Many evangelicals were shocked last June when Dr. Albert Mohler, the Southern Baptist Convention’s leading theologian, wrote that it is now time for responsible Southern Baptists to develop an exit strategy from the public schools. But why should it have been shocking?
   For years innumerable, journalists, activists and scholars have been chronicling the metastasizing pathologies of the public school system. Surely few today are wholly unaware that the government’s schools have become foundries of ignorance and bad character. Surely few are wholly unaware that the government’s schools are the nation’s largest pusher of psychotropic drugs. Surely few are wholly unaware that violent crime and sexual abuse of students in the government’s schools are far from uncommon. And surely few can be wholly unaware that the government’s schools now incorporate curricula and programs that both are a threat to our children’s physical and psychological health and are, in many instances, pornographic.
   Moreover, our highly trained education professionals are not shy about informing any parent who questions, for example, the wisdom and necessity of teaching 6-year-olds about homosexual marriage that it is none of their business. And why should “educators” be reticent about making sure parents know their place? As the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals candidly stated in its recent Fields v. Palmdale decision, the power of the government schools has grown to the point that “parents have no constitutional right...to prevent a public school from providing its students with whatever information it wishes to provide, sexual, or otherwise, when and as the school determines that it is appropriate to do so.” In other words, a child placed in a government school will be trained up as the bureaucrats, judges and special-interest groups who control the government’s schools see fit.