Sunday, October 28, 2007

Educating Our Christian Children

I am reading the book The Harsh Truth About Public School. It is a good book and very well documented. This is what I have come away with so far. Christian children should be taken out of public schools for these reasons:

1. The Chrisitan worldview was taken out of public schools via legal action starting in the 1960's. There is no such thing as a worldview nuetral education system. So when the Christian worldview was taken out, it was slowly and subtly replaced with a Secular Humanist worldview. If you think that 2 hours a week of Bible school and 3 hours a week of family devotionals are going to counteract 30+ hours a week of anti-god, anti-chirstian thought, you are sadly mistaken. Take a look at this quote from page 50.
Even more telling was the response to the following statement: "Because human nature is constantly changing values and ethics will also change. Therefore each generation should be free to adopt moral standards appropriate to their preferences." Only 14.7% of Christian children attending government schools strongly disagreed with this statement, while 74.3% of children attending private Christain schools strongly disagreed.

2. Christian children are overtly taught immoral and anti-biblical information in government schools. Some examples of this include godless evolution, approval of homosexual "marriage", and that children should come up with their own values system. This values system stuff is called "values clarification". An example of values clarification is the DARE program. DARE officers are not supposed to tell children that it is wrong to do drugs. They are supposed to have the child list the "good" and bad points of drug use and decide for themselves. This system of teaching about moral topics like sexuality and drug use completely undermines the authority of God as the one that determines right and wrong.

3. The quality of education at public schools is not very high. I won't go into how far behind we are most "developed" countries in most subjects. I will just mention a couple of quotes from The Harsh Truth about Public Schools.
Page 127
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) found in 2000 that 68% of all American fourth graders cannot read at a proficient level.
Page 150
Consequently, under the TAKS [the standarized test in Texas], a student can pass the high school exit exam, for example, by answering correctly only 25 of 56 math questions, 23 of 50 social studies questions, 41 of 73 reading and English questions, and 27 of 55 science questions."
Did anyone else notice that many of these "pass" scores are lower than 50%?

4. I don't know of a grown-up that would tolerate working in these conditions:
  • 24-32% of the employees had been offered drugs by fellow employees
  • 5-10% of the employees avoid one or more places at work for fear for their own safety
  • 7-9% of the employees had been threatened with a deadly weapon at work this past year

Yet this is the "work environment" that children in government schools are expected to go to everyday. (The above statistics were taken from page 184.)

As I get through the rest of the book, I will write more on my findings.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I look forward to reading this post in it's entirety later. Why? Because I am in the middle of my homeschool day with my kids now! :)

I'll be back.

Treva

Frances Clements said...

Treva,
Thanks for reading when you have a chance. Happy homeschooling!

Living in Memphis said...

Thank you for these posts on government "education." I am a former public school teacher. What you say is true. I am only sorry I did not come to see and understand this earlier. NO Christian should send their child/children to one of these institutions. The world and its system, goals, values are force fed to these usually clueless, passive children. God is mocked, ignored and ridiculed. I once walked into a sixth grade "health" class while the teacher was discussing completely inappropriate terminology - including visual aids - with little boys and girls. I was mortified. Thanks again.

Frances Clements said...

Thanks for stopping by and commenting, Living in Memphis.

It's not about me. said...

Nice site you have here. You may be interested in this essay I found at KHouse: http://www.khouse.org/articles/1999/132/

Blessings

Frances Clements said...

That is a great article. Thanks for the link.