[As printed in the Palestine Herald-Press]
Parents Should Abandon Government Schools,
by Carol Fort
TO: Ms. Angie Alvarado, Managing Editor, Palestine Herald Press April 27, 1999Dear Ms. Alvarado:
Your April 23rd editorial, asking our youth for answers to the Columbine school tragedy, ended with the unbelievable statement that the "adult world can't figure this out." Surely you don't mean that!
As early as 1963, renown theologian Dr. R. J. Rushdoony urged parents to abandon the government schools and put their children in Christian schools or homeschools because of the irreconcilable conflict between Christianity and secular humanism — the religion promoted in the government schools that glorifies man. Rushdoony predicted that moral chaos would eventually result.
Fortunately, a growing number of parents have heeded Rushdoony's warning and removed their children from government schools, enrolling them in Christian schools or homeschools. Many of these parents truthfully realize that the purpose of our lives is to glorify God. They understand that education consists of learning what God says about His creation and how to live in this world. To guide us, God provides His holy Law. To redeem us, He provides grace through faith, giving life to the dead.
Could government schools ever educate according to God's plan? No, says theological historian J. Steven Wilkins, who reminds us that God created the family, church, and government for His glory and set the bounds of those institutions in the Bible, giving the responsibility of training the children to the family — not the government.
How did government usurp the family's role? In the early 1800's there were men promoting government schools who had two things in common: an undying hatred of biblical Christianity; and an unwavering faith that non-Christian education could redeem mankind. Horace Mann and others declared that the state and society were the true "parents" of the child. They believed men were basically good and could be perfected by a proper state-controlled, compulsory education — an education free from the bias and errors of Christianity, they said.
Were they right? Hardly! Steve Wilkins points out that:
- government schools teach that human beings are nothing more than blobs of protoplasm ... and yet we're shocked when children laugh at cruelty and suffering;
- students are taught there is no right or wrong, no absolutes ... and yet we're appalled when they hold truth and morality in contempt;
- students are taught to express their rage, to not hold it in ... and yet we stand in mock dismay when they get a gun and do what they've been taught to do;
- they're taught to respect the lives of animals, but also told that babies in the womb may be destroyed ... and yet we shake our heads in disbelief when they dispose of their newborns in dumpsters!
We respond by demanding more laws and more funding for the government institutions that are causing this mischief in the first place! Incredible! We are funding our own suicide!
"Education that rejects God and His Word is not education ... it is deception," says Wilkins. "It leads not to wisdom, but to folly. It ends, not in life, but in death."
Copyright 1999,
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