By the middle of the 20th century, many educa- tors had embraced a new paradigm that changed American education in a profound way. Instead of the millennia-old view of mankind being created by God and prone to sin, a new belief was adopted that emphasized children were, instead, merely the evolutionary products of nature and nurture. They were basically “good” and would flourish accord- ingly if given the optimal amount of positive reinforcement and tender loving care. Education, therefore, shifted from discipline, structure, and moral training to simply giving students more attention and more affirmation. Believing all children were essentially blank slates progressing along the evolutionary chain of self- actualization with no predisposition toward selfishness, teachers began restructuring the cur- riculum and the classroom to encourage rather than confront, and compliment rather than correct. Labeling any action as sinful was viewed as harmful to a child’s self-worth and emotional devel- opment. All that was necessary to create a perfect child was a perfect environment, and, thus, the birth of an ideology of Utopian thinking where the village supplanted the parent in raising the child. For if our children are basically good at birth, then all that’s needed for the realization of our brave new world is for the smarter ones—the brighter oligarchy of elites—to design a society that seam- lessly provides the optimal amount of comfort and care to encourage our precious little flowers to bloom and grow in the bright sun of a professor’s sagacity and a politician’s social engineering. By the 1960s and 1970s, these ideas were being lived out nationwide. As Chuck Colson said, par- ents became “sympathetic therapists” instead of “stern moralizers.” Many churches began to abdi- cate their educational responsibility. Many pastors bought into the progressive lie that education was best left to government schools and the church should only concern itself with “spiritual growth” of its parishioners. When it came to educating our kids, God was out and government was in. With very little protest, a country that still defined itself as a “Christian nation” ceded the responsibility of educating an entire generation to a secular system that was, and is, antithetical to Christian virtues. The Power of Ideas I deas matter. It matters when we teach young men to view young women as nothing but ob- jects of recreation and young women to accept this insult. It matters when we teach our children a career is more important than character and money is more important than morality. It matters when we teach students there is no God—and treat them as if they are gods. C.S. Lewis once warned us that severing men from morality is akin to “removing the organ and yet demanding the function.” Most everyone wants a “moral” society, but we can’t have one if we can’t agree on what morality means. Virtually our entire system of higher education is dedicated to the idea that Christian morality is passé if not 46 WWW.AGRM.ORG MAY/JUNE 2018 Virtually our entire system of higher education is dedicated to the idea that Christian morality is passé if not oppressive, and that we each should define our own morality along the Left’s approved racial, sexual, or class categories.