Old Deluder Satan

It has been widely assumed that mathematics is the most objective of school curricula, one that the politics and culture, so keen to shape other subjects, generally leave alone. America’s 'culture wars' are targeting maths teaching, now. Did you know that a maths teachers’ insistence that the ‘right’ answer be obtained is in fact a symptom of white privilege? Instead of learning and applying formulae, algebra and fractions, maths must become a tool for ‘calling out’ systemic racism- according to the California Instructional Quality Commission. Teachers must not focus upon whether a student has arrived at the correct answer, but must ‘scale their impact to a number of classrooms and students in order to dismantle the culture of white supremacy that exists within the math classroom.' In other words, teaching maths is to become a political activity. This kind of thing happened in totalitarian regimes, like North Korea and China; now, it comes from America. Education is becoming the state’s tool to infiltrate minds, not to educate them.

When the West rejected God, it convinced itself that biology was essentially the study of an endless process of death and destruction. Physics was admiring the surprisingly logical effects of a massive, random explosion. Religious Studies concerned itself with every conceivable religious notion, and philosophy majored on the bleak and soulless. Literature became a way of celebrating sinful lifestyles and art enthusiastically affirmed piles of rubbish, not depictions of beauty and meaning. Yet education was conceived by the godly, not the wicked. Our ancient English grammar schools were originally attached to churches. State education was first conceived by puritans in Massachusetts, with their wonderfully named Old Deluder Satan Act of 1647, which required children to attend school. “Ye old deluder, Satan” revelled in human ignorance, in order “to keepe men from the knowledge of ye Scriptures.” The puritan legislature therefore required every town with 50 or more families to hire and maintain a teacher to instruct all children in reading and writing, that the Bible they might read for themselves. Good for them!

Satan never was blessed with creativity; like a thief, he merely appropriates and confiscates things not his. Schools and colleges, despite their good foundations, are now bastions of ungodly world-views. The silly Californian education officials, and their likely British followers, are advocating hell’s objectives. By denying that 5+5 must always equal 10, they facilitate the degeneration of mathematical truth into subjective and erroneous nonsense. There is right and wrong, truth and falsehood. The serpent continues to ask “Hath God [really] said?”

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay