Matthew H. Lee

A Prophet of School Choice

Written by Matthew H. Lee |
Thursday, December 7, 2023

For Machen, the great benefit of these school choice reforms was that they would empower parents to oversee their children’s education. As he stated to the Sentinels, the hope is that “we may return to the principle of freedom for individual parents in the education of their children in accordance with their conscience.” School choice policies enacted and expanded this year promote this noble end and serve as an unexpected tribute to Machen on the hundredth anniversary of Christianity and Liberalism.

This year is the centennial of J. Gresham Machen’s magnum opus, Christianity and Liberalism.
Originally published in 1923, Machen wrote the book in response to a rising tide of theological liberalism and modernism in the United States. Machen’s views ultimately led him out of his denomination and out of Princeton Seminary, both of which accepted more liberal and modernist tendencies, and led him to help found two enduring institutions—Westminster Theological Seminary (1929) and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (1936).
While Machen’s achievements are chiefly theological, he wrote and spoke extensively about education, where he observed some of the deteriorating effects of liberalism. One hundred years of policy and research have proven Machen prescient in his views on education policy, which can largely be grouped into three themes: resistance against standardization, opposition to centralization, and insistence on parental choice.
Resistance Against Standardization
First, Machen resisted trends to standardize both the teaching profession and student learning. The Lusk Laws in New York, for example, required teachers to obtain certification from the commissioner of education and made them subject to state visitation. Though repealed in 1923, less than two years after they passed, the spirit of the Lusk Laws endures. Nearly every state requires teachers to obtain some certification, often in addition to holding a degree in the field of education, despite the fact that research fails to document evidence of a meaningful link between certification and teacher quality.
Machen believed the modernist trend of training teachers in the science of education, rather than with content in their disciplines, marked a fundamental shift in the understanding of what teaching is. He lamented that the primary preparation of modern teachers was not “to study the subject that he is going to teach. Instead of studying the subject that he is going to teach, he studies ‘education.’”
In Machen’s view, the great danger in standardization and in emphasizing methodology over content is that it would place the child “under the control of psychological experts, themselves without the slightest acquaintance with the higher realms of human life, who proceed to prevent any such acquaintance being gained by those who come under their care.”
Treating education as a mechanistic process would result in “intellectual as well as moral decline” because in such a context, morality is based “upon experience, instead of upon an absolute distinction between right and wrong,” Machen said in a 1926 address to the Sentinels of the Republic, a libertarian organization dedicated to resisting federal overreach.
To compensate for the meagerness of character formation in modern education, psychological experts instead try to inject civic and moral values into a standardized, secularized curriculum. Machen wrote about such “morality codes” in a 1925 essay titled “Reforming the Government Schools.” He observed that these codes were “making the situation tenfold worse; far from checking the ravages of immorality, they are for the most part themselves non-moral at the root.” Today, morality codes have many faces, but the same empty core. Social and emotional learning (SEL), for example, provides analogs for cardinal virtues promoted by classical and Christian education, but absent the thick moral context of religion.
Opposition to Centralization
Machen was also opposed to the centralization of oversight of education in the federal government, a natural extension of his resistance to standardization. In February 1926, a month after his Sentinels address, Machen provided expert testimony on behalf of the Sentinels for a Congressional hearing dealing with several issues, including the formation of a federal Department of Education, which he predicted that if enacted, would be “the worst fate into which any country can fall.” While he helped defeat the proposal for a federal department, his victory was merely temporary, as a federal department of education would eventually be formed as a cabinet-level department in 1980.
Machen was not being hyperbolic in his assessment. Since the establishment of the first federal agency in 1867, which started with only a commissioner and a staff of three, the federal role in education has ballooned. For 2023–24, the Department of Education budgeted over $270 billion in spending—all the more alarming when one considers that the Department of Education accounts for only three-fifths of all federal spending on education. Again, Machen has been vindicated by research, which has failed to document a reliable link between spending and student outcomes.
A common argument for centralized control over education, both in Machen’s day and today, is easily addressed.
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Sabbath-Keeping in Christian Schools

Written by Matthew H. Lee |
Tuesday, June 7, 2022
Communities in which members profess faith in God should affirm human dignity in part by prioritizing Sabbath rest. Along with our churches, Christian schools should be among the communities in which the freedom of Sabbath rest is proclaimed.

Sundays are my favorite holidays.
New Year’s Day, Easter, even Christmas pale in comparison. Unlike other holidays, particularly those of the man-made variety, the Sabbath is a tradition divinely consecrated and nearly as old as creation itself (Exodus 20:11).
When we remember the Sabbath, we celebrate our freedom from bondage (Deuteronomy 5:15). By contrast, it’s no surprise that throughout human history, ignoring the Sabbath has been the practice of oppressive societies. Sohrab Ahmari recently wrote for The Wall Street Journal, “While restless, Sabbath-less societies could easily descend into tyranny and barbarism,” Sabbatarianism was seen “as an essential bulwark against the depravities that had marked the French Revolution.” In an effort to abolish all religious influences, the French government adopted Auguste Comte’s Religion of Humanity and implemented a ten-day workweek. The practice was repeated in the Paris Commune of the 19th century.
The French weren’t the only culture who tried to dispense with Sabbath-keeping. Ancient Egypt used a nine-day workweek, with one day of rest reserved exclusively for the ruling class. In 20th-century Maoist China, during the disastrous Great Leap Forward, peasants were expected to follow a 48-hour workday, with a mere six hours for rest.
Ignoring the Sabbath was catastrophic in all cases.
In each of these societies, we see the same threefold rejection: of rights and liberties, of God, and of the Sabbath. In contrast, to love the Sabbath is to love neighbor, acknowledging each person’s dignity as an image bearer and inviting them to share in rest. To love the Sabbath is to enjoy rest, both from our work and from our works-righteousness (Hebrews 4:9-10).
And yet, how often do we subject ourselves to the oppression of Sabbath rejection?
Communities in which members profess faith in God should affirm human dignity in part by prioritizing Sabbath rest. Along with our churches, Christian schools should be among the communities in which the freedom of Sabbath rest is proclaimed.
Sabbath-Keeping in Christian Schools
To explore the topic of Sabbath-keeping in Christian education, Albert Cheng, Rian Djita (both at the University of Arkansas), and I analyzed data from the Sabbath Study, a survey fielded by the Association of Christian Schools International in early 2021. Altogether, 5,634 individuals responded to our survey, including administrators, teachers, students, and parents. As part of the survey, respondents indicated whether or not they keep the Sabbath, their beliefs about the Sabbath, their teaching practices as they relate to the Sabbath, and common practices they follow on the Sabbath. They also completed the Copenhagen Burnout Inventory, a validated six-item scale that measures psychosocial well-being.

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