Dr. Voddie Baucham is the father of nine children and a home educator.
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.
By the Rev. Voddie Baucham
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.
[David Tulis on his show today will interview Ray Moore of Exodus Mandate, arguing that Christian people should exit state schools just as the Israelites fled Egypt after God sent the plagues upon Pharaoh and his people. — DJT]
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. America’s schools are among the worst in the industrialized world
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)
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Dr. Voddie Baucham, Jr. is dean of the seminary at African Christian University in Lusaka, Zambia. He, his faithful wife, Bridget, and their seven youngest children made the bold move from the heart of Texas to the heart of Africa in August 2015
