Why Latter-Day Saints Should Homeschool . . . and how to do it!
#5b: You Can Give a Magnificent Gift

In preparing for their first year under the Free School Act, George Q. Cannon, first counselor to President Woodruff, had written in the Juvenile Instructor:

It will be a great temptation to many people to send their children to the free schools that will now be supported by our taxes, but of what value is learning if it is acquired at the expense of faith.  
                                                - Revealed Education and the Public School, Jack Monnett, p. 154

Church leaders were concerned.  They had cause to be.  Brother Monnett tells us that the “beginning of the new school year brought little response to President Cannon’s plea . . . The ‘tempation’ was evidently too great for church members and the year showed a substantial decline in church school enrollment.” (Monnett, p. 154)

Without the support of the people, church leaders found it very difficult to carry out the Lord’s educational plan.  In a letter, “Horace Cummings told Brother Maeser that once his students attended public schools, he doubted that he would be able to win them back [as many a parent who waited until jr. high to homeschool knows today].  John Swenson wrote that the Panguitch Academy would have to be discontinued.  The reason, he said, was that “there is quite a number gone and others going to other places to school.”  (p. 154)  And Principal Angus Vance from Brigham City wrote, “We believe the Saints should say today as Israel of old, ‘God hath spoken, let Israel obey and patronize these schools and fill them to overflowing.’”  That didn’t happen; the next term his academy lost 58 of its 139 students “because of free school competition.”  After the following term he was down to 25 students.  The academy closed its doors during the next year. (p.155)

President Cannon wrote in the Juvenile Instructor again:

There are parents who are very favorable to their children receiving education, but appear to be indifferent as to the character of the teaching which they receive.  They do not seem to place any value on their children being taught the principles of their religion.  Apparently, therefore, they would as soon their children be taught in schools or colleges where religion is entirely ignored as in an academy taught by Latter-day Saints.…

The Latter-day Saints have forsaken everything for their religion.  They have been willing to die for it….how persons who have had these feelings concerning religion in their own case can be so careless as to expose their children to infidelity seems a great mystery. (p.161)

Imagine how awful this must have been for the prophets.  The government schools had all the money.  Those schools were bigger and better, materialistically.  The church schools, which had the Spirit of the Lord, still couldn’t compete.  Brother Monnett says the Saints were lured away by false education ideas promoted by “…leading educators and politicians who said that public taxation was fair; would assure all children equal opportunity; and would significantly raise the level of education.”  These are the very same words that are used today. (Monnett, p.41)

Why were church leaders so adamant in promoting church schools, especially since it was so difficult a task to accomplish?  I think we can identify several principles that were important to them.  Frist, they wanted the Saints to practice self-reliance in education.  Second, they wanted LDS children to have an LDS education at the hands of LDS teachers.  Third, they hoped for willing obedience, the only path to unity.

Self-Reliance in Education
Church leaders may have been thinking that when parents take responsibility for the education of their family, even if they had to sacrifice to do so, they are more likely to take an active interest in that education and to teach their children to value self-reliance.  When parents turn their children over to the state for education, they are then out of the loop.  They have lost control over curriculum, moral standards, and teaching staff; and their children tend to become dependent on the state.

Tuition for church schools was not expected to cover all of the costs and it was never excessive; in fact the church did what it could to keep tuitions low.  This was not easy.  The incarceration of so many of the best men in the territory for polygamy had left the Church, as well as private businesses and families, impoverished.  The goal was to make education “so cheap that it will be within the reach of the humblest in the land.” (p. 129)

Money was never the issues; principle was.  Brother Monnett reports that, “The Beaver Stake, (and President John R. Murdock) was somewhat more affluent than other stakes and offered free tuition for a time.  When President Woodruff found out about the ‘free school’ at Beaver, he wrote to the stake president demanding to know why tuition was not charged.  The academy quickly imposed tuition payments. (p. 135)

An LDS Curriculum Taught by LDS Teachers
In Part A of this article we included several statements expressing the desires of the prophets for a religious education for LDS children.  Why were the prophets so concerned about this?  One reason might be that scripturally based education is more truthful and will therefore bring more lasting satisfaction and future success.  Another is the power of the scriptures to build faith. 

Still another reason the prophets might have been so concerned about education is that they knew their enemy.  They had been persecuted by live people; they could see the whites of their eyes.  They were not about to turn their children over to these enemies to have their faith destroyed.  An insight into the intensity of their feelings comes from John Taylor.  President Taylor was speaking about a man who was on trial for polygamy.

He, from his earliest recollection, had been taught to reverence the Bible as the word of God, to revere the lives and examples of the ancient worthies . . . . yet all these men, the friends, associates and confidants of the great Creator of heaven and earth, were men with more than one wife, some with many wives, yet they still possessed and rejoiced in the love and honor of the great Judge of all the world . . . And there, in this ignominious position, he stands, [on trial for polygamy] with every person who might possibly be his friend excluded from the jury, without the possibility of a fair trail by his peers, not one of the panel being in the least sympathy with himself; and by such people this unfortunate young gentleman has to be tried, judged, prosecuted, proscribed, and condemned, because of his firm and unswerving faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, of David, Solomon, and numerous other God-fearing and honorable men . . . . no wonder then that our would-be reformers are so anxious to exclude the Bible from our district schools.
                                                                                               - John Taylor, Journal of Discourses, 25:357

“Free” schools aren’t so free.  Sometimes they cost us our children.

Obedience
When the Lord gives us a command through His prophets, He hopes we will freely choose to obey.  In what I think is the most painful verses of scripture, when Enoch was shown in vision the evil behavior of men on the earth, he actually watched the Lord weep.  He asked, “How is it that thou canst weep, seeing thou art holy, and from all eternity to all eternity?  And the Lord answered:

 . . . . Behold these thy brethren; they are the workmanship of mine own hands, and I gave unto them their knowledge, in the day I created them; and in the Garden of Eden, gave I unto man his agency;

And unto thy brethren have I said, and also given commandment, that they should love one another, and that they should choose me . . . 
                                                                                                                             - Moses 7:29, 32-33

After all the Lord has given us, beginning with a sun that “comes up” every morning and air to breathe, He asks just two things:  that we love each other and that we obey. 

In early Utah , when church leaders asked for the support of the members in avoiding tax-supported, non religious education in favor of self-reliant, religiously based education, what they were asking for was consistent with scripture.  It was consistent with the history of all successful cultures.  In the January 1980 Ensign, Elder Joe J. Christensen, who was then the President of the Missionary Training Center in Provo UT wrote:

It is my opinion that the roots of all education over the centuries are essentially religious. Education, and in fact religious education, has existed from time immemorial. I am aware of no culture, primitive or otherwise, that is not very much concerned with at least informal education, and even primitive cultures have placed more formal emphasis on religious education. I certainly do not mean by this that all education in all cultures has been based on truth. In fact, there have been many abuses, to the extent that some of the most grievous of man’s sins against man have been perpetrated in the name of religion.

Of course, I believe that what we need as a human society is true education and true religion because I maintain that all true education is essentially religious and all true religion is essentially educational.

There was no good reason for the Saints to reject this counsel. Latter-day education had been religiously based all along, even in Utah .  The movement to take the scriptures out of the curriculum and then to make the schools tax supported was recent history for them.  Church leaders understood that an enemy had done this.  Why didn’t the members?

It is true that the return to religious education through church schools started out when the Saints were in poverty, but within a few years the economy became prosperous.  Still the Saints were slow to respond to the Lord’s program.  Here’s the sad breakdown of school enrollment for the first four years after the Circular letter called for Stake Presidents to offer schooling for the students in their stakes.  (p. 162)

Before the Stake Presidents even had a fair opportunity to build successful schools, they were outmaneuvered by Babylon .  Because of a lack of faith on the parts of the Saints, Church schools had to be abandoned.  Like Moses on his second trip down the mountain, the Prophets gave us Seminary (for students up to age 12, as that was as far as the public schools went at the time).  Imagine what it must have been like for the prophets and those faithful members who had worked to support the schools to have to close down what the Lord had asked them to do.  Image how hard it must have been for the leaders to now have to partner with the very schools they had spoken against in order to get Seminary into the program.  Image how hard it was for the children who were in church schools and had to move to government schools. 

Within a few generations the partnership between the church and the government schools became natural to the Saints.  When my husband and I moved to Utah in 1972 as fairly new members of the church, the Superintendent of Schools still sat on the stand at conferences, a protocol that I assume began with John Taylor.  When our family started homeschooling in 1975, we had no idea that the Saints in Utah viewed the public schools very much like an auxiliary organization.  No wonder our homeschooling so offended them.   

Have our modern prophets been happy with their partnership with the public schools?  Let’s see:  

President David O. McKay
When we joined the church David O. McKay was the prophet.  President McKay had been an educator his entire life.  We were given a book of his teachings, Gospel Ideals, which contains a chapter of quotes on education all emphasizing his concern for the development of noble character.  For example, in 1942 he said:

But gaining knowledge is one thing and applying it, quite another.  Wisdom is the right application of knowledge; and true education – the education for which the Church stands – is the application of knowledge to the development of a noble and Godlike character. . . .

True education seeks, then, to make men and women not only good mathematicians, proficient linguists, profound scientists, or brilliant literary lights, but also honest men, combined with virtue, temperance, and brotherly love – men and women who prize truth, justice, wisdom, benevolence, and self-control as the choicest acquisitions of a successful life.

     It is regrettable, not to say deplorable, that modern education so little emphasizes these fundamental elements of true character.  The principal aim of many of our schools and colleges seems to be to give the students purely intellectual attainments and to give but passing regard to the nobler and more necessary development along moral lines.  This is particularly noticeable along the line of self-control.    (p. 440-1)

President McKay saw the slow decline of American education and marked the spot at which the decline became a slippery slope.  He was the prophet in 1962 when the Supreme Court passed a ruling against school prayer.  Because the ruling involved one particular prayer, Elder Dallin Oaks at first thought it was a favor ruling, but said:

President David O. McKay saw the direction of those decisions with prophetic vision. In December 1962, he said: “By making that [New York Regents’ prayer] unconstitutional, the Supreme Court of the United States severs the connecting cord between the public schools of the United States and the source of divine intelligence, the Creator himself.”
                                                                   - Dallin H. Oaks, Religion in Public Life, Ensign, July 1990

President Ezra Taft Benson
When morality lost out, prophets just tried to stop  the evil.  President Benson was a farmer and a champion of liberty.  He watched our schools careen down the slippery slope and was outspoken and prolific.  He too marked the Supreme Court decision.  His book of teachings, which he and his counselors personally reviewed,  includes an entry in which he quoted President McKay’s remark and said, “Does that make a difference to you?  Can’t you see why the demand of conscientious parents is increasing the number of private Christian and Americanist-oriented schools?” (Teachings of Ezra Taft Benson, p. 308) 

In the late 70’s President Benson’s son Reed resigned from his job with the John Birch Society on the East coast and returned to Utah where he taught at the American Heritage School while he obtained his doctorate degree from BYU.  The subject of his dissertation was homeschooling, and his research project was his family’s year-long  homeschool “experiment.” They did not give up their homeschool after the dissertation, and Reed became the leading spokesman for what he termed a “family-saving movement.”  He spoke at our homeschool conferences for many years before illness sent him into retirement.  Today many of President Benson’s posterity is involved in home and private schooling.

Here are more statements from President Benson’s chapter on education:

Let us never lose sight of the fact that education is a preparation for life -- and that preparing for life is far more than knowing how to make a living or how to land on the moon. Preparing for life means building personal integrity, developing a sound sense of values, increasing the capacity and willingness to serve. Education must have its roots in moral principles. If we lose sight of that fact in our attempt to match our educational system against that of the materialists, we shall have lost far more than we could possibly gain. (Teachings p. 297)

Our educational system must be based on freedom – never force. (p.318)

The world worships the learning of man.  They trust in the arm of flesh (see D&C 1:19 ).  To them, men’s reasoning is greater than God’s revelations.  The precepts of man have gone so far in subverting our educational system that in many cases a higher degree today, in the so-called social sciences, can be tantamount to a major investment in error.  Very few men build firmly enough on the rock of revelation to go through this kind of indoctrination and come out untainted. (p. 319)

From the fifth grade through the fourth year of college, our young people are being indoctrinated with a Marxist philosophy, and I am fearful of the harvest.  The younger generation is further to the left than most adults realize.  The old concepts of our Founding Fathers are scoffed and jeered at by young moderns whose goals appear to be the destruction of integrity and virtue, and the glorification of pleasure, thrills, and self-indulgence. (p. 320-1)

President Boyd K. Packer
President Packer has never been one to mince words, and he certainly didn’t do so when he spoke at the Utah State University baccalaureate services on June 8, 1973 , about three years after the death of President McKay.  His address was reprinted in the Ensign in September 1973 and, in part, in the New Era the next month.  The talk is a classic and needs to be read from the housetops.  Here are some quotes; you will find the complete talk on the church website (emphasis President Packer’s):

Some years ago a plaintiff prospered in her grievance concerning the saying of prayers in public schools. The practice was declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court. That decision was a partial decision, for the effect was, regardless of the intent, to offer great encouragement to those who would erase from our society every trace of reference to the Almighty.  

She wanted to protect her son from any contact with religion, and now her son is protected from my type of religion—but my son is exposed to hers.   

There is a crying need for the identification of atheism for what it is, and that is, a religion—albeit a negative one, nevertheless it is a religious expression. It is the one extreme end of the spectrum of thought concerning the causation of things.

Those who are spiritually sensitive recognize God as the cause, a living being who rules in the affairs of man. The so-called atheist declares that God is not—not just that he isn’t the cause of things, but that he indeed is not. . . . .

The patrons of a university, the citizens who finance it, have the right to send their sons and daughters to school without the anxiety that they will be taught sectarian religion, including that of the atheist. They have the right to expect that the standards of campus discipline and dormitory living are not dictated by a few ultraliberals who are confined by no moral standards whatsoever.

We are very particular to forbid anyone from preaching Catholicism, or Protestantism, or Mormonism, or Judaism, in a public school classroom, but for some reason we are very patient with those who teach the negative expression of religion.

In the separation of church and state we ought to demand more protection from the agnostic, from the atheist, from the communist, from the skeptic, from the humanist and the pragmatist, than we have yet been given. . . . .

I submit that the atheist has no more right to teach the fundamentals of his sect in the public school than does the theist. Any system in the schools or in society that protects [permits?] the destruction of faith and forbids, in turn, the defense of it must ultimately destroy the moral fiber of the people.

President Packer is also an educator.  Two decades later, as he watched the decline, he said:

The ultimate purpose of the adversary, who has “great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time,” is to disrupt, disturb, and destroy the home and the family. Like a ship without a rudder, without a compass, we drift from the family values which have anchored us in the past. Now we are caught in a current so strong that unless we correct our course, civilization as we know it will surely be wrecked to pieces.

Moral values are being neglected and prayer expelled from public schools on the pretext that moral teaching belongs to religion. At the same time, atheism, the secular religion, is admitted to class, and our youngsters are proselyted to a conduct without morality.

World leaders and court judges agree that the family must endure if we are to survive. At the same time, they use the words freedom and choice as tools to pry apart the safeguards of the past and loosen up the laws on marriage, abortion, and gender. In so doing, they promote the very things which threaten the family . . .

...The distance between the church and a world set on a course which we cannot follow will steadily increase.   (Conference, April 1994) 

Just a year after I had been called as a General Authority, I saw President McKay very agitated.  I had not seen him that way before.  We were in a meeting in the temple with all of the General Authorities in October 1962, prior to the general conference.  When President McKay came in, he was obviously very agitated.  When it came his time to speak, he told us that the Supreme Court had made a decision announcing the prohibition of prayer in the public schools.  He said then and later in a public meeting, by that decision “the Supreme Court of the United States severs the connecting cord between the public schools of the United States and the source of divine Intelligence, the Creator himself, “in whom we live and move and have our being.”  President McKay further declared (and I quote), “The ruling is surprising, when we realize that the noblest purpose of the public schools as a function of government should be to teach loyalty and obedience to the laws of our country.” . . . That statement and his anxiety was prophetic of what has come now and the drift that we have seen.

President Packer then went on to say:

In many places it is literally not safe physically for youngsters to go to school.  And in many schools – and its becoming almost generally true – it is spiritually unsafe to attend public schools.  Look back over the history of education to the turn of the century and the beginning of the educational philosophies – pragmatism and humanism were the early ones, and they branched out into a number of other philosophies which have led us now unto a circumstance where our schools are producing the problems that we face.” (BYU 1996)  

President Hinckley talks often of education, but usually about the need for parents to read to their children, of the value of good books, of getting as much education as possible, of educating the hands and heart, etc.  He is speaking to a worldwide church, so he doesn’t talk about the American public school system.  He knows what’s going on though.   Here, in the year 2000, he seems to be speaking of that same 1962 court ruling:

Q. What is your position on prayer or meditation or moments of silence in public schools?

A. I believe in them and will be glad to get through here so I can have a moment of meditation (laughter). Well, all of us ought to pause once in a while and think of things. We are prone to talk too much and do too little. I think it is a wonderful thing to just indulge once in a while in moments of introspection and see what we are doing with our lives and what contribution we are making and where we could do a little better than we are now doing. I feel we would all benefit from that.

Q. Do you think it is appropriate to have this as part of the daily instruction in public school?

A. In the public schools? I don't know whether I want to comment on that. I think we may have taken a terrible step backwards some years ago, and I don't know whether we'll recover from it. You politicians know better than I do what the mood is to change the law, but regardless of that we teach our people in their own private lives and in our own individual ways to pray, to get on their knees and talk with God and listen for his still small voice and listen for his inspiration and direction in their lives. We bear testimony of the fact that yields great good. I don't hesitate to say that for a moment.

How awful it must be to be a prophet!  In what might be the saddest statement of a latter-day prophet, President Packer described the burden (notice that he invoked two other witnesses as well):

President Harold B. Lee told me once of a conversation he had with Elder Charles A. Callis of the Quorum of the Twelve.  Brother Callis had remarked that the gift of discernment was an awesome burden to carry.  To see clearly what is ahead and yet find members slow to respond or resistant to counsel or even rejecting the witness of the apostles and prophets brings deep sorrow. . . .

There are limits to what the Spirit permits us to say . . . .  
                                                                                   - President Boyd K. Packer, Conference, Oct 1996  

Do our current prophets weep?  Are we responsible for their tears?

Are we recovering from the loss of religion in our public schools?  No.  Our children are falling victim, in frightening numbers, to Satan’s traps. 

After all the years of sorrow, could we now give the Lord the one gift he asked for – could we choose Him?  Could we make Him the center, the foundation, the spirit of our children’s education?  Could we willingly obey what we can see is a basic gospel principle?  Could we sacrifice for our children, consecrate ourselves and our work with our children? 

How much joy would the Lord and His prophets feel knowing that in six more homes, or six hundred, parents are teaching their children from the scriptures, reading with and to them from great books, teaching them correct views of history and science, and holding discussions of ideas and events that cultivate faith? 

If we can homeschool just 20 minutes a day, or an hour or two on Sunday afternoons, or every morning instead of classroom school, we can give the Magnificent Gift.     

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