Education: A War of Worldviews
Philsosphy of Life
It has been said, “the philosophy of the classroom in this generation will be the philosophy of life in the next generation.†The educational system in America is being used to influence young minds to reject the Christian worldview and accept secular human-ism dogma. Our earliest founding fathers understood this. That’s why, after building homes and churches, they established educa-tional institutions with a biblical worldview: Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Dartmouth.
Expelled: No Academic Choice Allowed
Recently the State of California has declared open war on home-school families. California passed a law providing that home-schooling is illegal unless the teacher in the home is certified to teach at the grade level being taught. Now the State of Tennessee has joined the war. The State Board of Education has “invalidated diplomas” from religious based schools that are home-school affiliated.
The Tennessee Board of Education ruled that when a job requires a diploma, home school affiliated diplomas will be unacceptable. Yet, in spite of this, home school students in Tennessee routinely perform better than public school students on standardized tests and in college. The Board claims it does not know what home school students are being taught, but with increased frequency studies show public school students are not learning what they are taught.
Engaged in a War of Worldviews
We are engaged in a war of worldviews: state boards of education are trying to shut down alternatives to government schools. Home Schools and Christian Schools are rooted in a biblical worldview. Home schoolers and Christian School students are being taught the Genesis Record of Origins and a respect for people and property; they are developing a culture of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness or destiny. Today’s Public or Government Schools are rooted in a secular worldview. Young people in government schools are being indoctrinated with Darwinian Evolutionism in science, with revisionism in history, and socialism and Marxism in economics. These doctrines do not respect people or property. Young people in government schools are developing a culture of death, big government regulations, and lose of our freedoms in our personal lives. This is unacceptable!
Academic Freedom
All 50 states should enact an education policy that allows parents freedom of choice to send their children to private or religious schools, and/or home-school their children with or without a college degree or teacher certification.
Are you smarter than a homeschooler? Probably not!
Home Schoolers Score Higher
According to a report by the Home School Legal Defense Association, for a decade now, the composite score on the ACT college entrance exam for home-schooled students has been higher than the national average. The 2006 statistics show the trend continuing. Homeschoolers receive a classic education in which they learn the three standard R’s—reading, writing, and arithmetic, as well as respect, responsibility, and how to do research.
Repeal the Department of Education Organization Act of 1979 (Public Law 96-88)
The Federal Department of Education (ED) in Washington doesn’t work because of one important principle: the Federal government has no business being in the business of education. It’s counterproductive to good education. Our present education system is a bad system. The government has failed miserably in educating our young people, because that’s not government’s job.
Good Education: Our First Line Of Defense
An educated citizenry is America’s first line of defense. But our young people today are being cheated out of a good education. Putting more money into the present educational system is not the solution to raising the low academic scores and bad behavioral problems in government schools. A secular agenda has produced moral relativism, resulting in a consistent and intentional academic “dumbing down†of students, far-left programs that are anti-Christian, anti-American, and anti-free enterprise, and that promote an absence of student discipline.
Failing Public Schools
Parents and local school boards are responsible to develop a learning system that works, replacing the old broken system with what the founding fathers originally intended. Public schools graduate a disappointing percentage of their entering freshman on time. African-American males who drop out of high school face a high percentage unemployment rate in their 20s, and a good possibility of going to jail.
Noah Webster (1758-1843)
Noah Webster was a remarkable man. He was among the first to call for the Constitutional Convention and was responsible for the copyright and patent protection clause found in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution. Moreover, Webster was a master of word usage, learning over twenty languages and compiling America’s first dictionary that defined some 70,000 words.
In 1828, at the age of 70, Noah Webster published his Ameri-can Dictionary of the English Language in two quarto (having four leaves to the sheet) volumes containing 70,000 entries. Webster expressed the convictions of the earliest foundations when he maintained that “Education without the Bible is useless.â€
Webster understood the connection between physical liberty and liberty of thought. He further understood that the meanings of words played a key role in a person’s ability to develop a sound system of knowledge and principles based on unchanging absolutes. He also recognized the necessity of preserving the connection to our heritage of Liberty, as well as the failures of former systems of government and philosophy before the founding of our Constitutional Republic.
Words Have Meaning
Today, most parents have adopted the false premise that facts are neutral. They believe it doesn’t matter how words are defined or who teaches math, science, and history, because facts are facts. The humanists took advantage of this type of thinking by gradually shaping and controlling education in terms of materialist assumptions.
Ideas Have Consequences
History records that education has been used as a vehicle for social change from Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler, to secular humanism and radical Islam. Indoctrinators with a secular worldview understand that education is where the war of ideas is fought.
Training the Next Generation of Leaders
If Evangelicals and conservatives are serious about securing the future for our children, they must understand the nature of the war that is being fought in the classroom five days a week; a war of worldviews. Remember, whoever controls America’s schools rules the nation.