Category: Government Schools

http://christwire.org/2011/08/is-homeschool-best-for-your-christian-child/

Any experienced non Christian parent is worried about what the children of Christians may be exposed to while attending home school. They often ask themselves, “Isn’t it time that we forced those children into the enlightened classrooms of our public schools.” Don’t those people know how they are ruining their children and that their children are better raised by strangers then by fundamentalist parents? Recently someone asked me to list the advantages my children have over a child educated by homeschooling Christian Nazis.

Here is my list,

1.) My child learns how to work in groups and how to get along with others. The public schools have taught them to rely on the group and to find their identity in the group. Why, just last week, little Lou-Ann came home and said that her peers at the school had decided to do something different as a group and together had decided to have a “Dress as a chaste and modest lady” day. I thought that was so cute and indicative of how Lou-Ann and her peers have learned how to work in groups. No more of the independent thinking that gets in the way of group progress.

2.) My girls learn how to put prophylactics on cucumbers and bananas. I find safety and cleanliness in food preparation to be important to me and so I think it is wonderful how the public school takes up home economics in the Kitchen and is proactive in protecting vegetables and fruit from Sudden Tainting Disease (STD’s).

3.) I love the creative new vocabulary my children learn in school. My boys now affectionately refer to me as (sniff sniff) Dad’s “Ho,” (doubtless short for my given name “Hortensia”) and the girls have taken to affectionately calling their Father, “pimp” (I think it is short for “paterfamilias”). Even I have picked up some of the kids language as when I am in a hurry filling out forms I simply put in “Ho,” when asked my name.

4.) I have come to appreciate the body art that my children learn at school. I’ve learned from my children the improvement upon the body beautiful that a hole in the ear can be or Chinese lettering across the chest. And my darling girl put the cutest little serpent on her right calf.

5.) The teachers have become special to me and my children, and boy do they love the kids. Why just last week I saw the History teacher giving my 13 year old Lisa an affectionate hug goodbye. He even kissed her but as he is from France, I know that was just a cultural demonstration. Also the 22 year old new lady English teacher has a very close relation to my 18 year old son. Just last week my husband and I came home from a business trip and she was at the house conjugating verbs with my son. Such dedication. Before that they were studying his reading assignment in D. H. Lawerence’s “Lady Chatterly’s Lover.”

6.) My children have learned that other cultures are just as valuable as their great great grandparents culture. They have learned the beauty of gangsta rap is just as full of rapture as the beauty of Bach or Mozart. They have learned that pants worn around the knees, thus revealing colorful boxer shorts, is just as stylish as a Tuxedo. They have learned that burning widows with their dead husbands is just as acceptable as letting widows stay alive after their husband’s death. They have learned that the definition of “theft,” or “loose” is culturally variant. They have learned that since one can find sodomy in animal cultures therefore we know that sodomy among humans is a beautiful thing. Funny thing is that they’ve especially come to see the beauty in Jewish culture. Viva la culture.

7.) The schools have made my children very smart. They have learned to read road signs if I slow down enough and they have learned how give change back for a quarter. They have learned that the world is melting. They have learned that Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt were our greatest Presidents. They have learned how the white man has oppressed the world. They have learned about six million Jews being oven baked (Why, they even watched Schindler’s List in class), and they learned about how gays and lesbians, like the Jews, have been oppressed. They have learned how Christians have often been behind world wide oppression.

8.) The schools have excelled at teaching the children civics. They have learned that the Constitution is a document of negative powers, and being taught to be positive people they have learned that being negative is a bad thing and so the Constitution needs to be changed. They have learned that the State always has the people’s best interest at heart and they have learned that people have rights (health care, homes, food, peace, safety from guns, etc.) for which a good government must provide.

9.) They have learned how to support one another in grief. The school has taught them well to be sympathetic in the midst of the multiple suicides of their peers. Down this line, the school has taught them not to be judgmental and that they should support their peers who are sexually active with dead people, with farm animals and with dead farm animals. My children are the most non judgmental people I know. They will support anything.

10.) The school doesn’t get into all that “god stuff.” We pray at every meal (God is great, God is good, thank you God for this meal) and we don’t need the schools worrying about God. Even our preacher agrees with us on this score.

We are very thankful for our children attending public schools and we earnestly desire that home schooled children could experience all of this.

“The school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends. Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.”

John Dewey
My Pedagogic Creed

1.) In order to interpret this correctly the reader must understand that Dewey was a Hegelian in his philosophy. Hegelians believed that the State is the idea of universal Spirit in the external manifestation of human Will and that the universal Spirit was God becoming. Hegel said,

“The State is the absolute reality and the individual himself has objective existence, truth and morality only in his capacity as a member of the State.”

Simply put, for Hegel and later his disciple Dewey, the State was God. This is important to understand for Dewey’s education is not child centered but state centered. We see this in the quote above with the repeated references to the word “social” serving as the adjective for the subsequent noun. For Dewey, the Hegelian, “social institution”, “social processes” and “social ends” means “state institution,” “state processes,” and “state ends.”

This is where the gulf of misunderstanding between modern parents and the educational system begins. Parents believe a child goes to school to learn skills to use in the adult world, but Dewey states specifically that education is “not a preparation for future living.” The Dewey educational system does not accept the role of developing a child’s talents but, contrarily, only to prepare the child to function as a unit in an organic whole — in blunt terms a cog in a wheel of an organic society. Whereas many Americans have moral values rooted in the individual, the value of the school system are rooted in the Hegelian concept of the State as the absolute.

That Dewey is channeling Hegel can be seen by yet another quote from Dewey,

“Education consists either in the ability to use one’s powers in a social direction or else in ability to share in the experience of others and thus widen the individual conscienceness to that of the race”

In each case the individual is lost in either the left wing Hegelian collective of the State (i.e. — social direction) or the right wing Hegelian collective of the race.

The point to be taken in all this is that modern education is geared towards training the child to be a cog in the machinery of a State that has become so overarching that the society, and every individual in it, is identified with the State. When children go to school they are being trained against Christianity which opposes the State as God.

2.) When Dewey says that “education is a process of living” he means to communicate that education is to the end of molding little people into the stream of societal consciousness. Students, in modern education, are not trained to think critically, or prepare for future living, they are trained in how to be good citizens. In contemporary education public schooling has the teleology of creating Borg. It does not have the teleology of training independent thinkers.

http://www.mott-multi-media.com/samples/HBCCatalogCover.php

“Education… now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and ‘fans,’ driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve ‘education’ but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and to allow and help people to shape themselves.”

John Holt — (1923-1985)
American author and educator
Proponent of homeschooling, and pioneer in youth rights theory

Note the photo in the link above. This photo was chosen to serve as the cover of a homeschooling curriculum catalog. It is supposed work within the reader a sense of nostalgia for a more wholesome time.

The idea that education should take place in the shadow of the cross is something we can salute. Having said that though, the picture

1.) Has children gathering in a school. Much of the Christian community believes that the Scriptures teach that parents are responsible for their children’s education. Why would a homeschooling company reinforce the idea of public schooling by using a public school (even if nostalgic) as their photo for their curriculum catalog?

2.) Note the predominance of the flag. It is placed above the shadow of the cross. It is preeminent and is what draws the viewers eye. Of course in flag decorum the highest flag is the flag with the most honor.

3.) Since it is the State, and the humanist agenda it is pushing, which homeschoolers are struggling against, why does the flag have such a prominent place? Is there something of a hint here of wrapping the cross in the flag? Christians need to realize the dangers of reducing Christianity to a civil religion. The Cross is not Red, White, and Blue. Patriotism — love for country — in our current climate might better be represented by having a photo without a flag so prominently displayed.

4.) The danger that the photo might represent is to reinforce in people’s minds the centrality of the State. By combining this version of what might be called “Judeo-Christianity” with homeschooling what might end up being produced by homeschoolers is little homeschool Statists who are better Statists than the pagan children statists created by the Government schools since our homeschool Statists have become convinced that Christianity and Patriotism are two streams that flow together. Let us say it plainly. Our children, in this climate, ought not to be educated unaware of the designs of the current post Christian West as those designs are incarnated in the State. In point of fact, our children should be educated to know why the humanist American state, needs to be resisted.

During this graduation season what might we look for in homeschool graduates?

1.) Your children graduated knowing the words “catechism,” “confession,” or “creed.”

Whether you know it or not you have catechized your child, even if you have done so without a set catechism. The advantage of education your child with a set catechism (Heidelberg, Westminster, etc.) is that they will have a well grounded understanding in their undoubted catholic Christian faith. Children who are not catechized regarding their Christianity are typically (allowing for the occasional exception) not grounded in their faith and are apt to surrender their uninformed Christianity with the first gale wind of an opposing faith system.

2.) Your children know that all education is driven by some faith system consideration and is what it is because of the theology from which it flows.

3.) Your children know that Thomas Jefferson desired as the motto for the seal of this nation, “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.”

4.) Your children know that none of our founding documents teach that this nation is “indivisible.”

5.) Your children make a connection between 1 million dead babies every year and the impact that reality should have on their “patriotism.”

6.) Your children are aware of the concept of “States Rights,” and understand that the States were originally intended to serve as check and balance to the Federal government.

7.) Your children are epistemologically self conscious and are on the road to becoming ever more so.

8.) When asked about “Calvin,” your children know the difference between “John Calvin,” and “Calvin Klein.”

First, Calvinism is the purest expression of the Christian faith and even if you disagree with Calvinism your children should be aware of how Calvinism has influenced all of Protestant Christianity.

Even if you dislike Reformed theology a good education would include information about Calvin since Calvin was considered by the world renowed German Historian Leopold Van Ranke to be “virtually the founder of America.” Historian George Bancroft could say of Calvinists, “The fanatic for Calvinism was a fanatic for liberty, and, in the moral warfare for freedom, his creed was his most faithful counselor and his never failing support. The Puritans … planted … the undying principles of Democratic freedom.” Should your child graduate clueless about the principles of Calvinism that informed both our Republican form of government as well as the Christian faith soil out of which that Republican form of government flowered your child is not educated.

9.) Your children were never offered the blue pill

Reality is not what we are fed by the major media outlets in this country. A complete education will make your child aware that if they want the truth they will have to dig beyond the mainstream publishing houses, media networks, and WORLD magazine. Truth can be found but it is not something that will be found without searching for it.

10.) Your children graduated realizing that many more Christians than Jews were slaughtered by 20th Century Tyrants

The biggest manipulation ploy of the second half of the 20th century is the constant reminder of the Jewish deaths during WW II. Those deaths were tragic and yet their numbers pale in comparison with the number of Christians who were slaughtered by Jews as they were key leaders in the Bolshevik revolution. In the Ukraine alone millions upon millions of Christian Kulaks were slaughtered by the Communists. The Christian Armenian were slaughtered by the Turks. The 20th century has been a blood bath for the martyrs of the Christian faith. Your children should know this by the time they hit 18.

11.) Your children realize that Democrats and Republicans are two wings of the same bird of prey.

Both of our major parties are working in concert towards the same end as designed by the New World Order.

When considering contemporary conservatism as embodied by the Republican party both parents and graduating seniors should be familiar with this quote.

This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt bath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always, when about to enter a protest, very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance. The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy from having nothing to whip. No doubt, after a few years, when women’s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.

~~R. L. Dabney. “Women’s Rights Women”

12.) And most important of all your children will know that God is King, and because His Kingdom is Spiritual it is therefore concrete and growing in history, and consequently in Him we live and move and have our being.