The Biblical Basis for Homeschooling Christian Children ~ Part V ~ A Battleground for the Minds of Our Children

A Battleground for the Minds of Our Children

“Jesus said to His disciples: ‘Things that cause people to sin are bound to come, but woe to that person through which they come. It would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around his neck than for him to cause one of these little ones to sin. So watch yourselves.’” (Luke 17:1-3)

John Dewey was a very out-spoken prophet for the anti-God public school system. Not only did he not want God entering through the doors of our schools, but God’s absolutes, God’s morals and principles would put a wrench in his plans for our youth. There is no room for the God or anything to do with His kingdom. “Every teacher should realize the dignity of his calling; that he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of proper social order and the securing of the right social growth…In this way the teacher is always the prophet of the true god and the usherer of the true kingdom of god.”[1] [emphasis mine] And again, just in case you didn’t understand the first time, he added this for good measure: “Faith in the prayer-hearing God is an unproved and out-moded faith. There is no God and there is no soul…There is no room for fixed, natural law or moral absolutes.”[2]

Oh, but there is more. Horace Mann and John Dewey were certainly not the only ones to take this point of view. They are merely standing at the head of the line of our modern school system. More recently, Paul Blanshard, a writer for The Humanist magazine even hinted that even though America’s arithmetic, science and reading skills are sinking – even while billions of our tax dollars are being poured into the bottomless pit of educational “reform” – that only seems to be part of the plan for him. “Our schools may not teach Johnny to read properly, but the fact that Johnny is in school until he is sixteen tends to lead toward the elimination of religious superstition.”[3]

For anyone who doubts, Blanshard was not the first person to think this way. Adolph Hitler once said, “Let me control the textbooks, and I will control Germany.” And that is exactly what he did. And to make sure, he made private school, parochial school and home education illegal. “Recalcitrant parents were warned that their children would be taken away from them and put in orphanages or other homes unless they enrolled[4] [in the government schools].” (Sound familiar?) But Hitler was certainly ahead of his time. In 1983, John Dunphy, yet again another writer for The Humanist magazine, reiterated that what the public schools are secretly fighting unaware parents for are the minds and immortal souls of their children: “The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new – the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism.”[5]

And let us not forget about this generation’s leader of the pack: The National Education Association. Dr. John Goodland wrote a report for the NEA in which he said, “Our goal is behavioral change. The majority of our youth still hold to the values of their parents and if we do not resocialize them to accept change, our society may decay.”[6] [emphasis mine]

Reading, writing and arithmetic have had to make way and be replaced by a new value system. Values clarification seems to be the order of the day whether parents want it be or not. (Remember the outcome of the Ninth Circuit Court’s decision.)

“Values Clarification.” It has the sound of the educational system desiring nothing more than to help our youngsters get a handle on right and wrong, doesn’t it? Mary Pride, in her book “The Way Home,” is not one known to beat around the bush. She cuts right to the chase as she puts it this way: “…as the public schools are demanding the right to indoctrinate children in values that may be directly contrary to the parents’. Sex education courses are designed to brainwash children into accepting homosexuality and fornication as ‘valid forms of sexual expression.’ Values clarification classes systematically destroy the Biblical concepts of an absolute right and an absolute wrong. One-world government programs in Social Studies are meant to destroy patriotism, while the study of ‘women’s role in today’s society’ is a front for indoctrination in feminism. Economics courses teach socialism; English teachers assign pornography as required reading; even my high-school gym class featured instruction in occult Yoga techniques.”

Even though I graduated from high school in 1977, I can personally verify nearly everything she listed. In my own experience, my Psychology teacher required us to lay on mats hooked up to monitors that measured our bio rhythms. All in the name of progressive learning. Mann and Dewey would have been so proud.

{Continued...}

[1] John Dewey, My Pedagogic Creed (Washington D. C.: Progressive Education Association, 1897), 17
[2] John Dewey, Characters and Etlents, Popular Essays in Social and Political Philosophy, Vol. II (New York: Holt, 1929), 515
[3] Paul Blanshard, “Three Cheers for Our Secular State,” The Humanist, March/April 1976 (A publication of the American Humanist Assoc., based in Amhurst, New York,), 17
[4] William Shirer, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York, Simon and Schester, 1960), 255
[5] John Dunphy, The Humanist, January/February 1983
[6] Dr. John Goodland, Report to the National Education Association: Schooling for the Future (no date given)