Education for the last several decades in the States has been focused much more on vocational training than on any higher goals:  learning the classical liberal arts (trivium and quadrivium), advancing in the Christian faith, etc.  This leaves students at a terrible disadvantage:  They are not learning how to discern truth from falsehood, only how to apply utilitarian tools.  Because of this, they tend to be overly accepting of the pronouncements of ‘experts’ in various fields while dismissing any voices outside The Establishment.  We have seen what a disaster this has created, as large majorities have been content to yield to the experts that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were going fine for 20 years, that face-masking would stop the spread of covid, that there are no downsides to the childhood vaccine schedule, etc.

Thanks to this educational programming, people have accepted outright lies for years now.  A good example of the scale of the dishonesty of The Powers That Be was uncovered recently by DOGE:

‘President Donald Trump highlighted this morning the finding that the Department of Defense (DOD) paid the leftist media outlet Reuters $9 million for a program labeled “large scale social deception,” and he has demanded that they return the money.

‘“DOGE: Looks like Radical Left Reuters was paid $9,000,000 by the Department of Defense to study ‘large scale social deception.’ GIVE BACK THE MONEY, NOW!” wrote Trump on Truth Social.

‘ . . . A more detailed overview of the contract on highergov.com shows the description “SIMULATION TESTING AND MEASUREMENT LARGE SCALE DECEPTION” but does not further expand upon the activities the award intends to fund’ ( Emily Mangiaracina, ‘Trump admin reveals Pentagon gave $9 million to Reuters for program called ‘large scale social deception’’, lifesitenews.com).

This isn’t entirely new, as Miss Emily notes:

‘Some commentators highlighted the fact that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has used American news media for propaganda purposes, most notably in a project known as “Operation Mockingbird.” At the time, the CIA admittedly hired at least 400 journalists to serve its aims, in part by writing “fake stories,” according to the journalist who exposed the scandal in 1977’ (Ibid.).

One of the leading technocratic globalists of the 20^th century, Bertrand Russell, much earlier than Operation Mockingbird, was writing about how globalists like himself could brainwash children to believe that snow was black using the educational system:

‘The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow k white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. But I anticipate. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark grey.

‘Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen’ (The Impact of Science on Society, Blackie and Son, Bombay, India, 1942, pgs. 65-6).

We have been living through exactly this kind of devious schoolhouse propaganda in the States, as the federal government has imposed its own false ideologies upon students for many years now:  Darwinian evolution, the ability of males to become females, etc.

President Trump’s stated goal of eliminating the federal Department of Education is therefore welcome news and a great opportunity for States, counties/parishes, and cities to undo the damage that has been visited upon them by federal ‘guidance’.  The opportunity lies mainly in returning the religious dimension to public schools.  By doing so, they will give children the ability to discern truth from lies, good from evil.  For the most basic elements of learning begin with those latter distinctions, that Truth and Light are of God, and lies and darkness are of the devil:  ‘In Him [Jesus Christ] was life, and the life was the Light of men’ (The Holy Gospel according to St John 1:4, NASB); ‘Then Jesus again spoke to them, saying, “I am the Light of the world; he who follows Me will not walk in the darkness, but will have the Light of life’ (John 8:12); ‘You are of your father the devil . . . .  He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him.  Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is liar and the father of lies’ (John 8:44).

That is the foundation of all learning.  Furthermore, the degree of virtue one has attained allows one to advance in learning.  Wise and holy men throughout the ages have given testimony to these truths.

‘Religious faith, far from being considered as a necessary condition for sound philosophizing, has been regarded as something irrelevant or a positive hindrance to the attainment of truth.  The philosopher’s moral character and inner being in general have been tacitly assumed to be quite irrelevant to the successful pursuit of knowledge.

‘The approach of the Byzantines, with very few exceptions, involves a negation of both these presuppositions.  Religious faith is for them an indispensable condition of sound philosophizing.  The philosopher must begin with religious faith, if he is to avoid error and attain truth.  Also, one’s moral and spiritual state – whether one is courageous or cowardly, continent or incontinent, just or unjust, calm or irritable, humble or proud, disposed to love or to hate, and so on – is viewed by them as quite relevant to the pursuit of philosophical knowledge’ (Constantine Cavarnos, ‘The Way to Knowledge’, Byzantine Thought and Art, Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, Belmont, Mass., 2000, p. 30).

‘For the Greek Fathers, Christianity is the truest and highest philosophy (philosophia), because it was revealed by Christ, Who is God’s Wisdom (Sophia).  Perhaps the first who used the term philosophy in this sense was Justin Martyr the Philosopher (c. 100-164), the most important of the Apologists.  Justin speaks of Christian teaching as the “divine philosophy,” which is “greater than all human teaching.”  It is divine and surpasses all human wisdom because it is “inspired by the Divine Wisdom or Logos,” i.e. Christ.  Consistently with his conception of Christianity as the divine philosophy, Justin continued to wear the philosopher’s cloak after he became a Christian’ (Cavarnos, ‘Philosophy’, Ibid., pgs. 16-7).

‘Inner purity results in the removal of the psychical barriers that make our innate knowledge inaccessible to us, that keep it buried in the unconscious.  . . .

‘ . . . Man is born with a vast treasure of knowledge pertaining to the whole created world and to God.  This knowledge is termed “natural knowledge” . . . .  Within God are contained the reasons, ideas, or archetypes of all things.  Hence God is said to be perfect Wisdom.  . . . Now since man has been created in the image of God, he must reflect within himself God, and hence all these ideas.

‘ . . . In proportion as a man grows in passionlessness, his natural knowledge rises to consciousness, and his knowledge according to nature [i.e., the external knowledge gained through rational learning, the physical senses, etc.—W.G.] becomes sound, free of error.  To the degree, on the other hand, that he remains chained to the “passions” . . . – to bad thoughts and feelings, to vice and sin – his natural knowledge remains buried in the unconscious, and the knowledge which he acquires through inquiry and search is not according to nature, but contrary to nature . . . , unsound, a mixture of truth and error’ (Cavarnos, ‘The Way to Knowledge’, pgs. 34, 35, 36).

We have access to reams of information in our time, more than any generation before us.  But without the enlightenment that comes from the All-Holy Trinity, we cannot make right use of it.  Even those who have made great strides in the Christian life stumble because of the deceptions of the devil.  Such was St Isaac, an Orthodox monk at the Kiev Caves Monastery in the 11^th century:

‘He led a very strict life of reclusion, eating only a single prosphora and a little water at the end of the day. After seven years as a hermit, he was subjected to a fierce temptation by the devil. Having mistaken the Evil One for Christ, he worshipped him, after which he fell down terribly crippled. Saints Anthony and Theodosius took care of him and nursed him. Only after three years did he begin to walk and to speak’ (‘Venerable Isaac the Recluse of the Kiev Near Caves’, oca.org).

Students in Louisiana and other Southern and Red States have made some progress lately in their academic performance, for which we are glad.  But education, in its truest sense, is much more than reading, writing, arithmetic, computer coding, and other similar pragmatic disciplines.  It is connected with virtue, and holiness, and with God Himself.  If we divorce learning from them, then our students, not only now but also later in life, will suffer, unable to tell the difference between truth and lies.

A society can endure for many years with a less-than-optimal economy.  It cannot survive long at all, however, when the Light of Truth has disappeared.  A people starved of Truth will follow the lies they are told, having no way to distinguish the latter from the former.  With the federal education bureaucracy’s burdensome and misleading directives being lifted from the States, they can and should once again put Christianity back at the center of their classrooms.  For the worldly prosperity of each generation is of some value, and good things can be accomplished with it.  But knowing God is of far greater, and eternal, value, and should be the primary focus of any people in any era.

We ought, then, to sweat and labor to build the Heavenly Louisiana, the Louisiana that will exist in the Kingdom of God for all eternity, and not simply the Louisiana of this present, passing world.