Posted on 07/05/2009 7:36:02 AM PDT by wintertime
A slew of research shows that America is losing the conservative Christian youth in massive droves. These studies show a generation being increasingly won over to a socialistic/secular-humanistic worldview in spite of the American church increasing their apologetic courses, children's programs, youth rallies and books and sermon series on child training.
What is happening? Could it be that we are doing something wrong? I would make the case that we are blatantly sinning in sending our kids to places that are, in fact, causing them to fall away. Let me lay out the case in three simple points.
( SNIP)
2. Is there any convincing evidence that a secular-humanistic public education is causing kids to stumble and fall away from the church?
* 88 percent of the children raised in evangelical homes leave church at the age of 18;
* 83 percent of children from committed Christian families attending public schools adopt a Marxist-socialist worldview;
* Mounting evidence that the public schools are successfully converting covenant children to secular humanism;
* Nehemiah Institute's graph showing the shocking result of a 20-year study on approximately 60,000 youth in 50 states from churchgoing families.
(Excerpt) Read more at wnd.com ...
Can’t do that very well, if a child is in a godless government school for the best hours of his awake hours.
They wanted states to handle education issues themselves. Fed-ucation was certainly a foreign concept. And if a state doesn’t want to have public education it should have that right as well.
YES!!!
I am a product of the government schools (GS). I graduated from high school in 1957 and was exposed to several hundred teachers. Most were dedicated professionals. And I can STILL name the EXCEPTIONAL ones.
Edna Kleinmeyer who didn’t just teach English: She imbued us with a love of language I carry to this day. It was Ms. Kleinmeyer who told me I had a gift for writing;
Charlie Kluckholn, the tough old wrestling coach who taught chemistry and gave me some of the best advice I had received to that time;
Charles Huffman, the homeroom teacher who helped me over a very rough spot in my life;
Franklin Jefferis, a “lowly” shop teacher, whose love of a job well done was wordlessly communicated to his kids in thousands of subtle ways. Mr. Jefferis died soon after I graduated. One October night, I “visited” him – alone — at the funeral home and wept as I thanked him one last time.
But the current GS are radically different from the system through which I passed 50 years ago. Know that my concern and hostility are NOT directed at those who still TEACH — really teach, really want the best EDUCATION for the kids, want to prepare them academically for the future.
Those feelings are reserved for SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS who have socialist/collectivist agendas or quietly acquiesce to the agendas imposed on them from above. They know that what is going on is wrong, but say nothing lest they jeopardize their careers. Author Thomas Sowell calls these folks “the anointed.” And as the title of his book on the subject, “The Vision of The Anointed,” indicates, they HAVE a vision!
That it is NOT the PARENTS’ vision is of no concern to them.
When my kids were still in the GS, my wife and I were quite active. The Principal of their elementary school chose me to represent the school in something called the LSAC (Local School Advisory Committee) program. I attended several meetings held at the County Board of Education headquarters. I came away from the VERY FIRST of those meetings with these impressions:
1. Those folks DID NOT speak English. Through tight little smirks clearly indicative of the low esteem, indeed, contempt, they had for the uninformed and ignorant gaggle of parents arrayed before them, they spoke in buzz words and technobabble code only they comprehended. At one point — to the visible relief of the other parents — I stopped one woman’s presentation and asked for a translation of what she’d said. She was NOT pleased!
2. They DID NOT want parents involved! Cookie sales and PTA? OK. Serious criticism of a course or textbook? Verboten! Your option was private or parochial school. There very little home schooling then.
3. Most of these people MAY have once been educators. They were now bureaucrats guarding their turf.
4. Many of those administrative folks were making over $50K and, though I looked for signs of it, I saw little evidence of anything resembling “work.” And this was 20 years ago when the average classroom teacher earned less than $25K.
5. There were WAY too many administrators in the GS. It is a perfect opportunity to provide make-work sinecures for “anointed” members of the educational fraternity. Four years as an Air Force instructor taught me how to spot the signs.
Here’s the “bottom line:” Simply hurling more money into the black hole of the GS WILL NOT WORK. Most of that money will NEVER get to the classroom or into the pockets of DESERVING teachers who actually TEACH. And teach what any sensible human being – REGARDLESS of race, faith or ethnicity — instinctively understands to be correct, morally defensible material.
Bush is right about one thing: We need accountability! Perhaps you recall Clinton’s asinine plan to send 100,000 PAID Americorps “volunteers” into the grade schools to TEACH KIDS TO READ. Why hadn’t their PREVIOUS teachers – OR THEIR PARENTS! — taught them to perform that rather basic skill???
Think about what you just read as YOUR local government schools continue to raise YOUR property taxes.
Another encounter with “The System”
In 1978, my wife and I came to know a young woman named Patty. She
was a devoutly religious young mother who’d become more devout when her
husband and father of her two small sons aged 2 and 6 informed her that he
was leaving. In dire economic straits, I offered to let her stay in our
former home in Chamblee — which was not rented at the time – rent-free until she got back on her feet. She had been clandestinely home schooling the 6 year
old for about 2 years using very well done Christian course materials from
an organization in Texas the name of which escapes me. The lad had recently been tested and had placed at least a year ABOVE his chronological age. As required by the government school authorities at the time, she dutifully apprised the authorities of his scores.
For reasons which would become clear in a moment, Patty had been harassed by the DeKalb County school authorities for about 6 months and, by the time she moved into the Chamblee house, had been — unbeknownst to us — ORDERED to put the 6 year old into the nearest government elementary school or suffer the consequences. Because she wanted the boys to be educated Christians, there was no way she was going to do that and she told them so.
At approximately 2 am one morning, a loud knock on the door announced the
arrival of the aforementioned “consequences.”
Dressed only in a nightgown, she was confronted by several burly police officers who thrust an arrest warrant in her face. With the now awakened 6 year old watching and the 2 year old wailing in the other room, she was handcuffed and led out the door to jail. She was tossed into a large cell with a couple of hookers and a junkie who spent much of the rest of that morning vomiting in the corner. The two young boys for whom the educational authorities professed such great concern were just left AT THE HOUSE — ALONE! Patty was later told that the bureaucrats from Children Services who were SUPPOSED to accompany the cops were late and, in their haste to get this dangerous miscreant behind bars, the cops just missed the fact that the Children Services people were, well, missing. The CS folks showed up an hour later to find two terrified kids, one of whom had just seen his mother hauled off in cuffs.
Patty was ultimately brought to trial under the Georgia Truancy Statutes. Her pro-bono attorney tore the school authorities to shreds and hers has been called THE case that opened the floodgates to home schooling in Georgia. Once they had all the facts, the jury didn’t take long to acquit her. I’m proud to have played a small part in that.
At Patty’s trial, a previously overlooked aspect of the government schools was put into sharp focus for those paying attention: The Director of Instruction for DeKalb County testified that the then current 7 hour school day consisted of an average of approximately 3 hours or less of instruction. At that time, Patty was devoting 4 to 5 hours a day to direct instruction.
He also as much as admitted that the REAL reason they wanted ALL these kids in school was the $3,000.00 per kid per year (I’m sure that number is higher in 2001!) they then got from the state and federal government. Empty seats = lost funds. As in most things, follow the money.
Patty home schooled these two boys through high school.
And how did the boys turn out?
One is now a physician and the other a budding journalist.
But that now seems to be the norm for the growing legions of home schooled kids – which most likely explains why the NEA and the government school folks feel justifiably threatened. And home-schooled kids routinely win national academic competitions.
One of Reagan’s key platform planks was to dismantle the horribly misnamed Department of Education (the Department of Educational MEDIOCRITY would be more descriptive). When he got to Washington, his effort was defeated by the NEA and the federal educrats. Reagan’s 1983 report “A Nation at Risk” declared that if a foreign power had done to government schools what was been done to it by the establishment bureaucrats and teachers’ unions, we would have CONSIDERED IT AN ACT OF WAR!
Sadly, that war goes on – and our kids and the future of this nation are the casualties. Barack Obama is a direct manifestation of how badly America has lost that war and how effectively generations of kids have been indoctrinated.
Thomas Jefferson believed an EDUCATED PUBLIC to be the cornerstone of the system he and the other Founders TRIED to leave behind. He would NOT, I feel certain, be a big fan of the current government education system. If he returned today, he’d home school just as he did before.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0lR1KQq2-U
I don't think it is ridiculous. My wife is a public school teacher. My three older sisters have a total of about 100 years of public school teaching experience. One of the sisters is also an Episcopal priest. (Episcopal canon law allows a parish to "raise up" a member to fill a need.) The other sisters are devout Episcopalians. My wife is not a Christian but she, like my sisters, is a "wonderful person." I do not believe they are sinning in the sense of consciously acting against God's will. If they were Roman Catholic I would expect them to compare what they are required by the states of California and Washington to teach in the classroom with what the Church requires them to accept as the truth as presented in the Catechism. I believe a case can be made that a great number of parents are guilty of child abuse or neglect by exposing their offspring to moral or physical harm in the public schools. Whenever I hear a caller to a talk show describe some outrage that occurred in their child's public school I wonder what the parent is thinking about. If they took their child to a zoo and it climbed the fence into the tigers's lair they would not pull out their cell phone and call Shawn or Rush to vent. Have your parents told you any horror stories about what goes on in their schools? Does any of their curriculum tend to erode the morality of their students? Do they bear some responsibility? It is a tough topic but worthy of serious discussion.
What is a sin is allowing the Marxist-Atheists to have taken over the school system. We need more people with classic American values on school boards. People who will not buy the idea that more money for teachers with lifetime tenure improves the education of our children, that teachers need teaching aides, that fewer children per classroom improves education, etc. And we need people who will demand results from the current superintendent and not renew his or her contract if the individual does not produce results and who are not afraid to fire the superintendent or any teacher who does not do the job they are paid to do or who commits any crime. Too many school systems are filled with pedophiles of both genders, yet the members of the school boards are into cutting deals and controlling construction funds rather than in overseeing the educational quality of the schools. The real sin is that we have allowed our school systems to become such cesspools.
“I think we can debate whether it’s better to homeschool or private / public school, but bringing “sin” into it is somewhat ridiculous. My parents both teach at public schools. They are wonderful people, and they have not devoted their lives to “sin.””
Let’s see, put a bunch of boys and girls together naked in a room, then leave. Has a sin been created? Nope, there’s nothing wrong with being naked...most people are naked at least once a day (for now). But wouldn’t creating the conditions that you know will lead to sin be the same as a sin?
*********************
I do agree.
The government schools ( compulsory attendance and compulsory taxation) have been a socialist scheme from the beginning.
Socialist monopolies can not be fixed!
The solution is for conservatives to form private education foundations. These foundations could issue grants to individual teachers. The conservative teachers would open **tuition-free** private conservative one-room school houses or homeschool co-ops. The foundation would certify the teacher, test the students, and approve the curriculum.
The educational foundations could break the government school monopoly on team sports by sponsoring private leagues.
Well, you can't win them all... (kidding!)
Interestingly, 45 years of age seems to be about right regarding the dividing line between those educated in government schools that either were or were not immersed in relative thought and leftist propaganda. I graduated high school in ‘81 and don’t believe that I was subject to the extreme indoctrination that is the norm today. Even as an undergraduate in the early to mid-80s, I don’t believe that most of my instructors were as openly hostile to freedom as they have been post-80s.
I don't know your parents or their situation, but I can speak **generally** about godless government education.
In my homeschool, when we read literature, I would point out to the children which of the Ten Commandments had been broken that caused the fictional conflict upon which the story was built. In fact, except for the genre of “Man Against Nature” it's darn hard to write fiction that does not include the breaking of a Commandment!
Imagine that being taught in government school! Fat Chance!
Yet, to ignore even this **one** tiny aspect of including the Commandments in classroom lectures leaves the child woefully poorly educated! Teaching the child to evaluate literature in a Ten Commandments-free vacuum weakens a child's faith!
This is merely one example among possibly thousands in which learning how to think godlessly weakens faith.
The above is a **general** statement about education. I don't know your parents or their situation and have no comment about them.
I used to think not. By I’ve since changed my mind given the increasing pedophiles working as teachers. The subjects being stuffed down our impressionable childrens minds like chldren having 2 mommies or 2 daddies. The move away from teaching the basic 3 Rs system and the basic English language. Illegals who can’t speak a word of English but the teachers have to focus on them while the rest of the class suffers.
John Dewey in the early 1900's designed public education into his progressive (atheist, Marxist) world view. All of America's public schools and esp. the media were controlled by progressives by the 1920's and after.
Indoctrination into Marxism and atheism has been almost accomplished because people were unaware of the underlying message in their covert efforts to undermine family and God through progressive ideas....such as homosexuality, feminism, egalitarianism, multiculturalism,tolerance.....all will destroy the family and the concept of a true God. They have been able to subvert the Christian paradigm into the atheist, socialist paradigm over the course of the constant repetition of lies as truth to the point that even good, "righteous" people can not recognize the Truth.
Times sure have changed since then especially regarding the public schools. Compare then to now.
MAYBE....just maybe kids leave mainstream churches when they discover that Easter is really about pagan fertility worship and that Christmas is really a pagan solstice celebration?
Or that the nifty steeple is a pagan phallic symbol?
Or that today’s ‘christianity’ is impotent primarily because it more resembles baal worship than early christian practices.
Maybe kids decide that the lies coming from mainstream churches, and those that defend the pagan practices rob them of their credibility and they seek answers elsewhere?
Perhaps the question really should be is it a sin to send kids to church?
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