A father of a prospective family asked me if our students sing O’ Canada. In answering that question, I alluded to the role National Anthems played in the gradual adoption of progressive education. At Verideia we sing and therefore learn by heart the first and fourth verses of O’ Canada which we sing on Chapel days, Remembrance Day and other occasions. When I was attending government schools, we sang the first verse of the Canadian National Anthem (Declared official Canadian anthem, 1980), and the first verse of the British National Anthem, and recited the Lord’s Prayer. The gradual slide away from Ontario’s Christian foundations of education required a shift of ultimate allegiances, away from King Jesus towards the Head of state and ultimately fidelity to the State itself. Hymns and Psalms were replaced with State Anthems. Education’s old goal ‘of make people able to be good, and also free through the Liberal Arts’ combined with Christian education’s goal of ‘conformity to Christ’ was swapped out for a ‘good’ job and conformity with compliant and insatiable consumerism.
With allegiance to the State naturally comes conformity to what the State wants. Given the self-serving nature of the State, it demands productive, compliant, or better yet, complicit slaves. Ironically Canadian and British Anthems in their entirety are now far too God centred to be sung by the current State which hates all rival Kings.
The degree to which citizens believe education is primarily about job acquisition is the decree to which they have adopted the progressive state decreed purpose and corresponding worldly philosophy of education. Classical Christian education takes the noble aspects of the ancient goal of equipping people to be better able to be good and free and then grounds any and all goodness and freedom we may exhibit and acquire in Jesus Christ. We have all been influenced by the progressive slide, but recognizing its soul-destroying impact is crucial to climbing out of the slough of despair.
