If people would leave the mega cities and realize the po dunk USA still has values, we’d be better off. Our town still has annual round the clock Bible reading marathon weekend ON THE COURTHOUSE STEPS ...
Gilbo and Othniel,
Moving is not the answer, Gilbo.
ALL government schools are Anti-Christian, even those in “Podunk”, U.S.A. Please read what Dr. Bruce Shortt presented to the Southern Baptist Convention.
Another point, is that if Christian teachers are members of the NEA, they are ( with their money) supporting and promoting an overly Anti-Christian agenda.
I respectfully suggest that it is time for Christian teachers to leave the government schools and to focus their time, talents, and energy on building up an alternative Christian system. The chances of saving the souls of their own congregation’s Christian children are greater. The chances of attracting non-member families and their children to the fold are greater.
Wintertime
All Public Schools, By Law, Are Anti-Christian
First, it is important to distinguish between individuals and institutions. There is still a sizable remnant of Christian adults employed by the public schools. Many of them pray for their students and a few, though they risk being disciplined or fired, furtively try to witness. But this certainly does not mean that institutionally any public school system is, as some try to argue, “sympathetic to Christianity.” In fact, expressing nontrivial institutional “sympathy” for Christianity, let alone teaching from a Christian worldview, is absolutely prohibited by a complex web of court rulings, legislation, and regulations that apply to every single school and every single school employee subject to the laws of the United States. This is the hostile institutional environment in which Christian adults in the schools are forced to work. And, unfortunately, when you put good people in a bad system, the system almost always wins, which is the reason the public school system continues to deteriorate.
“Sympathy”, or the lack of sympathy, however, is simply not the relevant standard for judging whether a school is a suitable place to train up a Christian child. Christ tells us clearly that “He who is not with Me is against Me, and he who does not gather with Me scatters abroad.” For forty years and more, every public school has been legally prohibited from being for Christ. Unless one chooses to disregard Christ’s teaching, the only conclusion that can honestly be reached is that the entire public school system, by law, is against Christ. As will be seen, this is further confirmed when we look at the evidence of whether the public schools are “gathering” with Christ or “scattering.”
There Is No Neutrality in Education
Often Christians attempt to argue it doesn’t matter that the public school system is not for Christ – that education is somehow religiously “neutral.” Education, however, is never neutral.
Any Christian who believes that government schools operate on religiously neutral principles is simply deceived. There is no such thing as metaphysical or religious neutrality. If an institution rejects the Bible’s teaching about the nature of God, Man and the universe, then it necessarily accepts, implicitly or explicitly, some other worldview, whether it be the materialist metaphysics of secular humanism, the cosmic humanism of the New Age religions, or something else. Government schools are no exception.
On a practical level, the net result of nearly sixty years of Supreme Court rulings on the meaning of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution has not been to create a level playing field for different beliefs, but simply to take all vestiges of Christianity out of government schools. Today, secular humanism, postmodernism, New Age mysticism, and other forms of paganism pervade government schools at all levels. The teachers’ unions, such as the NEA, are openly hostile to Biblical Christianity and its values, and the curricula of schools of education and teachers’ colleges, from which the overwhelming majority of teachers are drawn, are suffused with a mélange of postmodern and other nonchristian worldviews. Not surprisingly, textbook publishers accommodate the education establishment’s worldview by providing textbooks that conform to the prevailing anti-Christian perspective of the education establishment.