Top Five Reasons NOT to Send
Your
Kids Back to Public School
By Pastor Voddie
Baucham
Anyone who has
kept up with my blog knows that I am no fan of government
education. I have made it a point to carry The Continuing Collapse
on a regular basis, and I try to make biblical, philosophical and theological
arguments in favor of Christian education as often as possible. However,
I recognize the obstacles those of us on my side of the street face.
As many as eighty-five to ninety percent of professing Christians
send 
their
children to the government for their education. That is simply
an astonishing figure considering the fact that the Christian community fought
mandatory government education tooth-and-nail for its first fifty years of
existence. Since then we have gone from fighting against government
schools to fighting for them and implying that those who fight against them
are fundamentalists, anti-intellectuals, and racists.
In the meantime, our schools grow progressively worse. As fall
approaches, I want to appeal to those of you with children in government schools.
Please don’t send them back! I beg you to consider what you are doing.
As Dave Black has written: “No academic skepticism, no secularist authors,
no blatant materialism can so undermine the spiritual life of the country
like the completely secularized training of the child under the authority
of the state... Bible-based education is
mandatory for Christian parents.
If we think we can keep our children in a secular school system and escape
the dumbed-down, amoral, and immoral results of
secular humanism in schools, we are sorely mistaken (See: http://daveblackonline.com/our.htm).”
With
that, here are the top five reasons not to send your kids back to government/public
school.
5.
You Don’t Have To
This may sound like a no-brainer, but
you’d be surprised how many people ask home educators the ‘authority’ questions
(i.e., to whom do you report? Who approves your curriculum?). These questions are the byproduct of statism. The Gramscian,
neo-Marxist influence is so prevalent in our culture that we don’t even
recognize it anymore. We actually believe that children are wards of the
state when in fact they are not. As a result, some people have a hard
time believing that they have the right to educate their children in a manner
of their choosing. Well, I’m here to tell you that you are free.
Your children are yours. They do not belong to Caesar. You don’t
have to take them back to the local government indoctrination center next
semester. And in some states (thank God for Texas), you don’t even have
to tell them you’re not coming back!
4.
One of the issues that many Christians
seem willing to ignore is the fact that sending children to American schools
represents extremely poor stewardship. American students continually rank
at the bottom in math, science and reading compared to other industrialized
nations. That’s right,
our educational system is among the world’s worst! Of course everyone
says, “Our schools are different.” News flash... that’s a lie!
One
of our elders taught honors math at one of the ‘best schools’ in one of the
‘best school districts’ in Texas (you know, one of those schools people lie
and cheat to get their children into so that they can get a ‘better education’).
His advanced geometry class was filled with a bunch of imbeciles who could
barely do basic arithmetic. As a result, most of them failed their first
major test. You know what happened next? The principal called
him
into the office and told him to make things right. One of the things
he was told was to employ a grading technique called “Square root times ten.”
Thus, a student who made a 49 on a test ended up with a 70 in the grade book
(for those of you who went to government schools like me, that’s
the square root of 49 times ten).
This
is what’s happening at our ‘best’ schools. Don’t believe me? Ask a
college admissions worker how many students coming from our ‘best’ schools with
grade point averages hovering near 4.0 need remediation when they get to
college. It’s an absolute joke. The overwhelming majority of
children in our schools have a B average or above (mostly for self esteem
reasons), which serves to give them and their parents a false sense of
achievement. It also results in people who ‘feel really good’ about their
schools.
Please
don’t buy the lie. Your child’s school is probably terrible. If you
really care about the stewardship of you child’s mind, don’t send them back to
the worst schools in the industrialized world.
3. America’s Schools Are Morally Repugnant
The headlines speak for themselves.
Student-teacher sex scandals, student-student sex, immodesty, foul language,
drugs, alcohol, radical homosexual agendas, teachers taking students for abortions,
“sexting” leading to suicide, sexually transmitted
diseases, brutal beatings, and school shootings. These are just some
of the headlines that have become the norm. And that does not include
things like cheating, disrespect for authority, 
impropriety
towards the opposite sex, and other moral behaviors children learn regularly
and repeatedly in school.
Van
Til said it better than I ever could: “Non-Christian
education puts the child in a vacuum…. The result is that child dies. Christian
education alone really nurtures personality because it alone gives the child
air and food…. Modern educational philosophy gruesomely insults our God and our
Christ. How, then, do you expect to build anything positively Christian or
theistic upon a foundation which is the negation of Christianity and theism?…. No teaching of any sort is possible except in Christian
schools.”
Moreover,
the system itself is funded by virtual theft. Homeowners are forced under
threat of the loss of their property to pay for the education of other people’s
children. How is that appropriate? The
government tells everyone that they have to send their children to school, then
tells homeowners that they are going to be the ones to foot the bill whether they
like it or not. Not only is this a form of welfare, it is also a form of
theft.
For
those of you ready to read me the riot act and yell and scream about paying for
roads and bridges, hold on a minute. Why is it that we get all up-in-arms
about our tax dollars being used to fund abortions (while our opponents make
the roads and bridges argument), but we don’t see this one? Our schools
are morally repugnant. They are also neo-Marxist, secular humanist
indoctrination centers. Why should I as a Christian be forced to pay for
children to have every vestige of Christianity beaten out of them?
Americans are not forced to pay for Mormon schools, or Muslim schools; why
should we be forced to pay for neo-Marxist schools (remember, all education is
religious in nature)? And why should any Christian contribute to such a
system by sending their children to such schools at the expense of
others? And before you yell, “I’m just using the tax dollars I spent,”
ask yourself if you’re willing to take advantage of all that abortion funding
going to Planned Parenthood, or those tax dollars going toward fetal stem cell
research.
2. Government Education is Anti-Christian
“I am as sure as I am of Christ’s reign that a
comprehensive and centralized system of national education, separated from
religion, as is now commonly proposed, will prove the most appalling enginery
for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief, and of
anti-social nihilistic ethics, individual, social and political, which this
sin-rent world has ever seen.” (A.A.
Hodge)
Jesus
made it quite clear when he said, “Whoever
is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.” (Matthew
As
Hodge pointed out, the result of non-Christian education is anti-Christian
education. Government schools must
be anti-Christian. They can be nothing else.
Therefore, to send a child to a government school is to have them trained
in an anti-Christian environment for 14,000 instructional hours. To
get that much instruction from church a child would have to attend two hours
a week for one hundred and forty years!
1.
The Bible Commands Christ-Centered
Education
“This
whole process of education is to be religious, and not only religious, but
Christian…. And as Christianity is the only true religion, and God in Christ
the only true God, the only possible means of profitable education is the
nurture and admonition of the Lord.” (Charles Hodge)
I
recognize that educational antinomianism is the norm in the modern American
church. According to the common refrain, “It doesn’t matter what educational
choice you make... you just have to pray about it and do what the Lord
leads your family to do.”
However, I must confess I find this concept disturbing on a number of fronts.
First,
this kind of thinking denies the sufficiency of Scripture. The Bible speaks either directly, or principally
to every aspect of life. There are no grey areas. Sure, there are
things that are difficult to discern, but education is not one of them.
Though you won’t find the word ‘education’ in Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance, there are a number of passages
that speak directly to the issue of training ourselves and our children
intellectually, spiritually, philosophically and morally (See Deut. 6:6,7; Prov. 1:7; Eph. 6:4,
etc). We also have numerous warnings against allowing others to influence
us intellectually, spiritually, philosophically, and morally (Psalm 1;
Second,
this line of reasoning smacks of mysticism. Instead of making an argument
with an open Bible we dismiss all
opposition with the flippant, trite, overused, and theologically problem-laden
phrase, “we prayed about it and this is what the Lord told us to do.”
The
Lord ‘has spoken.’ (Heb. 1:1-2) We are not awaiting new revelation. Instead of doing what the Lord ‘told us,’
Christians are commanded to do what the Lord ‘has told us’ in His Word.
The London Baptist Confession speaks to this matter rather poignantly:
“The Holy Scripture is the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of
all saving Knowledge, faith and obedience; Although the light of Nature, and
the works of creation and providence do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom
and power of God, as to leave men unexcusable [sic.];
yet are they not sufficient to give that knowledge of God and His will, which
is necessary unto salvation. Therefore it pleased the Lord at sundry times,
and in divers manners, to reveal Himself, and to declare that His will unto
His
Church; and afterward for the better preserving, and propagating of the truth,
and for the more sure establishment, and comfort of the Church against the
corruption of the flesh, and the malice of Satan, and of the World, to commit
the same wholly unto writing; which maketh the Holy
Scriptures to be most necessary, those former
ways of Gods revealing His will unto His people being now ceased.”
The
Cambridge Declaration states: “We reaffirm the inerrant Scripture to be the
sole source of written divine revelation, which alone can bind the conscience.
The Bible alone teaches all that
is necessary for our salvation from sin and is the standard by which all Christian
behavior must be measured. We deny that any creed, council or individual
may bind a Christian's conscience, that
the Holy Spirit speaks independently of or contrary to what is set forth in
the Bible, or that personal spiritual experience [i.e., “the Lord told me”]
can ever be a vehicle of revelation.”
There’s
enough here for an entire series of posts (so many posts... so little time),
but for now let me simply say that the “the Lord told me” line of argumentation
has serious theological problems. We must make our educational decisions
with an open Bible. “The Lord
told me” is no substitute for ‘the Bible
says!’ Please don’t make a decision
about your child’s education without consulting (and obeying) the Scriptures.
Conclusion
How I long for voices like Hodge, Van Til,
and Machen (who called government education a
“soul-killing system”) to be heard among my Southern Baptist brethren.
However, with over eighty-five percent of our children in the government
schools and more government school teachers and administrators than any other ‘denomination,’
it is highly unlikely that our side will prevail on this issue any time
soon. One wonders what the schools will have to do to our children before
we are willing to acknowledge the folly of our choices. In the meantime,
I will continue to watch, fight, and pray, and try to convince as many of you
as I can to liberate your children from Caesar’s indoctrination camps.
I
have quoted John Wesley on this issue in previous posts. However, his
words are far too pertinent for me to ignore on this issue: “Let it be
remembered, that I do not speak to the wild, giddy, thoughtless world, but to
those that fear God. I ask, then, for
what end do you send you children to school?
Why? That they may be fit to live in the world? In which world do you
mean, — this or the next? Perhaps you thought of this world only; and had
forgot that there is a world to come; yea, and one that will last forever! Pray
take this into your account, and send them to such masters as will keep it
always before their eyes. Otherwise, to send them to [a government] school
(permit me to speak plainly) is little better than sending them to the devil.
At all events, then, send your boys [and girls], if you have any concern for
their souls, not to any of the large public schools, (for they are nurseries of
all manner of wickedness,) but private school, kept by some pious man, who endeavours to instruct a small number of children in
religion and learning together.”
I can’t help but wonder
if people called Wesley divisive or extremist for making the aforementioned
comments. Perhaps not. Perhaps they simply
said, “That may be right for you, but it’s not what the Lord told us to do.”
Voddie Baucham
is a husband, father, pastor, author, professor, conference speaker and church
planter. He currently serves as Pastor of Preaching
at
