by Charlie Clough
– Remember those 4 quotes from the law journals against the right of parents to teach their children? Ohio SB-248 is the first expression of their attempted implementation.
Paganism, because it can’t have unity by submission to the transcendental ethic of God’s Word, must strive to create an artificial unity by totalitarian implementation of whatever suits the fancy of the reigning elite. This savage intolerance to biblical faith has been over a century in coming. John Dewey, the great shaper of American education, wrote: “I cannot understand how any realization of the democratic ideal as a vital moral and spiritual ideal in human affairs is possible without surrender of the conception of the basic division to which supernatural Christianity is committed.” [A Common Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), p51]. God, Dewey, insists, is dangerous because He divides humanity into saints and sinners.
Undoubtedly Christian schools will be next on the regulatory agenda for elimination. Ideas have consequences. Once entrenched the consequences are unavoidable.
Now is the time for development of curricula and tools that parents can administer to their children under the radar of State bureaucrats in the privacy of our homes. We must teach our children and grandchildren how to question the pagan belief system so they can see that paganism has no answers. The Emperor has no clothes. Example: in classroom discussion and projects on the environment, teach them to ask a basic question: “if we are the products of ‘forces that had no prevision of the end they were achieving’ (to cite Bertrand Russell), give me one good reason why I should care for the environment–give me a reason that is consistent.” Or, “show me observational evidence of evolutionary transition across specie-lines–just give me one evidence.” Or, “If we are all bags of evolving protoplasm, give me one reason why I shouldn’t bully those weaker than myself–after all it’s all about ‘survival of the fittest.'” Short videos like “Cruel Logic” on YouTube can be tools to learn how to use ideological “Judo” on the pagan state educational curricula.
Really? Is the response to an attack on the right to withdraw from the public school system to develop, market, and sell yet another home schooling curriculum? Having homeschooled six children it does not seem to me we lack in curriculum alternatives. Nor does it seem to me that our inability to critically engage with the culture is due to a lack of apologetic material. Education is necessary but not sufficient for the challenges we face. Certainly Solomon found education to be inadequate in resisting paganism.
Homeschooling is doing fine as long as the state allows it. From recent writings in legal journals it is obvious that homeschooling is finally coming onto the statists’ radar screen as a serous culture threat. The Ohio bill as well as certain efforts now underway in PA show that educational bureaucrats are increasingly conscious of the threat homeschooling presents to their vision of a “unified” culture around the themes of homosexual tolerance, state-defined health-care, and climate-change spawned globalism, all based, of course, on a Neo-Darwinian version of ancient nature-worship. Working with Christian students on secular campuses (high school through graduate school) for decades has taught me that training in active challenge-techniques in stead of encouraging passive compliance radically undermines the influence of anti-Christian educators. This environment outside the home may well become the fate of home-shoolers at the elementary and junior high levels if laws are passed like the Ohio bill. It is already the situation with kids of Christian parents who do not homeschool. We hope for the best–continued protection on homs schooling; we prepare mentally and spiritually for the worse.
Thanks for the reply but I think you missed my point and instead gave me a polemic against culture. I agree that Christians, and all people, need to be taught how to think not what to think. But you assert we need new curriculum and tools. I am challenging that. Why do you think that? Is there any evidence that our inability to critically confront the culture is due to a lack of curriculum and tools not yet available for parents?
It seems that a streamlined “under the radar” apologetics curriculum might well be helpful to parents to counter the state-defined curricula in situations where “total” homeschooling is not an option. Parents whose children must be in public schools have limited time to counter the anti-Biblical assertions, but a curriculum specifically developed for dealing with specific cultural issues would assist in enabling children to confidently challenge error that is being presented.
I would definitely welcome such a curriculum. I recently started homeschooling my two younger children but I still have two older ones in school. We live in Texas where things are fairly conservative, but I am desperate for a counter world view curriculum to challenge what they are being taught in school for seven hours every day. I have even attempted to start teaching them a simplified version of the Bible Framework because I have not been able to find anything that fits that description.