Jonathan Edwards v. Socialism on Campus: Whoever Teaches the Children Controls the Future

America’s founders understood the importance of education in the colonies to sustain their form of self-government.

In addition to home schooling, tutors and academies, the purpose of institutions of higher learning in early America was “to train a literate clergy” or prepare missionaries to reach the Indians.

When Harvard was thought to have drifted from teaching students Puritan orthodoxy, ten Congregational ministers, headed by Rev. James Pierpont, founded “Collegiate College,” in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1701.

In 1718, it was renamed Yale College after large contributions from Elihu Yale, a Boston merchant who made a fortune in Madras, India, with the British East India Company.

Yale founder James Pierpont’s daughter was Sarah Pierpont, who married Jonathan Edwards in 1727.

Jonathan Edwards was born in 1703, and entered Yale in 1716, at the age of 13.

As a student, he was fascinated with the philosophy of John Locke and the discoveries of Isaac Newton.

In 1720, at age 17, he graduated valedictorian of his class.

In 1722-1723, Edwards was a pulpit-pastor at a Presbyterian Church in New York City.

He taught students at Yalefrom 1724 to 1726 as a as a “pillar tutor.”

He was ordained in 1727, the year he married Sarah Pierpont.

Edwards served as a “scholar-pastor,” studying 13 hours a day, at the Congregationalist Church in Northampton, Massachusetts.

There, he assisted the head pastor, his grandfather, Puritan Rev. Solomon Stoddard, the first librarian at Harvard University.

A church membership controversy, the “Half-Way Covenant,” still simmered from the 1650s.

Edwards’ wife, Sarah, was the great-granddaughter of Rev. Thomas Hooker,the Congregationalist minister who founded Connecticut.

Where strict Puritans insisted that only church members could vote in community elections, Rev. Hooker advocated that anyone who was a Christian should be allowed to vote.

Hooker stated in a sermon in Hartford, Connecticut, May 31, 1638:

“The foundation of authority is laid firstly in the free consent of people.”

This was a revolutionary idea at a time when most of the world was ruled “top-down” by kings, emperors, czars and chieftains.

Connecticut was to be a colony ruled “bottom-up”by the consent of educated Christian citizens.

Hooker’s sermon became the basis for The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, 1638-39, which according to historian John Fiske, comprised the first written constitution in history.

It became a blueprint for other New England colonies and eventually the United States Constitution.

Hartford’s Travelers Square has a plaque which reads:

“In June of 1635 … Thomas Hooker’s congregation … established the form of government upon which the present Constitution of the United States is modeled.”

Connecticut’s General Assembly designated Connecticut “The Constitution State” in 1959.

Rev. Thomas Hooker is considered the “Father of American Democracy,” as memorialized on a plaque at the school he attended in Market Bosworth, Leicestershire, England.

Another marker where he lived in Shire Hall, Chelmsford, England, reads:

“Thomas Hooker 1586-1647, Curate of St. Mary’s Church, Chelmsford and Town Lecturer 1626-1629, Founder of the State of Connecticut 1636, ‘Father of American Democracy.'”

A statue of Rev. Thomas Hooker holding a Bible stands prominently in front of Hartford’s Old State House.

In 1729, Solomon Stoddard died, leaving Jonathan Edwards as sole pastor of one of the largest congregations in Massachusetts.

In 1733, a revival began with 300 youth joining the church in just 6 months.

In 1737, Edwards wrote A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton.

In 1739-1740, during Rev. George Whitefield’s tour through the colonies, Jonathan Edwards had him preach to his church in Northhampton.

In 1741, Edwards preached a sermon, “Sinners in the hands of an angry God” which began a Great Awakeningin which tens of thousands came to Christ.

The revival, largely among young people, was so widespread that history credits it with helping to unite the colonies prior to the Revolution.

Edwards published a pamphlet denouncing the importation of slaves from Africa.

He preached to the Mohican and Housatonic Indians,criticized politicians who used their official positions to make fortunes off of them, and opposed encroachment on Indian lands.

He took care of dying missionary to the Delaware Indians, David Brainerd. Afterwards he published in 1749, An Account of the Life of the Late Rev. David Brainerd.

Of the Great Awakening Revival,Jonathan Edwards wrote:

“God made it, I suppose, the greatest occasion of awakening to others, of anything that ever came to pass in the town.

I have had abundant opportunity to know the effect it had, by my private conversation with many.

The news of it seemed to be almost like a flash of lighting upon the hearts of young people all over the town, and upon many others.”

Ben Franklin wrote of the Great Awakening Revival:

“It was wonderful to see … From being thoughtless or indifferent … it seemed as if all the world were growing religious, so that one could not walk thro’ the town in an evening without hearing psalms sung in … every street.”

The Great Awakening Revival led to the founding of more universities.

Ben Franklin raised money to build a “preaching house” (100 feet by 70 feet) for evangelist George Whitefield’s revival meetings in 1740.

This “House of Public Worship”was the largest building in the Philadelphia.

There, Whitefield began a Charity School for blacks and the poor, but due to lack of funding it only lasted a few years.

Afterwards, Franklinused the building for the newly formed Academy of Philadelphia.

With Franklin as president of the board, it was supported by Presbyterians, Anglicans, Methodists, Moravians and Quakers.

It was renamed the Academy and College of Philadelphia, then the University of Pennsylvania.

In 1742, Moravian missionariesfounded Bethlehem Female Seminary, in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. It was renamed Moravian College.

In 1743, Presbyteriansfounded Free School in New London, Pennsylvania.

In 1763, it moved to Newark, Delaware, being renamed Newark Academy, then the University of Delaware.

In 1746, Presbyterians founded The College of New Jersey, in Newark, New Jersey. It was renamed Princeton University.

In 1749, Presbyterians founded Augusta Academy near Greenville, Virginia.

In 1776, it moved and was renamed Liberty Hall Academy, enrolling the first black student, John Chavis.

It moved again and renamed Washington College, then Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia.

In 1754, in reaction to the founding of Princeton, Anglicans secured a charter from King George II to establish King’s College in New York City.

After the Revolution it was renamed Columbia University.

In 1764, Baptists founded “The College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.”

It was renamed Brown University.

In 1758, Princeton elected Jonathan Edwards as its President.

He tragically died of a smallpox inoculation on MARCH 22, 1758.

Jonathan Edwards’grandson was 4th Yale President Timothy Dwight.

Dwight helped check the spread of liberal French infidelity on college campuses.

The atheism of French Philosopher Voltaire laid the groundwork for the French Revolution.

Naive students were slow to connect that society without moral restraints ends in lawlessness.

France’s bloody Reign of Terror,1793-1794, saw over 40,000 people beheaded.

The French Revolution became the blueprint for socialist and communist revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries — agitating groups with grievances into violence, to kill off the old order to user in a new utopia, which inevitably get taken over by a dictator.

Timothy Dwight wrote July 4, 1798:

“In societies of Illuminati … the being of God was denied and ridiculed … The possession of property was pronounced robbery.

… Chastity and natural affection were declared to be nothing more than groundless prejudices.

Adultery, assassination, poisoning, and other crimes of the like infernal nature, were taught as lawful … provided the end was good …

The good ends proposed by the Illuminati … are the overthrow of religion, government, and human society, civil and domestic.

… These they pronounce to be so good that murder, butchery, and war, however extended and dreadful, are declared by them to be completely justifiable.”

Timothy Dwight warned that Voltaire’s agenda included controlling the education of the youth:

“The means … were … the education of youth … books replete with infidelity, irreligion, immorality, and obscenity.”

Like the programing of computers today, many in the past understood that education gives youth their identity and their purpose.

Therefore it was necessary to gain control of education in order to bring future generations into a socialist system.

Students must give up the concept of “the individual”inherent in Judeo-Christian worldview, and replace it with the concept of identifying with “a group.”

“The group” is then controlled by the dynamics of peer-pressure, of wanting to “fit in” and be accepted by “the group.”

Being rejected by “the group” is the ultimate fear, as it then results in a loss of all self-esteem and self-worth.

Montesquieu wrote how kings maintained control through honor and dishonor.

Many countries have an “honor-shame” culture, where people have a perpetual need to “save face,” or to avenge if one’s person or family is “offended.”

Plato wrote in Republic (380BC):

“When the true philosopher kings are born in a State … they will set in order their own city …

They will … take possession of the children, who will be unaffected by the habits of their parents; these they will train in their own habits and laws.”

Plato explained how the philosopher-king would stay in power by instituting a centralized “common-core” type education program where children were taught “noble lies.”

A description of Plato’s “noble lie” was given in a review of James Glazov’s book, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror (Midstream, winter, 2011):

“Plato expressed an idea that is related to thought control: he called for the Noble Lie, a contradiction in terms if ever there was one.

In particular, he said that the people should be taught that

In 1949, at the beginning of the Cold War with the Union of Soviet SocialistRepublics, George Orwell wrote a dark, futuristic novel titled “Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

Orwell predicted things which have eerily come to pass:

Orwell explained why Big Brother government must rewrite history:

“Those who control the past control the future, and those who control the present control the past.”

During World War II, Joseph Goebbelswas Minister of Propaganda and National Enlightenment for the National Socialist Workers Party.

A master at manipulating peer-pressure for mob emotions, Goebbels stated:

“It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion … Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.”

The Führer of the National SocialistWorkers Party was Adolph Hitler,who stated November 6, 1933:

“When an opponent declares, ‘I will not come over to your side,’

I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already … What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.'”

Hitler stated May 1, 1937:

“The youth of today is ever the people of tomorrow.

For this reason we have set before ourselves the task of inoculating our youth with the spirit of this community of the people at a very early age, at an age when human beings are still unperverted and therefore unspoiled …

This Reich stands, and it is building itself up for the future, upon its youth.

And this new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing.”

The Communist tactic of deconstruction is:

Karl Marx stated:

“Take away the heritage of a people and they are easily destroyed.”

Marx stated:

“The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother’s care, shall be in state institutions at state expense.”

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin stated:

“The goal of socialism is communism.”

Lenin stated:

“Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”

Communist Party Education Workers Congress, 1918:

“We must create out of the younger generation a generation of Communists. We must turn children, who can be shaped like wax, into real, good Communists …

We must remove the children from the crude influence of their families. We must take them over and, to speak frankly, nationalize them.

From the first days of their lives they will be under the healthy influence of Communist children’s nurseries and schools. There they will grow up to be real Communists.”

Josef Stalin stated:

“Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”

Leon Trotsky stated:

“If our generation happens to be too weak to establish Socialism over the earth, we will hand the spotless banner down to our children … It is the struggle for the future of all mankind.”

William T. Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education, 1889-1906, drawing on the philosophies of Hegel, Kant, Fichte, Fröbel and Pestalozzi, stated:

“Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening.

The average American should be content with their humble role in life, they’re not tempted to think about any other role.”

Yang Berhorma, Minister of Culture of Borneo, wrote in The Brunei Times, August 29, 2013:

“A nation or generation that does not know the history of their nation is a nation that lost its identity, and can be easily manipulated.”

Henry A Giroux wrote in an op-ed “How Disney Magic and the Corporate Media Shape Youth Identity in the Digital Age,” August 21, 2011:

“Childhood ideals increasingly give way to a market-driven politics in which young people are prepared for a life of ‘objectification’ (a social philosophy term meaning to treat a person as a thing) that will simultaneously drain them of any viable sense of moral and political agency.”

Dr. James Dobson addressed the National Religious Broadcasters, February 16, 2002:

“If they can get control of children … they can change the whole culture in one generation… There is a concerted effort to manipulate the minds of kids …

A stem cell is a cell in the human being … that in the very early stages of development it is undifferentiated. In other words, it’s not yet other kinds of tissue, but it can go any direction depending on the environment that it’s in …

Do you understand that children are the stem cells for the culture?”

Will & Ariel Durant wrote in The Story of Civilization, 1967:

“History is an excellent teacher with few pupils.”

Harvard Professor George Santayanawrote in Reason in Common Sense (Vol. I of The Life of Reason, 1905):

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Cicero stated in Ad M. Brutum, 46 BC:

“Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever.”

Judge Learned Hand wrote:

“The use of history is to tell us … past themes, else we should have to repeat, each in his own experience, the successes and the failures of our forebears.”

Winston Churchill stated:

“The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”

Pulitzer Prize winning historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., wrote in an op-ed titled “Folly’s Antidote” (The New York Times, January 1, 2007):

“History is to the nation as memory is to the individual.

As persons deprived of memory become disoriented and lost, not knowing where they have been and where they are going, so a nation denied a conception of the past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future.

‘The longer you look back,’ said Winston Churchill, ‘the farther you can look forward’ … I believe a consciousness of history is a moral necessity for a nation.”

John F. Kennedy wrote in the Introduction of the American Heritage New Illustrated History of the United States (1960):

“History, after all, is the memory of a nation.

Just as memory enables the individual to learn, to choose goals and stick to them, to avoid making the same mistake twice — in short, to grow — so history is the means by which a nation establishes its sense of identity and purpose.”

Edmund Burke wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790:

“People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.”

Lord Acton wrote in 1877:

“The story of the future is written in the past.”

Patrick Henry stated March 23, 1775:

“I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.”

Aristotle, in his book Rhetoric (4th century BC), called this “deliberative rhetoric,” using examples from the past to predict future outcomes:

“The political orator is concerned with the future: it is about things to be done hereafter that he advises, for or against.”

Adolph Hitler stated:

“The man who has no sense of history, is like a man who has no ears or eyes.”

Will & Ariel Durant wrote in The Lessons of History, 1968:

“Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew;

if the transmission should be interrupted … civilization would die, and we should be savages again.”

President Ronald Reagan addressed the National Prayer Breakfast, February 3, 1983:

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream.

It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s childrenwhat it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

In the spirit of his grandfather, Great Awakening preacher Jonathan Edwards,Yale President Timothy Dwightconcluded his remarks, July 4, 1798:

“Where religion prevails, Illumination cannot make disciples, a French directory cannot govern, a nation cannot be made slaves …

To destroy us therefore, in this dreadful sense, our enemies must first destroy our Sabbath and seduce us from the house of God …

Without religion we may possibly retain the freedom of savages, bears, and wolves, but not the freedom of New England.

If our religion were gone, our state of society would perish with it and nothing would be left which would be worth defending.”