People often ask me what they can do to reclaim our nation. Many things can be done but the one action that would make a monumental difference would be for Christians and conservatives to remove their children from government schools. It would devastate the power base of the messianic State, take power away from the powerful teacher unions that pour millions of dollars into the Democrat Party, and shift the worldview thinking of millions of young people. If we aren’t willing to do this while we have the freedom to do it, we deserve to get what’s coming to us.
When I first read the article “5 Reasons We Don’t Send Our Kids to Christian Schools, I thought it might be satire. I contacted the author and he informed me that it wasn’t. The article is no longer posted on his website, but I did find it here.
Trying to redeem public (government) education is foolhardy, counterproductive, and doomed to fail. Conservatives have been trying to save public schools since the early 1960s when Bible reading and prayer were deemed to be unconstitutional. The longer Christians willingly keep sending their children to government schools, the more difficult it will be for us to disentangle ourselves from the chains of tyranny. Here’s the latest from the largest public school system in the nation:
California’s Board of Education voted unanimously to approve a new, multi-million-dollar Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, which will be offered statewide with many of the state’s largest school districts making it a requirement for graduation. According to National Review, the curriculum is “probably the most radical, polemical, and ideologically loaded educational document ever offered up for public consideration in the free world.”
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Students are to be taught that white Christian settlers committed “theocide” against indigenous tribes when they arrived in the New World by murdering Native American gods and replacing them with the Christian God. According to the curriculum, this replacement ushered in a regime defined by “coloniality, dehumanization, and genocide,” and the “explicit erasure and replacement of holistic Indigeneity and humanity.” But all is not lost, we are told. For students will learn that they have the power and the responsibility to build a social order defined by “countergenocide,” which will eventually supplant the last vestiges of colonial Christianity and pave the way for the “regeneration of indigenous epistemic and cultural futurity.
Students first clap and chant to the god Tezkatlipoka — whom the Aztecs traditionally worshipped with human sacrifice and cannibalism — asking him for the power to be “warriors” for “social justice.” (Source)
Are we to believe God wants us to send our children to be taught by mostly secular-educated teachers who are authority figures for six hours of instruction each day, five days each week, 160 days each year, for 12 years?
Whoever Controls the Schools Rules the World
It's been said that ‘the philosophy of the classroom in this generation will be the philosophy of life in the next generation.’ Our earliest founding fathers understood this. That's why, after building homes and churches, they established educational institutions like Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Dartmouth. Over time, most Christians have adopted the false premise that facts are neutral. They believe it doesn't matter who teaches math, science, and history, because facts are facts. The humanists took advantage of this type of thinking by gradually shaping and controlling education in terms of materialist assumptions.
Buy NowFor what it’s worth, the first thing I noted is that the author’s wife “is the Principal of a public elementary school in [their] area.” This might have something to do with his reasons. But I digress…
Let me move on to reasons 1 and 2: Quality of Teachers and Poor Funding Base. I agree that Government Schools have some high-quality teachers and are well funded and generally speaking, private Christian schools may not have as many quality teachers and some schools are poorly funded. In many cases, the one has something to do with the other.
If Christian schools could force property owners to pay their schools hundreds of millions of dollars every year, I can almost guarantee that their schools would attract more quality teachers and have better facilities. Keep in mind that with billions of dollars being spent on public schools, graduation rates are only around 80 percent. Test scores in reading, science, and math are down. Money and facilities do not guarantee a good education.
Let me add that some of the best teachers in America are teaching in Christian schools and some of the worst teachers in America are teaching in Government Schools, and the schools can’t get rid of them. See John Stossel’s “Stupid in America” if you don’t believe me. Stossel writes:
People say public schools are “one of the best parts of America.” I believed that. Then I started reporting on them. Now I know that public school — government school is a better name — is one of the worst parts of America. It’s a stultified government monopoly. It never improves. Most services improve. They get faster, better, cheaper. But not government monopolies. Government schools are rigid, boring, expensive and more segregated than private schools. By contrast, supermarkets are “private” yet open to everyone. You can stroll in 24 hours a day. Just try that with your kid’s public school. You might be arrested. I call them “government” instead of “public” schools because not much is “public” about them. Members of the public don’t get to pick their kids’ schools, teachers, curriculum or cost.
But back to funding. Government schools work by coercion and theft. The majority of voters who send their children to Government Schools put representatives in power to tax property so their children can get an education at a discount.
Property owners who don’t have children or have never sent their children to a Government School are forced to pay for the education of other children. Parents who do not send their children to a Government school have to pay twice. They are forced to pay for the education of other children while also having to pay for the education of their children. If property owners refuse to pay the school tax, they will lose their property.
It’s a nifty system if you’re into coercion.
Christian schools could do better if they could steal money from their neighbors and get away with it, but that would violate the eighth commandment: “You shall not steal” (Ex. 20:15), even if you get people to vote for it.
West Virginia has just passed a law “effective beginning in the 2022–23 school year, families who withdraw their children from public schools can receive a currently estimated $4,600 per-student, per-year for private- and home-schooling expenses…. The vast majority of West Virginia private schools are Christian, but the bill doesn’t prohibit using the money for out-of-state boarding schools or other private, out-of-state education providers.” (Source) Not a single Democrat voting for the new legislation.
The author’s third reason is that “Both Have ‘Problem Kids’ and ‘Negative Influences.’” I agree. My wife and I taught in Christian schools before we had children and while our children were in school. My wife served on two Christian school boards. We’ve seen it all.
The author claims that Government Schools are better equipped to handle problem children:
Another poorly kept secret is that Christian schools are a niche for rehabilitating kids with behavioral problems, but they are tasked with doing so without the massive academic, psychological, and pedagogical teams of people in your local public school. That’s a recipe for unhealthy classroom dynamics in some small Christian schools.
We’ve seen many troubled kids turned around by their experiences in a Christian school. In some school systems. Public school teachers are prohibited from counseling children in terms of a Christian worldview.
The author’s fourth reason is “certain Christian schools … are run by really creepy fundamentalist Christians who believe the world is 6,000 years old and won’t allow their kids to listen to satanic music like the Jonas Brothers.”
There are a lot of creepy secularist fundamentalists in Government schools who hate God and anything religious. Since he brought up creepy teachers, what about “the national epidemic of teacher-student sex stories”? “Any given week is likely to include several stories, and some are more intriguing than others…. [I]n Reading, Pa., middle school science teacher Jessica Saienni was arrested on Friday on charges of sexually abusing a 14-year-old student, reports Philly.com.”
Anybody can pull out an incident here or there about Christian Schools. I can do the same about Government Schools. Consider this crime report from 2012:
The Department of Education and the Department of Justice say that 1,183,700 violent crimes were committed at American public schools during the 2009–2010 school year, but that only 303,900 of these violent crimes were reported to the police…. As defined by the report, “violent crimes” included rape, sexual battery other than rape, physical attack or fight with or without a weapon, threat of physical attack with or without a weapon, and robbery with or without a weapon.
Most school shootings take place in public schools.
Our children went to Christian schools where we didn’t always agree with everything that was taught. Our two sons engaged in debate with their fellow students and their teachers on several topics. The experience made them better thinkers.
Try debating creation and evolution and homosexual and transgender rights in a Government School or simply offering a section in a science class outlining the weaknesses of evolution. Can anybody say ACLU and Americans United for Separation of Church and State?
The author would rather send his children to a Government school that makes no reference to God as the Creator than have to deal with a couple of interpretive issues at a local Christian School. Being taught that God created the earth 6000 years ago is certainly better than being taught there is no God. As a parent, you can engage in counter-arguments at home as we did on the topic of eschatology.
Just last week, one of our grandchildren who is in the third grade commented that we’re living near the time when Jesus will reign on the earth. I asked him where in the Bible is this found. He finally said “Revelations!” First, I told him it’s the book of “Revelation,” not “Revelations.” Second, I told him that Revelation 20 is the place where this claim is made, but nothing is said about Jesus reigning on the earth for a thousand years.
The author of “5 Reasons” goes on to write, “Simply put, you don’t want your children educated by fundamentalist Christians who use [a] dumbed-down curriculum riddled with false science and legalistic babbling.” This is hardly the case. I know hundreds of Christian school graduates who have gone on to some of the finest colleges in the nation. The textbooks available today are far superior to those found in Government Schools. There’s a great deal to choose from. See the selection at Veritas Press.
He mentions “legalistic babbling,” but says nothing about the moral relativism that’s taught in Government schools.
To cover himself from his overgeneralization, the author concludes his fourth reason with this: “Of course not all Christian schools are like this, but you have to be very careful and ask the right questions.”
The nice thing about non-Government schools is that you don’t have to send your children to any particular one. If you send your child to a Government school, you are required to send him or her to the school in the district where you pay your taxes. I realize there are exceptions, but they are few and far between.
The author’s fifth reason not to send your children to a Christian school has to do with “discipleship.”
Cloistering kids into an evangelical subculture where they are taught by Christian teachers and surrounded by other Christian kids doesn’t force them to live brave, evangelistically passionate lives…. But I want my kids to grow up reaching their friends for Christ. If we remove all the Christian kids from the schools, who will influence those kids for Christ? And their families?”
If this man’s children are evangelizing at school, they’re probably breaking the law. All it takes is one parent to object and you’ll have the ACLU down on you quicker than you can say Separation of Church and State.
I wonder how much witnessing takes place in public schools. Most of the time children are sitting at their desks listening to a teacher lecturing on a secularized curriculum. From the time I entered public school in the sixth grade, no one ever presented the gospel to me. It’s the friendships that are developed after school that lead to witnessing opportunities.
Witnessing can take place anywhere. Jesus met people at work and in their homes. He even went into the temple.
What do you think Jesus would have said if Jewish parents were voluntarily sending their children to the local Roman schools? Please don’t try to use the story of Daniel in support of Government education. They were captives of the Babylonians. They didn’t have a choice where they went to school.
The bottom line is, public schools are Government schools. They operate by force, using confiscated property to function. They are anti-freedom and Statist.
We’re not going to change the direction of the nation by electing a new president or even retaking Congress when each year Government schools pump out millions of Statist clones.
Is Public Education Necessary?
A colorful history full of fascinating characters and incisive commentary, Is Public Education Necessary? challenges American parents to discard the common wisdom concerning public schools—to reshoulder the responsibilities that are rightfully theirs, to fight to keep the liberties they inherited, and to teach their children to do the same.
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