

e need, therefore, a general “rediscovery” of the past.

W Happily, this has already begun, not significantly in the

sphere of education, but in the book publishing and en-
tertainment industries. The heartening success of the History Chan-
nel on television (when it is not straying into fiction) the
extraordinary work of Ken Burns with his brilliant series on sub-
jects as varied as the U.S. Civil War, jazz, baseball, Thomas Jeffer-
son and others, the captivating histories by the late Barbara

31
Tuchman and William Manchester, the indispensable accounts of
the 19th and 20th Centuries being turned out so magnificently by
Paul Johnson. The astonishing revival of interest in Remembrance
Day, the delightful histories of towns and the stirring military histo-
ries of local regiments, all these put histories in the top ratings on tel-
evision and high on the best-seller lists.

Similarly in Canada, we have the books of the late Pierre Berton

who almost single-handedly provided a fascinating panorama of
the country’s past, and Peter Newman’s portrait of the Diefen-
baker and Pearson years, which introduced a whole new genre of
Canadian political reporting. Less highly profiled were the writ-
ings of the late James H. “Jimmy” Gray whose delightful ac-
counts of the Canadian West must soon be discovered nationally,
while in Winnipeg the old house organ of the Hudson’s Bay Com-
pany, the Beaver magazine, has been taken over by Canada’s Na-
tional History Society and become one of the best magazines in
the country. In the national print media the names of Michael
Bliss, Jack Granatstein and David Bercuson occur ever more fre-
quently with commentary on current events. Always they give the
past a new voice in the present, for all three are historians.

Notably absent from this renaissance is the curriculum of most

public schools, whose administrators, whether consciously or not,
still view history through a Deweyite lens, requiring that it must
be “relevant.” But relevant to what, one wonders. The answer is
to whatever cause or movement the system is currently champi-
oning–whether environmentalism, feminism, anti-industrialism,
and in Canada anti-Americanism. The technique is always the
same: Some fragment of history is summoned to support the cen-
tral cause being expounded. There may be other facts, firmly in
the historical record, which support the opposing contention, but
these are tacitly omitted. In this way history is contemptuously

32
reduced to propaganda. Better, surely, that it be ignored in the
schools than perverted by them. The immediate use of history,
that is, is preferably left to the popular media.13

Not that any of us are proof against bias. The news and print
media accounts of day-by-day events are often classics of blatant
prejudice, bringing to mind Humbert Wolfe’s amusing observation:

You cannot hope

To bribe or twist,
thank God! the
British journalist.

But seeing what

The man will do
unbribed, there’s
no occasion to.

Yet, I’ve noticed that when the newspapers, and even television,
delve into an historic subject, they often seem considerably more
even-handed than they are with current events. Why this is so, I
can only guess. We are not as close to the controversies of yester-
year as we are to those of yesterday afternoon. Journalists are (and
should be) irrepressible story-tellers, and when we are writing of
the long past, it’s the story that energizes us, not the cause.

13. A new kind of attack on history emerged in the closing decades of the 20th Century, no-
tably the habit of blurring the distinction between fact and fiction, both in books like the
celebrated Da Vinci Code, and in what television producers took to calling “docudramas.”
These present as something that happened whatever the author or producer thinks he needs
to reinforce the drama of his story, or its bias, or both. So he therefore quietly invents it.
Manufactured quotes and facts are presented as authentic. In television, since the producer
never tells us what part of his production is “docu” (that is, documented) and what part
is “drama) (that is, fiction), an historical fraud is easily perpetrated, particularly on an his-
torically ignorant audience The effect is to reinforce the Deweyite dictum that history is so
undependable as to be worthless.

33
Before we can work a change in the schools, we must set on foot
a change in the culture, and popular history is the tool which can
bring such a change about. Because it reflects the great values of
the past, it will work to restore the great values of the past, and
the magnificent works of music, art and literature will be restored
along with them. For these are among the facts and treasures of
history. If we can achieve this, we have no reason to fear the threat
posed by other cultures and other societies. Our habit as a civi-
lization has been to absorb the best of other cultures. Only one
thing can prevent us from continuing to do so–that is, if we our-
selves have forgotten who we are and what we have done.

But why ‘Christian’ history?

ut why, someone has asked me, Christian history? The fact

B that I am the general editor of a twelve-volume series on

the history of Christianity, now in production, gave rise
to the question. The volumes begin at Pentecost, the Christian
feast that follows 50 days behind Easter, and continue, century by
century, era by era, through nearly two thousand years to the end
of the second Christian millennium. Seven of the 12 volumes have
been produced, reaching to the year A.D.1300. My answer to that
question is that from the fourth century to the late eighteenth,
Christian history and the history of the Western world are the
same history, and any attempt to divorce the religious from the
secular renders both incomprehensible.

Christianity, that is, begins in the first century of what the secularists
have decreed must be called “the Common Era” (though the only
thing common to it is Christianity). For its first three hundred years,

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the Christians grew from one of many eccentric Middle Eastern cults
that had established a presence in Rome into a formidable force
all over the Roman world, recruiting to the service of Christ about
one quarter of those living in the eastern Roman Empire and one
tenth in the western one. A point to observe is that the Christians
achieved this astonishing success, not through physical conquest,
but through suffering. That is, they were so persuaded of the truth
of the Christian Gospel and the genuine presence of Christ in their
lives that they endured the most hideous tortures, enslavement
and persecution that the imperial government could inflict upon
them. Meanwhile their undoubted valor and their unstinting care
for one another and those around them drew into their numbers
the meek and the mighty, the rich and the poor, the learned and
the illiterate.

Among the literate, they had something else going for them. They
could rationally defend their faith against scoffers and skeptics.
They did not shrink from philosophical disputation, and where
in their earliest days the Greeks regarded their theology as “fool-
ishness,” (1 Corinthians 1:23) the learned soon began to respect
it. In the early second century, for example, the Christian scholar
Justin, invoking the Greek philosophers, so bested an erudite
pagan in a public debate, that the man in a fury had him arrested,
tried and executed. But the Christians could remind the Greeks
that it was their man Plato, five centuries before Christ, who had
concluded that if the perfectly good man ever came into the world
he would be “impaled.”

Finally one would-be emperor, whether out of opportunism, convic-

tion or a mixture of both, decided to back the Christians rather than
fight them. With a Christian symbol painted on his battleshields, he

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triumphed over six rival contenders and gained the imperial throne.
This suddenly reversed the status of the Christians within the empire.
Rather than its most formidable enemies, they now became its fore-
most champions, and Christianity, rather than a personal peril be-
came the means to distinction, affluence and social advance.

However, its days of celebrity were brief and within a century and
a half the whole western empire was overrun by barbarians whom
the Christians slowly, diligently and painfully converted to the faith.
In much of that dark era, the church was the only stable form of
government that existed, and it produced over the succeeding thou-
sand years what became Western civilization. The core of its moral-
ity, law, theory of government, respect for the individual and
theology were all drawn from the Bible and Christian teaching.

Since the late 18th Century, however, Christianity has once again
become embattled (some would say with a new wave of barbar-
ians, this time intellectual ones), and the story of John Dewey’s
endeavors to destroy the Christian culture is part of that battle,
and therefore part of Christian history. So why Christian history?
Because in a sense that is all there is, and a strictly “secular” his-
tory of Western civilization is simply impossible.14 The story of
the West is pre-eminently the story of Christianity.

There is a further reason to produce an academically sound and

yet popular history of Christianity, and that is for Christians

14. The single substantial criticism of Tim Burns’s magnificent television series on the Civil
War was the absence of the role of the Christian faith on both sides of that conflict. Not
only was it the principal spur for the emancipation of the slaves, it was also the prime fac-
tor in the willingness of both the men in blue and the men in grey to die for their convic-
tions. Burns brilliantly depicts their astonishing heroism, but by ignoring the Christian
factor, he fails to account for it.

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themselves. The Christian faith, after all, claims to be rooted in
an historic event. The essayist Dorothy L. Sayers takes particular
note of this:

Christianity is not the only religion that has found

the best explanation of human life in the idea of an
incarnate and suffering god. The Egyptian Osiris
died and rose again; Aeschylus in his play, The Eu-
menides, reconciled man to God by the theory of a
suffering Zeus. But in most theologies, the god is
supposed to have suffered and died in some remote
and mythical period of pre-history. The Christian
story, on the other hand, starts off briskly in St.
Matthew’s account with a place and a date: “When
Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days
of Herod the King.” St. Luke, still more practically
and prosaically, pins the thing down by a reference
to a piece of government finance. God, he says, was
made man in the year when Caesar Augustus was
taking a census in connection with a scheme of tax-
ation. Similarly, we might date an event by saying
it took place in the year that Great Britain went off
the gold standard. About thirty-three years later
(we are informed) God was executed, for being a
political nuisance, “under Pontius Pilate”-much as
we might say, “when Mr. Joynson-Hicks was
Home Secretary.” It is as definite and concrete as
all that.

– From Dorothy L. Sayers, Creed or Chaos, London, 1949

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Nevertheless, Christians are as notably ignorant of our own his-
tory as the world around us. Most of us are familiar with the New
Testament era in the first century and the challenges we face in
the twenty-first, but for the two millennia in between we have
only the vaguest notions of what happened. And while we say we
really must do something about that, the fact is we don’t actually
care. Which is a mistake. We Christians have gone wrong in the
past many times, and we will go wrong again, if we fail to profit
from our past errors because we don’t know anything about them.
We might have seen in the doctrines of John Dewey, for instance,
the same sinister content that the historians Neatby and Daly saw,
and we would not perhaps have been so ready to turn our children
over to his disciples.

Having done this, however, we now find ourselves facing a crisis.

Unless we can somehow restore the unity we once shared, our so-
ciety will either disintegrate or change into something unrecog-
nizable. The chief essential in restoring it is to return to the
teaching of history as an indispensable element in public educa-
tion. Not fragments of history as an adjunct to some other subject,
but history as a subject in itself, taught effectively from kinder-
garten to university. However, before that is likely to happen, we
must first advance history through the popular media—in books,
documentary films, art, movies, plays, music, the web, and every
other means of communication open to us.

But the books must come first. Before any substantial return to our
Christian origins can occur, there needs be a restatement of what
those origins are—that is, a presentation of the whole two-thou-
sand-year Christian story, enticing to an educated reader, generally
acceptable to Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox, to the religiously

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sceptical and the doctrinally polemical, always in sufficient detail
for all the major events to be adequately described and all the fore-
most players to be seen in their historic roles. Upon that foundation,
children’s books can be produced, and the other media will be free
to find subjects of wide popular interest.

What am I suggesting? That the direction of society can be

changed by a set of books? No. But as the old Jewish saying goes,
it’s better to light one candle than complain about the dark. This
series, we believe, is such a candle.

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