The Battle for the Minds

Educators, students, parents, and schools involved in contemporary American education are very much caught up in a battle for the minds of the youth—one side from the left and the other the right.  From the left in this conflict is a type of evangelistic atheism being slanted toward the students, while in conjunction with the politically correct crowd it seeks to cover it all by flying their so-called the flag of peaceful pluralism in what in essence is the battle for the minds of our youth. And the right is presented as out of date and not right!

We had the roaring twenties, and then came the collapse of the thirties. Is there a parallel here in respect to the direction of our nation and our society?  It is not just an economic collapse, however, that is possible, but an educational one as well, as American school children are increasingly faltering despite all the so-called expensive programs seeking to revolutionize primary and secondary education in our public schools.

In the eighty-plus years old October 30, 1929 “Christian Observer” issue, the editor, Dr. David M Sweets, wrote in his editorial notes: “Many questionable things are going on today in social relations.  Some one has expressed amazement that so many so called Christian mothers and fathers, and so many so called Christian boys and girls, under a plea of popular will, can allow so many questionable things to go on in the social world.  This writer says, ‘We need more than anything else, to have some of that old-fashioned quality of backbone, not only in social life, but in politics and business and everywhere else. We need the application of religion to life in the way of having the courage to stand by our convictions.’” I feel this applies even more to us today, over eighty years later, particularly in the “everywhere else” in respect to the education of our youth!   We need that old-fashioned backbone to stand for what is right!  We need voices to speak out to give the warning!

A look at our nation today would very likely make the people of editor Sweets’ day shake their heads in even deeper despair to see how much deeper we have plunged as a society and culture into the progressive idealism that seeks to alter the biblical values basic to our Judeo-Christian culture and are basically cultivating an undisciplined corruption, so avidly displayed in so much of our media and society as an whole. Without question, I feel, that one of the areas where this courage to take a stand and speak out is particularly in respect to the education of our youth.  Many are doing this by homeschooling their children.

Dr. Voddie Baucham works to help parents educate their children in a Christ-centered way and has a presentation, “The Centrality of the Home in Evangelism and Disciple,” where he seeks to show the importance of developing godly discipline in the children at young ages, and to warn about leaving the discipline up the public school educators. Dr. Baucham persuasively argues that Christian parents need to take the initiative in their children’s education and stop turning them over to the anti-God environment of the government school. Using Scripture, statistics, and sound reasoning, Dr. Baucham powerfully makes the case that whoever controls the schools does indeed control the world. His call is but one of the many calling for home-schooling, as it seems the government is increasingly seeking to subtract Judeo-Christian influences from public education.

There is the call from scripture to instruct the youth in every way to love and faithfully belong to God, as it says in Deuteronomy 6:4-7 “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD: And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.”

The yeast that made the freedom we have in America rise came from our Christian heritage, for here is the true freedom to grasp for, in, and through God, as the Being of Being, as the bible presents him. It opens the door to an endless quest of knowledge, as we can know God, and he knows all things and gives us the true “knowledge of good and evil” from his perspective, not from our own distorted destructive vantage points!

Many Christian parents are willing to see the great danger of the increasing problems and attacks against Christianity and Christian principles developing in our public schools and are turning to home-schooling. The family is the central unit of human society, and one of the basic elements of this is the training and educating the youth.  The basic education of the children has been throughout the ages has been primarily from the nuclear family.  The bible says to “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”(Proverbs 22:6)  When the families not only train their children in the things of God, but in other education as part of it, appropriate discipline and learned takes shape.  Achievement excels!

Dr. Baucham well observes in his presentation, “The Culture Wars” that: “For years, our children have been robbed of a moral society that is engrained with spiritual doctrine, biblical principles and Christian directives. Secular organizations have rabidly gnawed at the foundations of our country’s Christian beginnings, leaving in its place a society bent on being devoid of the God who can rule and reign in the hearts of man…For decades, Secular America and Christian America have been engaged in a bitter battle over the minds of our school-age children.  The classroom is the minefield of our century. Humanism, secularism, atheism, rampant sexual perversion and historical revisionism are just a few of the missiles launched daily at our children.”

“Historical revisionism” can be observed as an intentional effort to falsify or skew past events for specific motives. The liberal mindset or progressivism sees one goal of education as the quest to free young minds from the traditional mores and moral codes of the past and to shift more toward an education that harmonizes more with Marxism, socialism, and materialism.  I know when I was reared in the forties and fifties the curriculum was far different than, when I began to teach in the seventies where so much of the focus was on the affirmation of all the cultures of the world with the underlying motive to cultivate a critical eye toward the individualism cultivated in the Western world, an individualism that called for individual responsibility!

Joyce Burges, who affirms Christian commitment in education, is the co-founder of the National Black Home Educators, an organization that empowers parents to educate their children for excellence, wrote an article, “My View:  Home-schooling: Marching to the beat of a different drummer.” published  in Schools of Thought March 15, 2012 tells of her experiences saying: “I learned many things during the first years of teaching my children. I didn’t realize the pressure we were under until we were set free of the educational “mess” of which they were part: The prepackaged curriculum, the one-size-fits-all model, the bullying and the negative socialization.  Home-schooling allowed us to discover and experience pure, superior learning and a customized learning environment.”

Yes, the public schools very often seem to follow the philosophy that one size fits all, to mold each and all into a certain pattern, a pattern that can kill creative thinking and a pattern that in subtle ways attacks the moral discipline that is vital to good education.  The Lord Jesus taught, “If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; And ye shall know the truth, If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.” (John 8:31b, 32, 36) The battle is raging in public school education, but, Praise God, many parents have the courage to make the choice of home-schooling as one way to bring their children through this with a positive education without much of the negative baggage from the battlefield of public education.

We learn as individuals, not a group. A six-year-old Virginia girl goes to the Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee after being crowned the 34th Prince William County Spelling Bee champion. Lori Anne, who is home-schooled, travels with her parents to Washington, D.C., for the June 1, 2012 Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee, believed to be the nation’s oldest academic competition.  But, I wager to say that if she had been in a public school, she might have well completed her assignments in spelling each day and then set there bored, waiting for the more slow students to catch up.  We might be able to learn with groups, but knowledge is not learned by the group; rather it is learned by individuals. What a waste it could have been, but her parents had the courage to do what the public schools can’t do.  Her parents took her off the battlefield and let her learn, as she was able!

by Joe Renfro, Ed.D., Educational Columnist, Radio Evangelist, Retired Teacher and Pastor, 5931 West Avenue, Lavonia, Georgia 30553, 706-356-4173 , joerenfro@windstream.net
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