Posted on 09/04/2003 7:21:35 PM PDT by Mr. Mulliner
Depriving Children of Belief May Be a Form of Child Abuse
By Rabbi Daniel Lapin
Toward Tradition.
Would anyone doubt that deliberately depriving children of education and condemning them to ignorance and poverty is a form of child abuse? Yet that is exactly the fate of many children attending our nation's public schools. It is the fate of many, but not of all.
The glare from the international news through the summer obscured a good story of how the Good Book is enhancing the lives of children with otherwise gloomy prospects. It turns out that one hour a week of Christian religious instruction is transforming the lives of public school students in one of the most blighted urban neighborhoods in the country.
Back in 1914, a public school superintendent in Gary, Indiana created the Released Time Religious Education program which was approved by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1952. It provided for religious instruction during the school day to public school students off campus with parental permission. The secular non-profit, The National Council on Crime and Delinquency, just completed an independent evaluation of the Oakland Released Time Program that had been operating for about two years.
Oakland schools have long ranked among the least effective and the most dangerous in the country. Just to give you an idea, during each of the past few years, Oakland schools typically reported about 500 assaults, over 50 of which involved guns or knives. In addition they report about 50 rapes or attempted rapes along with hundreds of cases of extortion and robbery. We're talking schools here not penitentiaries and jails. Needless to say, not much in the way of mathematics, history, or even basic fluency is being learned.
Even in this atmosphere, children enrolled in the Time Release program, 77 percent of whom are racial minorities, dramatically outperformed their classmates in almost every academic category. They also improved their own academic rankings compared to before their enrollment in the Bible program.
Furthermore these students also demonstrated significant character development and diminished criminal and delinquent behavior compared to their classmates. None of this is new. Academically credible studies proving positive correlation between religious instruction and preventing crime and delinquency go back to the 1970s.
Every impartial observer must surely now rethink American education's attempt to teach facts without beliefs. Trying to teach the facts of America's history without teaching the beliefs that fueled her founding has failed. High school students are quick to fault America while most cannot identify the century in which our Civil War took place. Children attending religiously-based private schools as well as home schoolers who typically educate on a foundation of belief, routinely outperform their public school friends who are rigorously denied any form of belief.
Teaching facts without an underpinning of beliefs simply does not work. But aren't beliefs strictly for primitives who lack the intelligence to base their lives only upon facts and reason?
By excluding religion, and including the principles of secular humanism (not the least of which is soley teaching the 'theory' of evolution and not the 'theory' of creationism'), secular humanism- a religion in my view- is indeed favored.
Secular humanism has become a religion, and thus should be excluded from government sponsored activities.
And, while you and I indeed have a choice to send our children to parochial schools, we do not have any choice as to whether our tax dollars support secular humanism being taught in schools. Nor can we choose to withold money that sponsors secularism in schools.
Our money is collected via property taxes. If you don't support the secular schools, the government will take your house.
Is that not compulsion?
Reread the article above, and pay attention to the part noting that test scores were higher and incidences of 'problems' lower among those with religious training.
Unfortunately the secular humanists (just about the only ones opposed) are far from impartial.
I posted this earlier, and it fits here:
There are two basic world views, and everyone falls into one camp or another.
The first is this: Those who are convinced that there is indeed a natural order to the universe, and humans are not exempt from this natural order. The mode of worship of the Creator of these natural laws may differ, the day of the week it is considered good to worship may vary, and He is called by many names. There are various scriptures of the world, and they differ in many details and even more than details. But they all agree on basic moral absolutes, even Buddhist teachings, and they are not a monotheist religion in that they deny the existence of a Supreme Being (although Buddha is often worshipped as such, and is even accepted as an incarnation in the Vedas).
They all agree that there is order and purpose in the universe, and that all beings are inherently meant to serve that order and its Author, not only to have a peaceful society, but to fulfill the higher purpose of spiritual or religious advancement. Including under the natural laws are basic laws of morality, the moral absolutes such as 10 Commandments, which are very similar in the Vedas and as far as I know, even in Islam (I'm rather disgusted with Muslims right now so we'll leave it at that).
In addition to basic prohibitions against lying, stealing, murder and assault, and injunctions to protect the innocent, respect elders and so on, sexual morality has always been extremely important - indeed necessary - to human civilization. The bans on adultery, pedophilia, incest, fornication (sex outside of marriage), same sex acts and bestiality are universal. There are many reasons for these prohibitions, some fruits of which we are seeing now.
The other group is those who see the universe and all that is in it as mechanistic in origin. There is no transcendent origin, it is accidental, and everything is evolving, including man's understandings, achievements, and intelligence. Therefore, whatever went before is less developed, more primitive, more unenlightened. Note that such moral relativists often use terms such as "turning back the clock" and "going back to the dark ages". To them, the mind and desires of man are supreme, and whatever people can think up and do is by its very definition good. It's not that they have no idea of morality, but they make it up as they go along, therefore it is constantly changing, according to changes in society, and the passage of time.
Of course, some of this group consider themselves "religious" and Christianity and Judaism in particular have been infiltrated and influenced so much by the materialist moral relativist atmosphere that many "religionists" are just utter materialists in disguise. If they admit belief in God, it is a god in the image of their own limited mental understanding, subject to change according to the times, and their own imaginings. In other words, not the Supreme Godhead at all, just an idol of their own creation.
To this group, those of us with sincere conviction in the changeless, eternal and Supreme God are imbeciles or unenlightened, and they will never accord us respect, and unless and until we can gain some prominence in influencing the culture we have lost the culture war.
My kids go to a public school where they get a more than decent education, but the teachers last year noted a decided lack of civility amongst the students in the 7th grade. Kids making fun of one another, gossiping, calling each other names -- in short, all the crap that junior high kids do, but with more than the usual share of nastiness.
So the principal hit upon the solution of teaching "virtue" through the use of materials from an outfit called Character Counts, a nonsectarian outfit dedicated to teaching the six pillars of character: trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring and citizenship.
What is laughable though is the utter lack of authority with which the stuff is taught: how do you tell a kid why he must be virtuous when you are constrained from invoking God's name ? Is he to be nice to his fellows because that is a 'nice ' thing and he is a 'nice' guy ? It begs credulity to think this stuff has any meaning to a child who has no relationship with god.
I was under the impression that CC came out of a religious organization (promise keepers?) but I may be mistaken.
I was driving down a busy thoroughfare in our town just after 9/11 and saw a sign, "Bless America".
I wanted to bust the door down and scream, "WHAT BLESS AMERICA YOU NINNYS!?"
Friggin' pansies!
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