Joshua;
I hear your point about secular. I do not understand it to mean neutral.
Happy to replace secular with anti-Christian. Are antichristian governments incapable of providing something good?
Bret responds,
As we start here would you mind telling me how old you are? Are you a school teacher yourself? Did you (do you) send your children to government schools?
As to your query … Yes, they are capable.
Now, let’s talk about degrees of anti-Christ. What degree of anti-Christ are we currently at in our government schools?
If, we as a people, were only a wee bit removed from Christian education one might argue that one could navigate around the problems. However, if you will do the reading of numerous books I recommended in the last post you would see that it’s not just that we are off a wee bit. The whole agenda is educate in such a way as to create non-thinking clones. It’s all about command and control. If I want children to be free to think as mature adults I will not want them to attend government schools. Indeed, I am of the conviction that to do so is child abuse.
Joshua writes,
This is where your reasoning is taking you. All schools are religious. If they are not Christian they are antichristian. Therefore they do nothing but harm.
Bret responds,
If I threw children in a pond w/ crocodiles some of them might learn how to swim really well. Throwing them all in the pond would therefore not necessarily do “nothing but harm.” But would it be wise therefore to throw them into a pond with crocodiles because some good might possibly come?
You’re argument here is “let us sin that grace may increase.” Because some good might happen let us ignore the 1st commandment and have our children catechized into a false religion.
Joshua writes,
Cue the anabaptists: all governments are antichristian. They can only do harm. Christians should have nothing to do with them.
Bret responds,
Cue the 1st commandment. “Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods Before Me.” Current secondary education catechizes children into a false religion and makes them servants of false gods. As such Biblical Christian in this climate should have nothing to do with them unless they want to destroy God’s covenant seed.
Do you really think that God would’ve had the Children of Israel attend the schools of Canaan in order to learn the Canaanite ways?
Finally, virtually all Christian do have something to do with government schools. They support them with their taxes.
Joshua writes,
But if antichristian governments are still a legitimate institution of God, then they can provide things of real benefit to everyone, Christians included.
Bret responds,
Yep … just like Stalin and Mao provided things of real benefit to everyone, Christian included.
Joshua writes,
The Church has benefited from inventions of the Cainites, Moses and Israel from the learning of the Egyptians, the apostolic church (at times) from the law and order of the Romans.
Bret responds,
Sure… we should plunder the Egyptians because it is all ours to begin with. But as we are plundering them and taking back what was our to begin with we should not become Egyptians.
However, currently Christians don’t have to attend the Baphomet Elementary school in order to access education. Have you heard of this thing called “the information age?” Never have we lived in a time when schools were more unnecessary.
Joshua writes,
To accurately compare public schools and homeschooling, you have to compare how Christian students do at home and how they do at school. A parent who homeschools is going to instill a value for education in their children. But that value enables the same child to do well in public school.
Bret responds,
But I don’t want a child to do well in Government school since that means they will be lapping up a false religion. If Christian children have to attend government school it is my prayer that they will do really really poorly.
Joshua writes,
Your analysis of schools is misguided if you compare children of highly dedicated homeschooling parents with children of parents who don’t care. A large majority of students in schools have parents who don’t care. Every teacher I’ve talked to says that the number one factor in academic success is parental involvement.
Bret responds,
I don’t want government schooled children to have academic success. I want them to do poorly. I don’t want them to learn to think like pagans.
I am awash in a culture filled with professional people, including “Christians” who did well in government schools. I try to avoid them as much as I can.
Do exceptions exist? Absolutely! But I don’t gamble when I know the house is overwhelmingly against me.
Now, you have repeatedly accused me of being Anabaptist. I can only plead with you to cease being pagan in your thinking.
You might want to look up the Reformed doctrine of the Anti-thesis and consider that subject in light of our conversation.
This Joshua fellow seems to have a deep interest in defending public schools, deep enough I doubt it is just theoretical. It reminds me of libertarians who *vehemently* defend open borders or queerness. And by vehemently, I mean not just a casual/whatever toleration of it as is common in our apostate age, but advocacy that those evils are a good thing. Why argue so strongly for it unless you or your family are affected by it?
I agree Joe… that’s why I asked him a bit about himself. He sounds so invested.
I appreciate your patience with Joshua and hope it bears fruit.
It’s appropriate to be gentle in this case, given your limited information.
It points out to me that it’s good I am not a pastor, because I may have responded out of annoyance with him because his questions seem (just my take) disingenuous and passive-aggressive. He’s not asking to learn, but to win and play “gotcha.”
I think I heard from Greg Koukl a phrase, ” some folks are asking questions because they are looking for an explanation but others are looking for an excuse, or exit.”
Why pose accusations in question form when he’s got such a deeply entrenched view? My guess is that a woman, or women, in his life are PS employees and they center his heart, and he doesn’t want to give them less worship, but he’s struggling with the anticipated fight and sacrifice with his wife/MIL/fiance/Mom if he stands up for reality and truth.
I hope this ends up with him asking for help, so the fight will be less overwhelming. If his MIL is a principal and his wife a PS teacher, then I too would dread his situation of coming to an awareness of how wrong they are and the shrieks that will follow.
Thank you Kurt for your encouragement.
You’re take about this chap being driven by a “Karen” in his life might be right. I definitely think you are right about the passive aggressive nature of his questioning.
Thank you for commenting.
What ridiculous surmisings. My devoted and godly mother stayed at home to homeschool her children. My wife was homeschooled too, and homeschooled our children until recently. She would have willingly kept homeschooling if that is what I wanted.
We were part of the second generation homeschoolers, homeschooled and homeschooling, and if you look around you will find some just like us: noticing the pitfalls that weren’t so obvious 20 years ago.
We men should be masculine and discerning but we should also have a little of that charity that thinketh no evil.
It is required of me to think evil of people who are advocating for evil. By advocating for Gov’t schools you are advocating for pure, unmitigated and untarnished evil.
Nope, married to a conservative Southern Christian, therefore a lady who is smart, feminine and supportive in every way. Devoted mother, and we have no relatives working in public education.
Just some quick points for now:
1. Homeschoolers fall into the error of univariable analysis. “Literacy is bad at 63% of schools. Since they are run by the government, the only reason for poor literacy must be the fact that they are government run.” No, to meaningfully understand the data, you have to dissect it. What is the literacy rate when you eliminate all the schools in blue cities? What is the literacy rate of a public school that has the same demographics as Christian schools – usually white, middle-class two parent families?
2. You can read books on the state of public education, read all the bad headlines, but you still don’t really know how things are going at the school half an hour away from you. The PhDs in the Dept. of Education, or in school administration might announce all kinds of LBGT stuff that is going to get taught, but it often doesn’t happen. Teachers quietly shelve it, because they’ve got to get their students ready for next math, physics, English or chemistry test.
3. You can go to school/college with bad students who don’t want to learn anything, but the resources are there if you want to learn. I went to a “conservative” public university in the South. Plenty there who just wanted to party. But a lifetime wouldn’t have been long enough to make use of all the resources there – including calculus, science, logic professors who professed faith in Christ and were ready to spend hours giving one-on-one tutoring.
4. Public school students spend about 25% of their waking hours at school. Homeschoolers, after you add up time at homeschooling co-ops, athletics programs at the local high school, and the workplace, might spend 15% of their time in the same kind of environment, hearing and seeing all the trash you rightly condemn.
5. If the child comes from devoted Protestant Christians, he will likely value education like all Protestants once did. He will easily get into honours classes, where they study Newton’s physics (a professing Christian, at least), electricity theories of Faraday (another Christian), and the medical guy who invented anethesthics (also a Christian). He will study advanced math – exercises in pure logic, and “the language of God’s universe,” as one Christian mathematics teacher in the homeschooling movement put it. If you want to exercise dominion over the earth as commanded, you need to know its language, he says.
6. Public education is constantly producing useful studies – just look at all the academic papers cited in “Who is My Neighbour?” There’s a paradox in higher education that is often missed: the LGBT communist profs always making headlines and pushing globalisation, vs. the researchers who are publishing paper after paper demolishing the assumptions of those profs, eg. more diversity means less social trust, interracial marriages more likely to fail, interracial children less healthy and less fertile when adults etc etc.
8. Our children should do what Paul did as a child: study pagan thinkers. Then they could go to Mars Hill and point out their contradictions like Paul did. “You have all these altars to all kinds of gods, but your pagan poet says you are the offspring of one God who doesn’t need anything.”
9. Michael Spangler just posted a very good analysis of homeschooling: it produces domesticated, effeminate young men, because they’re at home all the time with little kids and a female as their main teacher. They’re not getting educated well, they don’t have a public spirit, they develop a bunker mentality that lasts well into adulthood.
10. The Roman Empire supposedly became Christian or at least tolerated Christianity when only approx 15% of the people were Christian. Lots of school districts have more than this amount. If Christians exercised their rights, they could make big changes. The problem is the Christian parents don’t want to confront the nonsense. They just put up with it or take their kids out and hide. That’s a lot easier than seeking grace to boldly but meekly confront teachers and principles about objectionable material.
11. A lot of Christian parents don’t take the LGBT crowd head on, because they are shaky on it themselves. They attend churches that say homosexual acts are sinful, but the orientation is not. They let their kids watch movies, listen to songs, spend hours on social media where this stuff is promoted non stop. Their kids are going to get swept away no matter where they go to school.
12. High school kids are getting more conservative, according to some polls. At my children’s high schools, PRIDE displays get vandalized. Most despise the LGBT crowd. It’s against nature, so they naturally hate that whole agenda.
JA writes,
1. Homeschoolers fall into the error of univariable analysis. “Literacy is bad at 63% of schools. Since they are run by the government, the only reason for poor literacy must be the fact that they are government run.” No, to meaningfully understand the data, you have to dissect it. What is the literacy rate when you eliminate all the schools in blue cities? What is the literacy rate of a public school that has the same demographics as Christian schools – usually white, middle-class two parent families?
Bret responds,
You really seem not to get the macro picture Josh. Government schooling, by design, prohibits connecting what we know from how we know what we know. Government schools, by force of law, does not allow education to teach Christian ontology, epistemology, anthropology, axiology, or teleology. This means the foundation upon which everything the government schools sit upon is anti-Christ. As such, it is irrelevant if some government schools exist in a white, middle-class two parent family and if because of that those students escape some of the even worse outcomes that are characteristic in blue states. It’s all premised on anti-Christ presuppositions and you seem to not be able to understand that in our conversation. Maybe you have an interest in not understanding?
JA writes,
2. You can read books on the state of public education, read all the bad headlines, but you still don’t really know how things are going at the school half an hour away from you. The PhDs in the Dept. of Education, or in school administration might announce all kinds of LBGT stuff that is going to get taught, but it often doesn’t happen. Teachers quietly shelve it, because they’ve got to get their students ready for next math, physics, English or chemistry test.
Bret responds,
Oh, I see… so all the books I’ve cited from all the authors I’ve read (some like Gatto criticizing Government schools as a teacher of the year recipient and as from inside the workings of the government schools) don’t really know how things are going on, but you do. Sorry … I’ll cast my lot with Gatto and wait for your book that details how Gatto (and others) have been wrong.
Secondly here, you expect me to take your word that “it often doesn’t happen.” Sorry, I don’t believe you. I might believe “it sometimes doesn’t happen,” but I don’t believe that it “often doesn’t happen,” and I doubt you have anything to back that spurious claim up.
JA writes,
3. You can go to school/college with bad students who don’t want to learn anything, but the resources are there if you want to learn. I went to a “conservative” public university in the South. Plenty there who just wanted to party. But a lifetime wouldn’t have been long enough to make use of all the resources there – including calculus, science, logic professors who professed faith in Christ and were ready to spend hours giving one-on-one tutoring.
BLMc responds,
Again… more anecdotal statements and mere assertions on your part.
If it is only about resources being there, one doesn’t need to attend government schools because there has never been a time when resources are more present outside of the government schools. Indeed, it is kind of what makes your end of the conversation moot. The resources are so ubiquitous in our information age that we hardly need to send God’s covenant seed to brain dead teachers in dreadful peer settings in order for them to be educated. Indeed, sending them there is in pursuit of anti-education.
I notice you love to talk about the exceptions as opposed to the rule. The rule teaches, as the stats show, that American government schooled children test at the bottom when compared to students from other countries.
JA writes,
4. Public school students spend about 25% of their waking hours at school. Homeschoolers, after you add up time at homeschooling co-ops, athletics programs at the local high school, and the workplace, might spend 15% of their time in the same kind of environment, hearing and seeing all the trash you rightly condemn.
BLMc responds
This argument is “because Homeschoolers are not as superior as they might be therefore they should be even more inferior.”
JA writes,
5. If the child comes from devoted Protestant Christians, he will likely value education like all Protestants once did. He will easily get into honours classes, where they study Newton’s physics (a professing Christian, at least), electricity theories of Faraday (another Christian), and the medical guy who invented anethesthics (also a Christian). He will study advanced math – exercises in pure logic, and “the language of God’s universe,” as one Christian mathematics teacher in the homeschooling movement put it. If you want to exercise dominion over the earth as commanded, you need to know its language, he says.
Bret responds,
And all as presupposing a humanist (and so anti-Christian) starting point.
JA writes,
6. Public education is constantly producing useful studies – just look at all the academic papers cited in “Who is My Neighbour?” There’s a paradox in higher education that is often missed: the LGBT communist profs always making headlines and pushing globalisation, vs. the researchers who are publishing paper after paper demolishing the assumptions of those profs, eg. more diversity means less social trust, interracial marriages more likely to fail, interracial children less healthy and less fertile when adults etc etc.
Bret responds,
The case made by “Who Is My Neighbor” (the whole book) taken as a whole only reinforces my case. If you want to escape your children becoming egalitarian don’t send them to Government schools which is the seedbed for all things egalitarian. Indeed, Government schools are completely premised on egalitarianism. That some children come out having, by God’s grace alone, triumphant over the system is not a rational reason why we should send Christian children into a system that is, by design, thoroughly pagan. You are arguing here that we should go on sinning because grace has been present in a few cases.
JA writes,
8. Our children should do what Paul did as a child: study pagan thinkers. Then they could go to Mars Hill and point out their contradictions like Paul did. “You have all these altars to all kinds of gods, but your pagan poet says you are the offspring of one God who doesn’t need anything.”
BLMc responds,
How many Pharisees who studied pagan thinkers tried to kill Paul? You take one example of God’s marvelous grace and then try to argue from that one instance that therefore we are allowed to raise our children as pagans.
Joshua, the schools are anti-Christ. They are premised upon the anti-Christ foundation that all the wisdom and knowledge is not founded on Christ. This is contrary to God’s revelation which teaches that all the hidden treasures of wisdom and knowledge are known in Christ (Col. 2:3). A child (or adult) cannot be educated with an education that is dedicated to eliminating the God of the Bible as the locus for all knowing.
Then, of course, one has to add in all the social diseases that arises from putting children in a vast peer setting. Postmen writes about this in some of his books. You might want to read them. “The Disappearance of Childhood” could be a good place to start.
Joshua writes,
9. Michael Spangler just posted a very good analysis of homeschooling: it produces domesticated, effeminate young men, because they’re at home all the time with little kids and a female as their main teacher. They’re not getting educated well, they don’t have a public spirit, they develop a bunker mentality that lasts well into adulthood.
BLMc responds,
Shrug … just because Rev. Spangler writes something doesn’t make it true. It sounds like it is all anchored in anecdotal reasoning and not on proof. Honestly, this just sound like the warmed over nonsensical “but homeschooled children aren’t properly socialized” argument. An odd argument since its inception. Still, I don’t doubt that the above might in some instances be true but on the whole I’d rather have the errors found in homeschooling than the errors found in Government schooling. Similarly, I don’t have a very high opinion of “Christian schools,” though again, I’m sure there are some fine ones out there.
Joshua writes,
10. The Roman Empire supposedly became Christian or at least tolerated Christianity when only approx 15% of the people were Christian. Lots of school districts have more than this amount. If Christians exercised their rights, they could make big changes. The problem is the Christian parents don’t want to confront the nonsense. They just put up with it or take their kids out and hide. That’s a lot easier than seeking grace to boldly but meekly confront teachers and principles about objectionable material.
BLMc responds,
We’ve tried reclaiming the swamp for decades and decades. It’s time to just drain the swamp. See Rushdoony’s “The Messianic Character of American Education.”
Secondly, I seriously doubt that more than 15% of Biblical Christians live in these school districts because if 15% of Biblical Christians did live in these school districts the big changes would’ve been made long ago.
Thirdly, taking their children out is not a matter of hiding. Nice try at poisoning the well there. They take their children out because children are not equipped to withstand or refute the bilge that is characteristic of all Government schools.
As an example… in my little corner of the woods which is largely middle class and white (the standards that you previously mentioned) the Government schools are doing the whole “furrie” thing and the whole Trannie thing and the whole sex education thing.
You’re just massively in error Joshua about all of this. Indeed, for whatever it is worth, you really need to repent for being an advocate for Christians sending God’s covenant seed to anti-Christ government schools. It is sin for you to do this.
Josh writes,
11. A lot of Christian parents don’t take the LGBT crowd head on, because they are shaky on it themselves. They attend churches that say homosexual acts are sinful, but the orientation is not. They let their kids watch movies, listen to songs, spend hours on social media where this stuff is promoted non stop. Their kids are going to get swept away no matter where they go to school.
Bret responds,
So… because parents are rotten therefore it is OK for them to be maximum rotten?
Look, I quite agree that parents are a problem but maybe that is, in part, because the parents attended government schools?
Joshua writes,
12. High school kids are getting more conservative, according to some polls. At my children’s high schools, PRIDE displays get vandalized. Most despise the LGBT crowd. It’s against nature, so they naturally hate that whole agenda.
Bret responds,
When these children become adults with children I’ll then know the general population as gotten “more conservative,” when they refuse to send their children to government schools. Until then, it’s all anecdotal.
Look Joshua… I think we have covered this pretty well and it is clear that we are not making much progress. As such, I don’t know if I will be posting your future protestations. Thanks for being a contestant. There are some lovely parting prizes for some of our contestants who played but didn’t win.