The Public School System: Who Is Discipling your Children?
What is the social and political agenda of your local public-school system? Do you know? Should you care? I have some thoughts.
There are places in the United States right now where the social agenda in public schools has reached quite an extreme position. For example, the Madison Metropolitan School District in Madison, Wisconsin, one of the most liberal cities in America, they have implemented a curriculum that promotes the transition to trans-gender for children. It was done in 2018 with no transparency, with no parental input, in fact, with no knowledge of parents that it was being done. The first sign that something had happened was that they held a school-wide assembly for kindergarten through fifth graders where the school administration showed a video praising a teacher who had transitioned from one gender to another and talked to the children about what those options were for them.
One of the policies put in place in Madison requires school employees to support and participate in the social transition of children to living as the opposite sex at school. In other words, they’re called by one name and use pronouns for their supposedly preferred gender at school. But the policy strictly instructs the teachers to use the biological pronouns and the original name in front of parents so the parents are unaware of the life that the child is living at school and how that’s different from what they’re living at home. All information of the child’s new gender identity is kept in an off-the-books file so that it’s never a part of the permanent record that parents have a legal right to know about.
Well, what about California? California, the nation’s most populous state, is the target of many textbook companies because there are over six-million students in California and a huge market for curricula. The smarter-than-thou folks in California who are crafting curriculum that will eventually make its way across the U.S., have developed what they call "An Ethnic Studies Model" which, challenges racist bigoted discriminatory imperialist colonial beliefs and critiques white supremacy racism and other forms of power and oppression in order to teach young people that the mind set of every single immigrant coming to the shores of early colonial America was Euro-Centric, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal, heteropatriarchal and anthropocentric.
In other words, the curriculum makes a decision to specifically teach children that the people who are arrived to bring America to pass were white supremacist from the beginning. It’s a curriculum designed to instill the idea that America is, always has been and inevitably must be racist in all things. The co-founder of the curriculum says specifically,
White Christians committed Theocide against indigenous tribes killing their gods and replacing them with Christianity. White settlers thus established a regime of coloniality, dehumanization and genocide.
Well, so we’re racists to the core and there’s no solution.
What does this curriculum in California offer? Get this. The answer is what they call “Counter-Genocide.” That’s right, Counter Genocide. Students are instructed to clap and chant to one of the ancient Aztec gods; a god among the ancients that demanded child sacrifice. Children are told to worship this god who demanded human sacrifice and cannibalism, asking him for the power to be warriors for social justice. This Aztec deity of war is asked to eliminate the white race. Think about this. This is the public-school system in the state of California.
Charles Colson used to say, “Ideas have consequences. And bad ideas have victims.”
Abraham Lincoln once said, “The philosophy of the school room in one generation will become the philosophy of the government in the next.”
Adolph Hitler ominously agreed when he said, “Let me control the textbooks and I will control the State.”
Where are our kids right now in public schools? There’s an organization called the Nehemiah Institute that does an annual survey of High school students across America asking them a series of carefully crafted statements whether they agree or disagree. Each statement is designed to either agree or disagree with a Biblical Judeo-Christian worldview. The results are that they examine a student’s worldview in five categories: Politics, Economics, Education, Religion and Social issues. This is called the Piers Test. This test in 2015, several years ago now, showed that 90% of students from Christian homes attending public schools score in a range that indicates that their views are already firmly grounded in the basic tenants of secularism. The only category left in the Piers Test is Socialism. And I suspect in the six years since these results, the numbers have probably shifted even further beyond secularism towards socialism.
The founder of the tests says that, "These results mean that the students have intentionally rejected the basic tenants of Biblical Theism in favor of basic tenants of humanism and secularism." In short, it means that the secularization of our culture has successfully captured the hearts and minds of our youth more than has the efforts of Christian home, the Church or even the traditional Christian school. Do we as Christians want our children schooled in a system with those foundations?
Now here’s the issue that I want to ask you about. You say, “Well, I don’t live in the most liberal city in America, Madison, Wisconsin. And I don’t live in the most liberal state in America, California. It’s not like that in my local school system.” Good. Good. I hope that’s right. But let me tell you this. Whether you choose to put your children in the local public-school system or put them a Christian private school or a Classical education private school or whether you choose to home school, it doesn’t change one Biblically significant fact. And that fact is, it is your job as parents to be responsible for the education and the discipleship of your children.
Think about it this way. No matter what school you put your children into, by the time they go from kindergarten through 12th grade, if they’ve been in school for those thirteen years, and even if you’ve been a faithful attender of church Sundays, Wednesdays, active in other events, by the time they graduate from high school there’s a ratio of about 10 hours to 1 the influence of the school over the influence of the Church. The Church can strengthen families. It can partner with parents. But literally the only force on the planet that has the power, that has the influence and the impact to balance what kids get from their school system is the home and the parents.
In the book of Deuteronomy 6, the people of God were given these instructions.
These words that I am giving you today are to be in your heart. Repeat them to your children. Talk about them when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. (6,7)
In other words, make the discipleship of your children, make the development of a Biblical mindset, a critical-thinking process that you hand to your children so that they cannot be overwhelmed by the flood of anti-Judeo-Christian propaganda that is presented to them today. Your job is to help them be Biblical thinkers. It’s nobody else’s job. You take your kids to church, that’s great. That needs to happen. But it is your job to balance, to know what they’re being taught in their schools, to balance that by helping them think Biblically about how that works.
You say, “Well, Pastor I’m not qualified to do that job. I mean, I don’t know if I’m a Biblical thinker myself.” Well, Peter has a comment for you in 1 Peter 1:13: "Therefore, with your minds ready for action, be sober-minded and set your hope completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ."
My translation says, “With minds ready for action.” The old King James version has a very picturesque way of translating the Greek there. It says, “gird up the loins of your mind for action.” In the ancient world much like you see in the Middle East today, men typically wore long flowing robes. They did that because it’s hot in that part of the world and this is a cool and breezy wardrobe. It works in that part of the world. The only problem with wearing long flowing robes is when you have serious work to do, manual labor. And so what would happen is particularly in the ancient world, you would reach down between your legs and you would take the back side of the robe and you would pull it up between your legs and you would tuck it into the sash so that your legs were now freed from the flowing material of the robe. That way you could run. You could work. You could do manual labor. And that action of taking the robe and tucking it into your sash so you could free up your legs do something strenuous, that was called “girding your loins.”
Peter uses that phrase and he says, “Listen, for followers of Jesus, particularly for Christian parents, you need to make the commitment to gird up the loins of your mind, to prepare yourself intellectually for the challenges of this generation.” If you have been granted the stewardship of children, then it is your job to not allow their development to go unsupervised by parents who are living and thinking and walking in a Biblical manner.
I’m not here to tell you to avoid the public-school system. it’s not the same in every part of the country. If I lived in Madison, Wisconsin I wouldn’t let my children be in the public-school system. If I lived in California, I probably wouldn’t let my children be in the public-school system. I understand it’s not yet that way everywhere. But even if you’re in a place that you consider to be intellectually safe, understand this, all school systems promote what they call “value neutral education.”
Now let me ask you this. If God and the Bible are not even allowed a mention in the public-school system, is that really neutrality in values? Or is that a solidly secular approach. You can put your kinds in private school. You can home school them. You can even put them in public schools. But if you’re a Christian, a follower of Jesus, you need to make the time, the energy, the intellectual commitment to disciple your children and make sure that what they hear when they’re away from you is balanced and counter-balanced by what they hear about truth when they are with you.
Take your kids to church. Let them grow up in that context. But remember, even the Church can’t be the delegated discipler for your children. Mom, Dad, that’s your job. And it’s a divinely assigned assignment. Go raise the next generation of those who will advance the Kingdom of Christ and carry the Gospel throughout the world.
This is TruthCurrents.
There are places in the United States right now where the social agenda in public schools has reached quite an extreme position. For example, the Madison Metropolitan School District in Madison, Wisconsin, one of the most liberal cities in America, they have implemented a curriculum that promotes the transition to trans-gender for children. It was done in 2018 with no transparency, with no parental input, in fact, with no knowledge of parents that it was being done. The first sign that something had happened was that they held a school-wide assembly for kindergarten through fifth graders where the school administration showed a video praising a teacher who had transitioned from one gender to another and talked to the children about what those options were for them.
One of the policies put in place in Madison requires school employees to support and participate in the social transition of children to living as the opposite sex at school. In other words, they’re called by one name and use pronouns for their supposedly preferred gender at school. But the policy strictly instructs the teachers to use the biological pronouns and the original name in front of parents so the parents are unaware of the life that the child is living at school and how that’s different from what they’re living at home. All information of the child’s new gender identity is kept in an off-the-books file so that it’s never a part of the permanent record that parents have a legal right to know about.
Well, what about California? California, the nation’s most populous state, is the target of many textbook companies because there are over six-million students in California and a huge market for curricula. The smarter-than-thou folks in California who are crafting curriculum that will eventually make its way across the U.S., have developed what they call "An Ethnic Studies Model" which, challenges racist bigoted discriminatory imperialist colonial beliefs and critiques white supremacy racism and other forms of power and oppression in order to teach young people that the mind set of every single immigrant coming to the shores of early colonial America was Euro-Centric, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal, heteropatriarchal and anthropocentric.
In other words, the curriculum makes a decision to specifically teach children that the people who are arrived to bring America to pass were white supremacist from the beginning. It’s a curriculum designed to instill the idea that America is, always has been and inevitably must be racist in all things. The co-founder of the curriculum says specifically,
White Christians committed Theocide against indigenous tribes killing their gods and replacing them with Christianity. White settlers thus established a regime of coloniality, dehumanization and genocide.
Well, so we’re racists to the core and there’s no solution.
What does this curriculum in California offer? Get this. The answer is what they call “Counter-Genocide.” That’s right, Counter Genocide. Students are instructed to clap and chant to one of the ancient Aztec gods; a god among the ancients that demanded child sacrifice. Children are told to worship this god who demanded human sacrifice and cannibalism, asking him for the power to be warriors for social justice. This Aztec deity of war is asked to eliminate the white race. Think about this. This is the public-school system in the state of California.
Charles Colson used to say, “Ideas have consequences. And bad ideas have victims.”
Abraham Lincoln once said, “The philosophy of the school room in one generation will become the philosophy of the government in the next.”
Adolph Hitler ominously agreed when he said, “Let me control the textbooks and I will control the State.”
Where are our kids right now in public schools? There’s an organization called the Nehemiah Institute that does an annual survey of High school students across America asking them a series of carefully crafted statements whether they agree or disagree. Each statement is designed to either agree or disagree with a Biblical Judeo-Christian worldview. The results are that they examine a student’s worldview in five categories: Politics, Economics, Education, Religion and Social issues. This is called the Piers Test. This test in 2015, several years ago now, showed that 90% of students from Christian homes attending public schools score in a range that indicates that their views are already firmly grounded in the basic tenants of secularism. The only category left in the Piers Test is Socialism. And I suspect in the six years since these results, the numbers have probably shifted even further beyond secularism towards socialism.
The founder of the tests says that, "These results mean that the students have intentionally rejected the basic tenants of Biblical Theism in favor of basic tenants of humanism and secularism." In short, it means that the secularization of our culture has successfully captured the hearts and minds of our youth more than has the efforts of Christian home, the Church or even the traditional Christian school. Do we as Christians want our children schooled in a system with those foundations?
Now here’s the issue that I want to ask you about. You say, “Well, I don’t live in the most liberal city in America, Madison, Wisconsin. And I don’t live in the most liberal state in America, California. It’s not like that in my local school system.” Good. Good. I hope that’s right. But let me tell you this. Whether you choose to put your children in the local public-school system or put them a Christian private school or a Classical education private school or whether you choose to home school, it doesn’t change one Biblically significant fact. And that fact is, it is your job as parents to be responsible for the education and the discipleship of your children.
Think about it this way. No matter what school you put your children into, by the time they go from kindergarten through 12th grade, if they’ve been in school for those thirteen years, and even if you’ve been a faithful attender of church Sundays, Wednesdays, active in other events, by the time they graduate from high school there’s a ratio of about 10 hours to 1 the influence of the school over the influence of the Church. The Church can strengthen families. It can partner with parents. But literally the only force on the planet that has the power, that has the influence and the impact to balance what kids get from their school system is the home and the parents.
In the book of Deuteronomy 6, the people of God were given these instructions.
These words that I am giving you today are to be in your heart. Repeat them to your children. Talk about them when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. (6,7)
In other words, make the discipleship of your children, make the development of a Biblical mindset, a critical-thinking process that you hand to your children so that they cannot be overwhelmed by the flood of anti-Judeo-Christian propaganda that is presented to them today. Your job is to help them be Biblical thinkers. It’s nobody else’s job. You take your kids to church, that’s great. That needs to happen. But it is your job to balance, to know what they’re being taught in their schools, to balance that by helping them think Biblically about how that works.
You say, “Well, Pastor I’m not qualified to do that job. I mean, I don’t know if I’m a Biblical thinker myself.” Well, Peter has a comment for you in 1 Peter 1:13: "Therefore, with your minds ready for action, be sober-minded and set your hope completely on the grace to be brought to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ."
My translation says, “With minds ready for action.” The old King James version has a very picturesque way of translating the Greek there. It says, “gird up the loins of your mind for action.” In the ancient world much like you see in the Middle East today, men typically wore long flowing robes. They did that because it’s hot in that part of the world and this is a cool and breezy wardrobe. It works in that part of the world. The only problem with wearing long flowing robes is when you have serious work to do, manual labor. And so what would happen is particularly in the ancient world, you would reach down between your legs and you would take the back side of the robe and you would pull it up between your legs and you would tuck it into the sash so that your legs were now freed from the flowing material of the robe. That way you could run. You could work. You could do manual labor. And that action of taking the robe and tucking it into your sash so you could free up your legs do something strenuous, that was called “girding your loins.”
Peter uses that phrase and he says, “Listen, for followers of Jesus, particularly for Christian parents, you need to make the commitment to gird up the loins of your mind, to prepare yourself intellectually for the challenges of this generation.” If you have been granted the stewardship of children, then it is your job to not allow their development to go unsupervised by parents who are living and thinking and walking in a Biblical manner.
I’m not here to tell you to avoid the public-school system. it’s not the same in every part of the country. If I lived in Madison, Wisconsin I wouldn’t let my children be in the public-school system. If I lived in California, I probably wouldn’t let my children be in the public-school system. I understand it’s not yet that way everywhere. But even if you’re in a place that you consider to be intellectually safe, understand this, all school systems promote what they call “value neutral education.”
Now let me ask you this. If God and the Bible are not even allowed a mention in the public-school system, is that really neutrality in values? Or is that a solidly secular approach. You can put your kinds in private school. You can home school them. You can even put them in public schools. But if you’re a Christian, a follower of Jesus, you need to make the time, the energy, the intellectual commitment to disciple your children and make sure that what they hear when they’re away from you is balanced and counter-balanced by what they hear about truth when they are with you.
Take your kids to church. Let them grow up in that context. But remember, even the Church can’t be the delegated discipler for your children. Mom, Dad, that’s your job. And it’s a divinely assigned assignment. Go raise the next generation of those who will advance the Kingdom of Christ and carry the Gospel throughout the world.
This is TruthCurrents.
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