“Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world.” (Vladimir Lenin)
“Only take heed to yourself, and diligently keep yourself, lest you forget the things your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life. And teach them to your children and your grandchildren…”. (Deuteronomy 4:9)
Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” (Proverbs 22:6)
The next institutional domain I want to focus on is education. Let’s see how the Subdue and Rule Mandate and its perversion, Conquer and Dominate, affect the educational institution.
What is education? My “go-to” online dictionary, Merriam-Webster.com, defines education as “the knowledge and development resulting from the process of being educated.” Wow. Big help. Okay, off I go to the word educate.
a. “To provide schooling for: to train by formal instruction and supervised practice especially in a skill, trade, or profession,”
b. “To develop mentally, morally, or aesthetically especially by instruction: to provide with information,”
c. “To persuade or condition to feel, believe, or act in a desired way.”
Okay, now we’re getting somewhere.
Education aims to impart knowledge and training to develop a person’s mental, moral, and aesthetic capacity and living skills to feel, believe, or act in a desired way and support themselves via a trade or profession. In other words, the educational process is meant to equip the student for a productive life.
From the moment we’re born, we’re being educated, and that, generally speaking, is by our first teachers, our parents.
That means the parents are the initial and primary educators in a child’s life. The parent’s goal is to help their child develop into an independent state where they will be productive in shaping the world around them and create other children through whom the process begins anew. The most important educational component is teaching their child about God up to the moment they embrace His offer of salvation through Jesus and then continuing to teach and train their born-again child to walk in God’s ways and develop spiritual maturity (Proverbs 22:6).
Subdue and Rule Guided Education
Every parent’s primary job is to help their child’s spirit, mind, will, and emotions according to God’s ways. This was God’s plan in Eden. Had the Fall not occurred, we can speculate that as the couple went about their daily lives of bringing God’s wild, untamed world outside of Eden under control and maintaining that control as Eden’s boundaries expanded (“subdue it. Rule…”), they would have had the pleasant task of creating additional workers, children, to help in the mission and increase the workforce (“Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth…,” Genesis 1:28). After all, as Eden’s territory expanded, Adam and Eve would need more workers.
From the Subdue and Rule Mandate perspective, education is an essential part of it. As Adam and Eve were to tame a wild world and bring it under God’s domain as His proxies, the first couple were to take their newborn children and begin the educational process to shape their little bundle of joy into another image of God over time. The goal of the process was (and still is) to produce co-Imagers who would take their place alongside their parents in the work of Subduing and Ruling the Earth.
“But wait, Dr. Jay. Throughout this look at the Subdue and Rule Mandate, you’ve said that human beings were never meant to Subdue and Rule other people.” True. However, there is a place for Subdue and Rule with, not over, others.
First, education at its heart is the Subdue and Rule process – bringing something under control and managing it. When knowledge is imparted to shape characters, guide thinking, discipline emotions, and teach practical life skills, a parent and educators help a child learn how to control themselves and maintain that self-control for the rest of their lives.
Second, under the Edenic paradigm, the Subdue and Rule process was meant to eventually release the now-matured child into productive adulthood, working shoulder-to-shoulder with their parents and everyone else in human society.
But then came the Fall, and education was perverted along with everything else associated with humanity. There are many things in our world that are morally neutral. What determines something’s moral goodness or evilness is the person using it. Decades ago, a friend wanted to play a drum kit in a Pentecostal church. His mom espoused the holiness movement line, “Brian, drums are of the devil,” to which my friend replied, “Mom, it depends on who you use them for.”
Wisdom.
The same is true for everything. A prescription drug can fight pain or be abused. Paint can create the Mona Lisa or deface a building. The internet can be a vast source of wisdom and knowledge or a cesspool of human degradation and a tool of human trafficking. Music can lift you to the heights of heaven, such as Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No.2, Karl Jenkins’ Motets: 8. Hymnus: Locus Iste, and Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a theme of Thomas Tallis. Or music can be a tool to spew the scummy sewage of so-called artists like Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion.
Education is a neutral tool that takes on the morality of those educating. Are the educators using their knowledge, wisdom, and skills to raise the next generation to take their place before God and alongside others in society for the betterment of humanity, or are they, as Lenin espoused, using education to Conquer and Dominate the next generation into a cadre of sycophantic mental slaves and emotional infants to serve the elites of the world?
A teacher uses their teaching skills to shape students. With the Western world’s Greek-orientated mindset, we focus on the intellect. The Middle Eastern Hebraic-oriented mindset focuses on the whole person – the mind, will, and emotions. It even affects the physical person because our inner being moves our physical being. The Greek emphasis leads to “sit and think.” The Hebraic emphasis is to “learn and do.” Therefore, the teacher’s goal is to help the student take in information and master it to synthesize it with previous knowledge plus experience to build the whole person.
Continuing education aims to help the student build their knowledge base, adapt their increasing knowledge through synthesis, and generate and incorporate new ideas, procedures, and processes to equip the student for a fruitful life because, Hebraically, life is more than a career. A “career” is simply a means to support ourselves as we live for God. The Subdue and Rule mandate spurs us on to use education to improve ourselves so we can Subdue and Rule our God-given world better. In short, the Subdue and Rule Mandate motivates educators to shape their students to Subdue and Rule their world. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to be.
Conquer and Dominate Controlled Education
Divorced from God and His ways, education can become an oppressive and destructive tool. Education has been used to teach malleable young minds that those whom the state deems deplorable and undesirable should be marginalized, even destroyed. (See the Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea, and Germany’s Holocaust.) When the state is in the hands of those who reject God, state-run education can become destructive.
Education vs. Indoctrination. “Indoctrinate” is an interesting word. Like the word educate, it simply means “to teach.” However, indoctrination often implies “to imbue with a usually partisan or sectarian opinion, point of view, or principle… By the 19th century, indoctrinate was being used in the sense of teaching someone to fully accept only the ideas, opinions, and beliefs of a particular group” (Merriam-webster.com).
While this also can be harmless, such as a religious denomination emphasizing its theological distinctive, academic honesty should balance the bias by including other ideas for examination and debate. I applaud my Assembly of God professors who not only taught the denomination’s Pentecostal distinctive to an outsider such as myself but openly compared them to other Catholic and Protestant movements for fuller insights. Wrestling with contrasting ideas is vital to developing critical thinking skills as part of one’s education.
However, indoctrination often occurs when Conquer and Dominate takes hold of an educational institution or educator. Only specific knowledge is taught, i.e., only the ideas, opinions, and beliefs accepted by a particular group. It’s no secret that Marxist thought has taken over many universities and colleges today and fights to exclude all opposing thoughts. All we have to do is read the news about a professor, student, or guest speaker being canceled and driven from campus because they dared to present conservative ideas counter to the indoctrination points.
Educational Conquer and Dominate happens when professors and other teachers attempt to shape the student’s malleable mind into their image by teaching only the ideas, opinions, conclusions, values, and beliefs accepted by their particular group. When an entire college or university has been taken over by a specific group that pushes only its biases, the institution moves from the open and free flow of ideas (education) to the echo chamber of singular thinking (indoctrination). It moves from “how to think” to “what to think,” from critical thinking (objective analysis) to biased thinking (subjective analysis).
For this reason, Leftist movements have long sought to infiltrate and assume control over educational systems. True to Lenin’s “Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world,” we are always one generation away from complete societal change.
An example is how Leftist universities and colleges have infused Cultural Marxism into as many subjects as possible to the point where math becomes a vehicle for social justice, math education is racist, and science’s objective truths are irrationally denied because they oppose the LGBTQ agenda.
At this writing, a biology professor was fired “for teaching human biology just as he did in his previous 20-year career as a professor.” Professor Varkey was fired after being accused of “religious preaching, anti-LGBTQ discrimination, and other things… Four of Dr. Varkey’s students walked out of his class when he stated, consistent with his study of human biology and his religious beliefs, that sex was determined by chromosomes X and Y.” For stating such an offensive biological truth, inconsistent with the ideas, opinion, and beliefs of the public Texas Community College, St. Philip’s College, Dr. Varkey was told, “that you pushed beyond the bounds of academic freedom with your personal opinions that were offensive to many individuals in the classroom.”
Really? The scientist espousing science was canceled by those rejecting science in a science class? All I can do is shake my head in amazement. The inmates, indeed, are in charge of the asylum.
But none of the irrationality matters. The goal is to Conquer and Dominate all of society by discrediting values and replacing them with the “correct” ones, dismissing a Judeo-Christian worldview and replacing it with the humanistic one, and destroying mores (“customs, norms, and behaviors that are acceptable to a society or social group”) and replacing them with the socially acceptable mores in line with the new agenda even if it means overriding parental rights.
School usurpation of parental rights to educate their children. The hallmarks of Conquer and Dominate are infringing, encroaching, and usurping another person’s domain. In other words, to enter another’s domain gradually and to take or make use of without right. (Thanks, Merriam-Webster.com!)
Despite the great tragedy it brought to the world, the COVID pandemic was a blessing in one remarkable way. With schools being locked down and online education utilized, parents began to see precisely what their children were being taught and, in many cases, were appalled. They discovered their children were being taught Critical Race Theory (racism with a Cultural Marxist flair) and sexually explicit content, among other offenses. The Parent’s Rights movement energetically and potently confronted Leftist school boards and their indoctrination agendas, which revealed the strong Conquer and Dominate streak in contemporary education.
It will be a long and strenuous job to remove the indoctrinators and reinstall the educators, but it can be done. However, since many parents are consumed with the activities of life, they’ve surrendered their God-given role as their children’s educators to our current Conquer and Dominate educational system, much to their children’s harm. Remember, it only takes one generation to sway a nation. The good news is that the influence door swings both ways.
Replace God-centered worldview with humanism. The push to Conquer and Dominate our society by eliminating Judeo-Christian values began in earnest in the 1960s with the infamous case against prayer in public schools brought to the Supreme Court of the United States by Madalyn Murray O’Hair. The court ruled in favor of Murray by a vote of eight to one on June 17, 1963, and with that, prayer was officially removed from public schools in the United States. A barrage of attacks against religion in the public square followed (specifically Christianity) that continues today. Leftist opportunists used this ruling to expunge Christian beliefs, values, and practices from whatever college or university came under their sway. After all, “Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world.”
Replace biblical morality with secular humanist morality. And transform society they did! Conquer and Dominate indoctrination has been used to remove and replace biblical morality with secular humanist morality, antithetical to God’s moral standards. Children are exposed to aberrant sexual ideas and behaviors at increasingly younger ages while parents object and educators applaud. The school board vs. parent battles continue as parents read sexually explicit books found in their child’s elementary school library to the objections of the school board members. Appallingly, many school board members don’t object to the material being available to children. What they do object to is its explicit and sick nature being exposed in a public setting, thus revealing their twisted morals and agenda.
This push to skew sexuality is a direct assault on humanity’s foundational nature. God gave humanity three commands – reproduce, rule (Genesis 1:28), and do so only His way (2:17). Leftism’s full court press regarding human sexuality defies all three. The indoctrinators entice and encourage children and young people to willfully explore unbiblical human sexuality to permanently set every child’s internal moral compass in opposition to God’s way, reinforcing humanity’s baseline rebellion against God. Leftist education’s Conquer and Dominate agenda is a frontal assault on biblical morality in favor of a self-determined human morality.
Replace objective truth with subjective truth to push an agenda. Conquer and Dominate indoctrination has become a tool to challenge objective truth and replace it with subjective reality. Even though scientific fact affirms a person’s XX or XY chromosomes determine their gender, educators, and administrators who sympathize with the LGBTQ-ETC communities subvert facts with fiction to Conquer and Dominate the arguments from objective truth. In many cases, science is no longer the search for truth via the empirical method but a tool for control.
Change political views to change society. Education which should lead the curious mind to explore multiple points of view to reach their own conclusion, has become Conquer and Dominate indoctrination to herd the student to a predetermined conclusion. These predetermined conclusions often align with political views and agendas exclusive to competing political ideas or positions. Is the politicization of higher education a new phenomenon? Certainly not! That’s been a common accusation against higher education for a long time (The Politics of Higher Education, Steven Mintz). However, it shouldn’t be done at all regardless of which political party has higher education’s ear (and money). Once Conquer and Dominate politics fuses with academia, the cancellation erupting in society enters the campus and the classroom.
Educational Cancellation. Cancel culture as a manifestation of Conquer and Dominate is alive and well on most campuses today. Whether it’s a K-12 or higher education, the threat of being canceled dogs those educators, students, and guest speakers who hold “unapproved” views by so-called free-speech academia.
“The goal of a cancellation is usually to remove the targeted individual from status-bearing jobs, particularly ones that have the capacity to create or influence the discourses of society” (newdiscourses.com/tftw-cancel-culture). Cancellation’s purpose is to control the spread of specific ideas by controlling people from speaking them out loud. The only speech allowed is that which reinforces “proper” thinking and “correct” opinions per those in charge.
“H.L. Mencken, the great skeptic and cynic of American journalism, once defined Puritanism as ‘the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.’ The woke left has embraced its own brand of rigid orthodoxy in which they are haunted by the idea that someone, somewhere may be questioning their ideas about race, gender, government power, and above all, whether open debate about these issues should be tolerated” (Tobin). Therefore, all opposing ideas must be shut down and canceled.
Why is this so? Ari Blaff points out that many campuses are entirely controlled by Leftists who believe their morality is supreme. “The moral relativism of years past is transforming into a form of liberal moral puritanism. The reason? The authors believe that the humanities, arts and social science disciplines have become particularly good at instilling absolutist beliefs among impressionable students. These departments, they write, promote ‘a moral profile characterized by a progressive belief ... accompanied by a conviction that there are definite moral truths.’ Moreover, the authors found that the more time a student spends on cloistered campuses, the greater the odds that he or she will exhibit these traits.” Therefore, both the faculty and the students are subsumed into a quasi-religious social worldview that allows no debate with the “heretics,” those who challenge the orthodoxy the academic establishment preaches.
As a result, professors, students, and guest speakers are excommunicated from the Church of the Leftist Truth and, if necessary, metaphorically burned at the stake.
But are educational institutions the only culprits involved with academic Conquer and Dominate? No. On the flip side, students themselves often succumb to the drive to Conquer and Dominate their educational experience.
Students who Conquer and Dominate
As mentioned above, all education involves the Subdue and Rule Mandate. The educator’s task is to help shape the student into what the student desires to be, a successful, productive member of society. The idea is that academia cooperatively assists the parent in the molding and guiding process to eventually release the student as a free moral agent to strengthen and improve society for the next generation.
The student’s part in the process is to receive the required information, provide proof that they understand the essential knowledge and concepts, and can work with it via skills and synthesis while continuing to increase their knowledge base and combining it with experience to build wisdom for life.
But that’s hard work. So, Conquer and Dominate rears its ugly head.
The drive to achieve with the least effort entices too many students into academic dishonesty, cheating on tests, disruptive class behavior, and teacher abuse and disrespect. Honest academic competition becomes a win-at-all-costs drive to game the system.
During my years at the University of Minnesota, I often heard of students buying term papers from other students or a mail-order service (yes, I’m that old). The internet has made academic cheating cheap and easy. Teachers must constantly be on the lookout for plagiarism and uncredited citations. In a frightening twist, academic Armageddon is approaching with the advent of A.I., artificial intelligence which can write on any topic with any given style via access to the internet’s vast resources. How long will it be until many students pass with stellar grades, only to be revealed as utter frauds with empty heads?
A final, but certainly not the last, way Conquer and Dominate reveals itself is the age-old issue of favoring specific students because they are star athletes who are financial cash cows to any given university or college. In the quest for prestige, hefty incomes, and endowments, far too many educational institutions enable students to slide through their academic careers while demanding far more stringent standards for non-athletic students.
When morality must be surrendered, rules bent, reputations and careers destroyed, free-speech curtailed, and ideas squashed to work one’s way through the educational system, you can be sure Conquer and Dominate controls that system.
Solutions
So, how do we Subdue and Rule our way through Conquer and Dominate academia?
Just like it says. We need to retake or reassert control over our children’s education until they reach adulthood. This means greater control while they’re younger and increasing freedom as they mature to become our adult co-partners. And because the Leftist powers-that-be refuse to surrender, it means constant vigilance to retain control over academia.
First, we have to acknowledge there’s a severe problem. Those seeking to “fundamentally transform the United States of America” know where to hit – the next generation’s education.
Second, we need to work to change the current system diligently. As parents and concerned citizens, we must honestly and directly confront school board members who are encroaching, infringing, and usurping parents’ rights over the proper education of their children. Remember, school board members and superintendents are voted in. Use the power of your vote to Subdue and Rule an unruly school board. Recent victories throughout our nation prove it can be done. Take back the control you granted to the school board that abuses their position as if they were the lords over the academic castle.
Like an investment fiduciary who must work on behalf of their client’s best financial interests, make every Superintendent, school board member, educator, and staff person an educational fiduciary who will commit to working toward the student’s benefit, not the National Department of Education and Teacher’s Unions which we all know are highly corrupt and Leftist, catering to the Conquer and Dominate ruling class.
Speaking of fiduciary duties, a practical way to walk away from a Conquer and Dominate education system is to take control of its funding and allocation. Does money talk? Absolutely. Why let the Conquer and Dominate crowd have all the fun?
For those immersed in higher education, be prepared for the onslaught when you take a stand. Remember that learning how to resist injustice, stand for what’s right, and speak with clarity of thought, is an essential part of your education for life. If you’re a Christian, remember God stands by you when you stand for Him.
Third, if an educational institution is systemically Conquer and Dominate, the best recourse is to walk away. There has been enough verifiable success using charter, private, and home schools to warrant ditching an incorrigible school or school district. There is strength in numbers. Therefore, as you start and develop Christian schools in a city or region, stand united despite minor doctrinal and pedagogical differences. Christians began many prominent colleges and universities of today because reading and understanding God’s word and applying it to the student’s place in the world was important.
Another blessing that came through the COVID pandemic was realizing the incredible value of online education. Yes, in the early days, there were weaknesses as we all learned how to use Zoom.com and other platforms for classroom instruction. After the last few years, online education is “zooming along” at all educational levels. The brick-and-mortar college and university will soon be saddled with declining enrollments as disgruntled and abused students and professors vote with their feet. Many educators also realize, “Why reach a few people in person when your online potential is 8 billion?”
Education reminds me of an orchestra. The conductor and instrumentalists were educated in music and trained in its performance. The orchestra aims to play together to create a beautiful musical masterpiece as the composer intended. But what would happen if a rogue conductor or instrumentalist played the piece at the wrong tempo or key? Discord, disharmony, mayhem, and the ruination of the composer’s masterpiece.
God creates each person as part of His masterpiece. Educators are supposed to be the conductors that bring out the best within each student as instrumentalists in God’s grand symphony. Sadly, many of these conductors have abandoned God’s score in favor of their own composition, and we experience the mayhem all around us.
Right now, the questions are, “Will you step up and stop the rogue conductors and replace them with conductors after God’s own heart?”
Our actions, or the lack thereof, will affect future generations.
“Come, you children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord” (Psalm 34:11).
Sources:
Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto no.2 op.18 - Anna Fedorova - Complete Live Concert – HD, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEGOihjqO9w
Karl Jenkins’ Motets: 8. Hymnus: Locus Iste, youtube.com/watch?v=9e7bZ7KZEuE
Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a theme of Thomas Tallis, youtube.com/watch?v=ihx5LCF1yJY
Indoctrinate. Merriam-webster.com/dictionary/indoctrinate
Teaching Math Through a Social Justice Lens, edweek.org/teaching-learning/teaching-math-through-a-social-justice-lens/2020/12
Seattle Schools Propose To Teach That Math Education Is Racist—Will California Be Far Behind?, hoover.org/research/seattle-schools-propose-teach-math-education-racist-will-california-be-far-behindseattle
‘Preaching’ in Biology Class?, insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-freedom/2023/06/28/professor-says-he-was-fired-allegedly-preaching
Mores. Vocabulary.com/dictionary/mores
Madalyn Murray O’Hair. Encyclopedia.com/history/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/ohair-madalyn-murray
Cancel/Cancel Culture, newdiscourses.com/tftw-cancel-culture/
Cancel culture isn’t just for academics anymore, jns.org/cancel-culture-isnt-just-for-academics-anymore
Perspective: Why academia is a breeding ground of cancel culture, deseret.com/2022/5/20/23041368/perspective-why-academia-is-a-breeding-ground-of-cancel-culture-liberalism-woke-universities
Christianity and the American University, liberty.edu/journal/article/christianity-and-the-american-university/
For further information on academic cancellation:
https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/few-academics-support-cancel-culture/
Solutions:
Pushback
Walk away
· Start new education institutions https://www.economist.com/united-states/2022/02/26/pushback-at-cancel-culture-is-leading-to-new-educational-initiatives
Pastor Jay Christianson
The Truth Barista, Frothy Thoughts