Nicholas M. Butler Quotes

But instead of standing up for reason, our government is handing education over to the world of faith.

I confess that for fifteen years my efforts in education, and my hopes of success in establishing a system of national education, have always been associated with the idea of coupling the education of this country with the religious communities which exist.

If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.

Any system of education...which limits instruction to the arts and sciences and rejects the aids of religion in forming the characters of citizens, is essentially defective.

America's founding fathers did not intend to take religion out of education. Many of the nation's greatest universities were founded by evangelists and religious leaders; but many of these have lost the founders concept and become secular institutions. Because of this attitude, secular education is stumbling and floundering.

Education without religion is in danger of substituting wild theories for the simple commonsense rules of Christianity.

The difference between the denominational system and the public school system is all the difference between bolstering them up on the one hand and letting them alone of the other.

I don't favour ethics classes being an alternative to special religious education classes.

Our public schools began as ministries of the church; now it is time to return them to the Lord.

This issue is whether or not our government should be infusing religion into (schools).

In Holland, they have come to precisely the same conclusion. There they have adopted a system of secular education, because they have found it impracticable to unite the religious bodies in any system of combined religious instruction.

My kid is in the fifth grade. Out of twelve subjects, seven are pure religion. You tell me a system of this nature is going to bring into the labor force a highly qualified Saudi? Bullshit.

You know there's a problem [with the education system] when you realize that out of the three R’s, only one begins with an R.

I'm all for teaching creation and allowing prayers in schools, as soon as scholars begin teaching Darwinism and geometry in church.

Education belongs pre-eminently to the church ... neutral or lay schools from which religion is excluded are contrary to the fundamental principles of education.

Schooling deprived of religious insights is wretched education.

Secular schools can never be tolerated because such a school has no religious instruction and a general moral instruction without a religious foundation is built on air; consequently, all character training and religion must be derived from faith . . . We need believing people.

The removal of religion as history from our schoolbooks betrays the intellectual dishonesty of secular humanist educators and reveals their blind hostility to Christianity.

Religion's crucial role in the lives of many people... is rejected out of hand by the political community, especially the press.

I don't have an issue with what you do in the church, but I'm going to be up in your face if you're going to knock on my science classroom and tell me they've got to teach what you're teaching in your Sunday school. Because that's when we're going to fight.

I think the philosophy in our public schools, and many other institutions today, is that a dose of God is more hazardous to your health than a dose of herpes or drugs.

In 1963 with Abington v. Schempp, The Court said that reading portions of the New Testament could be 'psychologically harmful' to the children.

Why then, if these new books for children must be retained, as they will be, should not the Bible regain the place it once held as a school book ?

There is no instinct that has been so maligned, suppressed, abused, and distorted by religious teaching as the instinct of sex.

What little recognition the idea of obligation to the public obtains in modern morality, is derived from Greek and Roman sources, not from Christian; as, even in the morality of private life, whatever exists of magnanimity, high-mindeness, personal dignity, even the sense of honour, is derived from the purely human, not the religious part of our education, and never could have grown out of a standard of ethics in which the only worth, professedly recognized, is that of obedience.