An X post on education from 9/9/24:
What is (shockingly?) missing from this article is any acknowledgement of what God has actually commanded parents to do. The most obvious thing is completely ignored. It’s not as if God’s Word is silent in this area, leaving us to our devices when it comes to deciding how to educate the children he has given us. God has spoken, and we ignore what he has said at our own peril.
God’s Word commands parents, in no uncertain terms, to saturate their children’s lives with his Word. This saturation is to be comprehensive and constant. The requirement is laid down in Deuteronomy 6:7-9:
“You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”
There is no public school that does what Deuteronomy 6 requires so there is no possibility of outsourcing this work to a government institution. In fact, public schools do the opposite, saturating children in a Satanic worldview rather than a biblical one. They will teach your children to think about all of life as if there is no God. They will catechize your kids in the worldview of statism, hedonism, and nihilism.
In Ephesians 6, fathers are commanded to raise their children up in “the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” Those two words, “discipline and instruction” together describe a comprehensive form of physical, intellectual, and spiritual discipleship. They require nothing less than full enculturation into a way of life consonant with God’s kingdom. They require fathers to shape their children into citizens of the kingdom of heaven. By contrast, the government schools in America today will shape your children into good little statists.
The CT article simply ignores what God’s Word says about education. What should be the most obvious and weighty factor in making the decision about how to train our children never enters the article’s discussion.
This is no small matter. The public schools are absolutely, unquestionably the front line in the culture war. If you want to know how America has ended up in the ditch we are in, look no further than the public school classroom. You should no more put a six year old kid there than you would put a six year old on the front lines in Afghanistan. Missionaries, like soldiers, must be trained before they are sent to the battlefield – and only an army of fools would let the enemy train their soldiers.
Deciding how we educate our children is not a pragmatic issue. It is a matter of principle. I grant some situations might be far from optimal; I grant there can be exceptional cases at times where there is no other choice. Life can be messy. But the idea that Christian fathers would hand their children over to an officially atheistic institution of the state for training, day after day, year after year, would have been a reprehensible idea in better times. Christian children should be given a Christian education. Period.
Public schools are not neutral spaces. They are hostile to the Christian faith and Christian way of life. They catechize children into a form of secular idolatry. Nor are public schools a mission field where we can send our kids to be salt and light. There is no way young children can be prepared to discern, challenge, and correct all they will encounter in a public school classroom, whether in the curriculum or the culture.
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A A Hodge on America’s Public Schools, from the 1880s:
“It is capable of exact demonstration that if every party in the State has the right of excluding from the public schools whatever he does not believe to be true, then he that believes most must give way to him that believes least, and then he that believes least must give way to him that believes absolutely nothing, no matter in how small a minority the atheists or agnostics may be. It is self-evident that on this scheme, if it is consistently and persistently carried out in all parts of the country, the United States system of national popular education will be the most efficient and wide instrument for the propagation of Atheism which the world has ever seen….
I am as sure as I am of the fact 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….
It is no answer to say that the deficiency of the national system of education in this regard will be adequately supplied by the activities of the Christian churches. No court would admit in excuse for the diffusion of poison the plea that the poisoner knew of another agent actively employed in diffusing the antidote. Moreover, the churches, divided and without national recognition, would be able very inadequately to counteract the deadly evil done by the public schools of the State with all the resources and prestige of the government. But, more than all, atheism taught in the school cannot be counteracted by theism taught in the Church.”
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Progressives reproduce in the classroom more than the bedroom.
Progressives don’t have many kids of their own – but they are more than happy to steal your kids and train them up in their godless worldview.
Christian fathers, do not hand your kids over to a godless and God-hating institution to be trained, shaped, and formed. Fathers, do not abdicate. Raise your children in the fear and nurture of the Lord.
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Dabney on Christian parenting and education:
“True education is, in a sense, a spiritual process, the nurture of a soul. By spiritual, the divines mean the acts and states produced by the Holy Ghost, as distinguished from the merely ethical. The nurture of these is not human education, but sanctification. Yet education is the nurture of a spirit which is rational and moral, in which conscience is the regulative and imperative faculty; whose proper end, even in this world, is moral. But God is the only Lord of the conscience; this soul is his miniature likeness; his will is the source of obligation to it; likeness to him is its perfection, and religion is the science of the soul’s relations to God. Let these statements be placed together, and the theological and educational processes appear so cognate that they cannot be separated. Hence it is that the common sense of mankind has ever invoked the guidance of the minister of religion for the education of youth; in India the Brahmin, in Turkey the Imam, in Jewry the Rabbi, and in Christian lands the pastor . . .
It is the Christian ideas which are most stimulating and ennobling to the soul. He who must needs omit them from his teaching is robbed of the right arm of his strength. Where shall he get such a definition of virtue as is presented in the revealed character of God? Where so ennobling a picture of benevolence as that presented in Christ’s sacrifice for his enemies? Can the conception of the inter-stellar spaces so expand the mind as the thought of an infinite God, an eternal existence, and an everlasting destiny?
Every line of true knowledge must find its completeness in its convergency to God, even as every beam of daylight leads the eye to the sun. If religion be excluded from our study, every process of thought will be arrested before it reaches its proper goal. The structure of thought must remain a truncated cone, with its proper apex lacking….
This is the conclusive argument. The rejoinder is attempted; that Christians hold this theology as church members, and not as citizens; and that we have ourselves urged that the State is not an evangelical agent, and its proper business is not to convert souls from original sin. True, but neither has it a right to become an anti-evangelical agency, and resist the work of the spiritual commonwealth. While the State does not authorize the theological beliefs of the Christian citizens, neither has it a right to war against them. While we have no right to ask the State to propagate our theology, we have a right to demand that it shall not oppose it. But to educate souls thus is to oppose it, because a non-Christian training is an anti-Christian training. It may be urged again, that this result, if evil, will not be lessened by the State’s ceasing to teach at all, for then the training of youth will be, so far as she is concerned, equally non-Christian. The answer is, that it is one thing to tolerate a wrong as done by a party over whom we have not lawful control, but wholly another to perpetrate that wrong ourselves. For the State thus to do what she ought to condemn in the godless parent, though she be not authorized to interfere would be the sin of “framing mischief by a law,” the very trait of that “throne of iniquity” with which the Lord cannot have fellowship.”
Again, Dabney:
“Seeing the parental relation is what the Scripture describes it, and seeing Satan has perverted it since the fall for the diffusion and multiplication of depravity and eternal death, the education of children for God is the most important business done on earth. It is the one business for which the earth exists. To it all politics, all war, all literature, all money-making, ought to be subordinated; and every parent especially ought to feel, every hour of the day, that, next to making his own calling and election sure, this is the end for which he is kept alive by God—this is his task on earth.
On the right training of the generation now arising, turns not only the individual salvation of each member in it, not only the religious hope of the age which is approaching, but the fate of all future generations in a large degree. Train up him who is now a boy for Christ, and you not only sanctify that soul, but you set on foot the best earthly agencies to redeem the whole broadening stream of human beings who shall proceed from him, down to the time when men cease to marry and give in marriage. Until then, the work of education is neverending.
The generation which is trained for heaven is the one that dies; the one that is born into its place is born in enmity and under the curse. Thus the task of training is ever renewed, until the final consummation shall make the race equal to the angels.
In the last place: We observe some sincere Christians, whose minds are so swayed by the assertion that personal faith must be the invariable pre-requisite to baptism and admission to the church, that they seem incapable of ever entertaining the thought that the church membership of the children of believers may be reasonable and scriptural. The doctrine seems to them so great an anomaly that they cannot look dispassionately at the evidence for it. But to one who has weighed the truths set forth above, the absence of that doctrine from God’s dispensations would seem the strange anomaly. To him who has appreciated the parental relation as God represents it, the failure to include it within the circuit of the visible church, to sanctify its obligations and to seal its hopes with the sacramental badge, would appear the unaccountable thing.
We have seen that the promise of a multiplying offspring was the blessing of paradise; that paternity was the splendid expedient of our Maker for multiplying the human subjects of his blessings and instruments of his glory, and of making holiness and bliss the sure, hereditary possession of the increasing multitudes of men, through the probation and adoption of their first father. We have seen how, when Satan had essayed, with a stupendous, yet impotent malice, to pervert the invention of God to the propagation of sin and death, our merciful father rendered his victory void through the woman’s seed, thus causing redemption in the second Adam to spring again out of the family tie. We hear him declare in Malachi 2:15, long after the fall, that his object in founding the family, in the form of monogamy, was “to seek a godly seed.” Thus the supreme end of the family institution is as distinctly religious and spiritual as that of the church itself.
Civic legislators speak of the well-ordered family as the integer of which the prosperous commonwealth is formed. But God assigns the family a far higher and holier aim. The Christian family is the constituent integer of the church—the kingdom of redemption.
The instrumentalities of the family are chosen and ordained of God as the most efficient of all means of grace—more truly and efficaciously means of saving grace than all the other ordinances of the church. To family piety are given the best promises of the gospel, under the new, as well as under the old dispensation. How, then, should a wise God do otherwise than consecrate the Christian family, and ordain that the believing parents shall sanctify the children? Hence, the very foundation of all parental fidelity to children’s souls is to be laid in the conscientious, solemn, and hearty adoption of the very duties and promises which God seals in the covenant of infant baptism. It is pleasing to think that many Christians who refuse the sacrament do, with a happy inconsistency, embrace the duties and seek the blessing. But God gives all his people the truths and promises, along with the edifying seal. Let us hold fast to both.”
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The problem with the public schools (aka government schools) is not that they are failing They are doing exactly what they are designed to do.
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