http://www.cambridgestudycenter.com/articles/pubschoolgod.htm
Christians shouldn't stake their futures to such a deity
by Joel Belz
EVEN THOUGH AN UPPITY JUDGE IN CLEVELAND RULED the city's voucher program
illegal and suspended the program, then 72 hours later reversed himself and
let some of the voucher kids go to school, it was bad news. But it wasn't
the worst news last week on the education front.
And the bad news about terrible teacher shortages as New Jersey's public
schools tried to open late in August also wasn't the worst news you could
find about education.
Nor was word about a short teachers' strike in Detroit the Worst.
And the bad news that hundreds of schools were having to add expensive X-ray
scanning devices to their already beleaguered budgets--that too was not the
worst news you could have imagined.
The really bad news in education was that something like 45 million American
youngsters headed back peacefully, and without a whimper of protest from
them or their families, to public-school classrooms to be indoctrinated by
their government For 35 hours every week for the coming school year, those
children's belief and value systems will be shaped by a government-imposed
agenda.
American public education, to be sure, is either broken or approaching it on
several other fronts. Academically, fiscally, behaviorally, in terms of its
facilities, in terms of personnel shortages, in terms of moral shortages--in
all these ways, even die schools that win awards for outstanding achievement
are just getting by. By now, everybody knows it.
But the fundamental breakdown that both precedes and overshadows all these
other disasters is this: If it is wrong for government to run die railroads,
the telephone companies, and the banks--and it is--how is it possibly right
for government to take on the much more delicate and sensitive task of
telling our children what they are to think and believe on a whole host of
issues? And if we are concluding, as we seem to be, that the government
should reduce its role in welfare, mail delivery, and perhaps even
retirement programs, what on earth prompts us to think the one task
government might still be good at is passing on our value system to the next
generation?
It was Thomas Jefferson, of course, who wrote early on in our nation's
history that "To compel any citizen to provide in taxes for the propagation
of that which he disbelieves is both cruel and tyrannical." But if ever
there were a monstrous machine designed to do on a massive scale exactly
what Mr. Jefferson said should never be done, it is the public-school
system.
As such, the public-school movement is a false god. (I take care to
distinguish here between the system itself and the many good people who
remain in that system, whether as teachers, administrators, board members,
or supportive families.)
Many folks believe, I know, that the rapid advent of public schooling in the
United States a century ago was one of our main tickets to much that has
been good in the 20th century. It is commonly accepted that the remarkable
progress we've enjoyed as a modern people is somehow rooted in the
educational thinking of men like Horace Mann and John Dewey.
But what everyone should keep in mind is that from its earliest days, the
public-school idea was much more a social experiment than it ever was an
educational experiment. You do not have to read much of the thinking of the
pioneers in public schooling to know that their great distress was not that
Americans were uneducated (our forbearers could in fact, on average, read
better than Americans can today), but rather that Americans were so
fragmented. Geographically, ethnically, racially, religiously, socially, and
economically, we were too diverse a people to satisfy the early social
engineers. They wanted all of us singing from the same sheet of music- And
the music was theirs.
To be sure, not all of that was bad. The effort almost certainly produced a
kind of national unity we might otherwise have lacked. But it was unity at
great cost-and especially so for Christians. For it was a unity focused
increasingly through the years on the assertion that the God of the Bible
was just one among many options in life. When you preach that long enough,
the God with a capital "G" becomes a god with a lower case "g," and then no
god at all. Taking His position you will often find the one who challenged
Him in the first place.
So how much more audacious can you get than to set up a system of schools
where first you try to deny God His place, then you step in with a full
curriculum of what you think constitutes truth about life, while always
through the whole process you control the court system that decides what can
and cannot be taught in those schools-and whether citizens can spend any of
their educational tax money for any alternatives?
That's why the system is a false god. There may be some who are willing to
stake their futures to such a deity. But Christians should never be among
them.
--
Atheism teaches that there is no God, hence no God-given rights. That
ideology coupled with a system that believed in the superiority of the state
at the expense of the individual was murderously synergistic.
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