Written by Kirk Smith

We’ve learned several things since President Barack Obama dictatorially demanded that public school restrooms now be co-ed or risk federal funding. The first thing we learned is that in spite of well-intending parents saying their school is “different from all the other schools,” we now know they will all be the same with regard to restroom and locker rooms practices. Follow the money to D.C.

Second, regardless of how sincere Christian teachers are in their desire to bring Christ into the classroom, they are spiritual eunuchs, who were long ago emasculated and their message muted.  To give true testimony of Christ in their classroom is to suffer termination, a risk that is too great for most to take.

Third, local school boards are powerless as Washington D.C. controls every facet of education down to dictating bathroom policy.

Finally, Christian parents are in a showdown with the state with regard to whose will is absolute in the raising of their children, as they seek to answer, “How important is eternity for our children?”

One upset public school parent recently declared, “Obama’s mandate won’t stand!” Of course, this is the same sentiment embodies in an earlier claim that Christianity could not be taken out of the classroom, Obama could not get re-elected, and Mrs. Clinton had no real chance at the White House.  And here we are. Naïveté is a luxury we can no longer afford. The price is way too high.

The Scriptures make it undeniably plain: “A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher” (Luke 6:40). Statistics bear out this truth as the church is losing between 64% – 88% of her professing youth after their first year in college. Others studies reveal that the compromise which leads to this departure begins as early as junior high.

Public school students receive around 15,000 hours of indoctrination in the religion of secular humanism, while Christian parents seek to counteract this avalanche with pizza parties at youth meetings and a thirty-minute weekly sermon. Our children are leaving the faith by the tens of thousands, and we can’t figure out why?

Sadder yet, many will go into eternity unprepared. How long can we Christians elicit the grace of God for our children while sending our children into a culture that we know is spiritually destructive?

How much spiritual carnage do we have to witness before we say, “Enough is enough. This is the last straw. There must be an alternative!”

Not only is there an alternative, it’s been proven to work experientially, statistically, and historically.  It’s called homeschooling.

While homeschooling is not a silver bullet, 94% of homeschooled children do keep the faith of their parents, and 93% stay active in their local church after graduation. These numbers alone should motivate parents to train their impressionable children at home in accordance with Deuteronomy 6.

While many parents feel overwhelmed at the magnitude of this task, there are innumerable resources to help, not the least of which is God.  Ignorance and feelings of inadequacy are no longer justifiable excuses, especially since a parent’s level of education has been found to be a non-factor in their children’s academic success.

I was a public school teacher as was my wife. When we started to homeschool twenty years ago, I shared that I was not anti-public schooling, just pro-homeschooling. That is no longer the case. I know far too much. The public school system is not broken. On the contrary, it is doing exactly what it was designed to do: indoctrinate the next generation into a socialist perspective of voluntary slavery. Consider what educational leader John Dewey wrote:

The moral responsibility of the school and of those who conduct it is to society. [A]part from participation in social life, the school has no moral end or aim. [In religious terminology] the moral trinity of the school [is] the demand for social intelligence, social power, and social interests.

Can the point be made any clearer than that?

I call on all parents who profess the name of Christ to reevaluate their decision to send their children to government schools. We will each stand before God Almighty and have to give an account for the stewardship of our children’s souls. What will we say on that day when we knowingly sent them into a system that rejects His name and teaches doctrines that are diametrically opposed to His Word?

For those of you who feel this tug but don’t know where to start, I want to personally invite you to attend the Illinois Christian Home Educators’ Annual Convention in Naperville, June 2-4. For the past 17 years, my wife and I have made the five-hour trip north in order to be encouraged, instructed, and equipped to raise our children in the fear and admonition of the Lord. For more information and to register, go to www.iche.org and click on the convention icon.

Kirk and Joely Smith have been married since 1991. Kirk graduated from Greenville College, teaching and coaching for two years at the high school level before founding the House of Prayer church in Albion, IL, which he pastored for almost 25 years. Joely graduated from the University of Southern Indiana and taught first grade for two years before the birth of their first child after which she stayed home. 

The Smith family live in southeastern Illinois with their 11 children who range in age from toddler to young adult.  They are looking forward to building new relationships and spreading the home discipleship vision of ICHE to all corners of Illinois.

Education in America was originally the province of parents and churches. “Homeschooling” was the norm from colonial times through the mid-1800’s, and a classic education was the model.

Classical education consisted of the three stages of learning:

• The Grammar Stage — In this stage young children, whose minds are receptive to mass amounts of basic information, learn by memorization. Students learn the numbers, the alphabet, then words — the building blocks for the next stages of learning.
• The Dialectic Stage — In this stage the young students learn to compare and compartmentalize the building blocks. Sentence structure and grammar come into play.
• The Rhetoric Stage — In this third stage, students communicate “the truth of the subjects learned in the dialectic stage through writing, speech, or conversation…The third stage in learning a subject is to use what you’ve learned to solve a problem, write an original paper or speech, or lead a discussion.”

As noted at Classical Conversations: “This is the classical model of education that was used by the great thinkers and leaders of the past, including Aristotle, Plato, C.S. Lewis, and Thomas Jefferson.”

What is stunning is to consider that America’s founders and early settlers often had superior knowledge of the world, languages, and sciences without computers or a Department of Education!

Until approximately 1940, the schools in America adhered to the classic education model, preparing students for college with “classical curriculum [which] included Latin, possibly Greek, often French or German, English, history, mathematics, and some science.”

People may scoff at someone such as my grandmother who only had an eighth grade education. Yet Grandma had had Latin, Algebra, extensive English grammar, and even some Calculus in those eight years. She had a work ethic and, with the help of her husband, my Grandpa Ole, bought and managed businesses and real estate and achieved, to a modest degree, “the American Dream.”

Following 1940, and after World War II, there was a demand for more workers in trades, and fewer students had the money or ability to go on to college. So American education took a turn away from solely classical education, to also providing vocational education, allowing young people to learn a trade, enter apprenticeship programs, and join the ranks of tradesmen and factory production.

But somewhere along the way, the Progressive (think socialist) principles of John Dewey, germinating since the 1920’s, began to take hold. Dewey, like President Wilson, and like modern day Progressives, believed that, rather than giving students facts and the eventual ability to reason and argue, that people should be led by experts. That young people should be molded in such a way that they would acquiesce to suggestions and mandates by the enlightened elitists.

Faith and the Bible had been a foundation of education in America. Noah Webster wrote often on the subject and claimed:

The moral principles and precepts contained in the Scriptures ought to form the basis of all our civil constitutions and laws…All the miseries and evils which men suffer from vice, crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible.

Unfortunately, the Left has continued a quiet, but relentless war on that foundation, often aided by SCOTUS opinions and rulings. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Abington Township School District v. Schempp — decided on June 17, 1963 — “prohibiting school officials from organizing or leading prayers and devotional Bible reading in public schools.”

Though Schempp did not outlaw prayer and Bible reading in schools, but prohibited teachers from leading Bible study or prayer, the 60’s radicals (the latest permutation of Dewey and Wilson’s Progressives) took advantage and schools took a left turn. Gone was the classical education and in its place came a host of programs — sex ed, new math, whole language learning, and revisionist history.

What was the subtle, though potent, effect of all this “new curriculum?” Students were weaned from a reliance on parents and faith standards, from facts and reasoning, and pointed toward reliance on the “enlightened experts.” A new generation of students were raised up to question authority (at least their parents’ and grandparents’ authority) and blindly follow their teachers and profs.

Also, during this time the Federal government began to be more involved in education:

By 1965, the federal government, through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), expanded its involvement beyond areas with explicit defense connections. Importantly, the government did not mention increased federal control over education; rather, funding was the primary justification for this expansion

In 1979, the Department of Education was created, largely at the behest at the National Education Association (NEA). The NEA was, at this point, a new teacher’s union (albeit a very large teacher’s union). When Jimmy Carter was elected President, power over education became further concentrated in Washington.

Jump ahead to 2009, with Obama promising to fundamentally transform America. And one area of transformation was education. The Obama administration proposed criteria to evaluate every state’s education system, and the only way to standardize the education was through Common Core.

What in the world is “Common Core?”

That’s hard to pin down because it can be a different set of standards in different states. Some of the standards are terrible, some not so much.

But the REAL, issue with Common Core? Federalization of education. As written at Heritage:

Why is Common Core problematic? As evidence from both inside and outside the United States makes clear, centralization and control do not work; rather, freedom is the force that sparks educational improvement. Freedom unleashes competition, which, in turn, drives innovation and leads to specialization. The idea that there should be one monolithic set of standards and that everybody should move at the same rate makes no sense, as anyone who has met more than one child can readily attest.

Moreover, real accountability, immediate accountability, comes from freedom, choice, the ability to leave a provider that is not giving you what you want and take your business elsewhere. That is why there are a lot of recommendations for what to do when states get rid of Common Core.

Ultimately, the solution to America’s education problems is not more centralization. Instead, the answer is to create school choice for everyone.

Common Core appeals to Dewey disciples, to Progressives, because finally the masses of unenlightened Americans can be molded and coerced into a proper worldview and leave antiquated ideas and values behind.

But Common Core is nothing more than a Trojan Horse, enslaving towns and local communities to the mandates of Washington, and thereby the Progressive-driven NEA.

This country was birthed by people seeking freedom to live and worship, freedom to raise their offspring with a certain knowledge of God and the world He created. Common Core in the hands of über Progressives would seek to supplant the wisdom and role of parents with the mantra of secular and socialist ideals.

Common sense and real wisdom should warn us away from the centralized control of Common Core, and back to the time-tested truths of our forebears.

Dr. Duke Pesta on Common Core: DVD

IFI video recorded an event we had earlier this year with Dr. Duke Pesta, a nationally renown expert on the dangers of Common Core.  This DVD is available with any donation of $20 or more.

If you are a taxpayer, have young children, grandchildren, nephews, nieces, are an educator, are a therapist, are a religious leader, are an elected official of any party, or care about very young children getting an excellent education in grades K-12, it would be worth your time to learn more about the federal takeover of education.  Watch it yourself or with a group!

If you’re wondering how America and Western Europe went from marriage-centered societies to post-Christian sexual anarchy abetted by massive government growth enforced by brutal political correctness in just a few decades, let’s just say it was no accident.

Here’s a brief history:

The progressive left has been in a death struggle with religion, the family, capitalism and morality itself since becoming a political and philosophical force during the French Revolution.

With the advent of Marxism in the mid-19th century, the battle intensified, with the left eagerly expecting the collapse of capitalism.

When the West failed to succumb to an economic and political upheaval of the type that seized Russia in 1917, the strategy changed. To liberate people from free market capitalism, it became necessary to liberate people first from bourgeois morality.

Man’s natural inclination is to provide for himself and his own extended family, then for his neighbors and community. Socialism must remove existing loyalties and institutions in order to replace them with government power. That’s why progressives have been a major force behind abortion, easy divorce, single-parent welfare incentives, pornography, collective child-rearing and sexual excess of all kinds. All of these manifestations of the progressive disease weaken the natural family. As families crumble, the state steps in to take their place.

Italian communist Antonio Gramsci saw the value of this in the 1920s, calling for his fellow revolutionaries to “capture the culture,” that is, infiltrate the institutions that transmit cultural values. So they did, especially in the universities.

Revolutionaries such as John Dewey, Margaret Mead, Margaret Sanger, Herbert Marcuse and Wilhelm Reich, all of whom waxed poetically about the Soviet Union, inspired progressive educational and social policies that weakened support for organized religion, marital fidelity and the family while empowering the state.

With the help of like-minded people in Hollywood, they hammered away at social conventions of all kinds. The weapons of choice were radical individualism and moral relativism, which they peddled on college campuses to credulous liberal faculty who passed it on to their students.

By the time the 1960s rolled around, with the advent of the pill, Playboy magazine and mass communications, Western civilization was ripe for takeover by a heretofore alien, ideology of limitless sex. Of course, people weren’t told about the downside of “free love” — the destruction of families, social chaos, the loss of freedom to disagree, and a tightening statist grip on economic and intellectual liberty.

In his masterful new book, “Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage,” author Paul Kengor traces a direct line from the founders of communism to today’s liberal social “reformers.”

The elements change with the times, but not the ultimate objective, which is to “progress” indefinitely toward an evolved, socialist Eden where all is shared and all are equal. Mr. Kengor notes that the progressive canon changes rapidly, and in ways that even progressives cannot always predict.

“But we do know this much: what is seemingly inconceivable to all of us right now, including to progressives themselves, may become the dogmatic position of progressives in a generation,” he writes.

For example, “just five years ago, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton” supported “retaining the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman by 2012, that was completely gone. Now, anyone who opposed redefining marriage — and who stands now where virtually all Democrats stood a mere two decades back — is derided as a bigoted extremist.”

A case in point: The ninth World Congress of Families, which will be held this coming week in Salt Lake City, has drawn fire from the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Human Rights Campaign and other leftist organizations, which falsely and strategically portray the pro-family gathering as a “hate” event and the speakers as bigots. I have done some writing for the WCF, and will be on a panel about “How the Culture Undermines Life and the Family.”

In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx, who had an affair with his children’s nurse and mistreated his own family badly in other ways, railed against religion and the middle-class family: “The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.”

His co-author, Frederic Engels, was a prolific philanderer who preached free love in an 1884 essay as a benefit of political revolution, a few decades before abortion became the holy sacrament of the political left:

“With the transfer of the means of production into common ownership, the single family ceases to be the economic unit of society. Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of the children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike, whether they are legitimate or not. This removes all the anxiety about the ‘consequences’ … Will not that suffice to bring about the gradual growth of unconstrained sexual intercourse …?”

The progressives’ contempt for the family contrasts with the timeless definition of marriage given in Genesis 2:24 and reiterated by Jesus: “A man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.”

This article was originally posted at the WashingtonTimes.com.

Written by Frederick M. Hess

Like fascists, Communists, and boy-band producers, the American Left has always believed it could fine-tune human nature if it could only “get ’em while they’re young.” That’s why the Left works so hard to impose its will on schools and universities. As John Dewey, America’s high priest of educational progressivism, explained in 1897, the student must “emerge from his original narrowness” in order “to conceive of himself” as a cog in the larger social order.

Last week’s gay-marriage ruling will yield a new wave of liberal efforts to ensure that schools do their part to combat wrong-headed “narrowness.” Justice Anthony Kennedy’s sweeping 5–4 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges opened by declaring, “The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity.” Kennedy took pains to opine that marriage “draws meaning from related rights of childrearing, procreation, and education.” In finding that the Fourteenth Amendment secures the right to “define and express [one’s] identity,” the Obergefell majority has issued a radical marker. (If gay marriage had been established by democratic process, things might have played out in a more measured manner.)

Justice Samuel Alito predicted, “Today’s decision . . . will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy,” and “they will risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools.” Alito is almost assuredly right, and that poses serious questions for schools and colleges.

At the collegiate level, the implications are pretty clear — especially for religious institutions. Christian colleges are going to find their nonprofit tax status under assault unless they agree to embrace gay marriage. (The relevant precedent is the 1983 Supreme Court ruling that enabled the IRS to strip Bob Jones University’s tax-exempt status because of the school’s ban on interracial dating.) Policies regarding “family housing,” employee benefits, use of chapels for marriages — all will come under fire. And then we’ll start getting to questions of readings, campus programs, and curriculum, where familiar First Amendment rights will clash with the new Fourteenth Amendment right to “define and express [one’s] identity.” For religious colleges stripped of their nonprofit status, many — if not most — will be compelled to close their doors. (It’s safe to say that plenty of progressives would regard this development as a bonus).

More broadly, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that gay-rights advocates believe the decision will “help them move on to other issues, such as access to higher education and mental-health concerns for young LGBTQ students of color and transgender students of color.” Shane Windmeyer, executive director of Campus Pride, said, “I’m hopeful we can now say we won one game; now the next game is looking at trans rights, how we treat queer people of color, especially first-generation LGBTQ students of color.”

LBGT crusaders are also pushing for big changes in K–12 public schooling. Education Week’s legal-affairs reporter noted that the decisions “holds various implications for the nation’s schools, including in the areas of employee benefits, parental rights of access, and the effect on school atmosphere for gay youths.” I can’t say with certainty what’s coming. But here are four things to watch for. Expect demands for schools to amp up their efforts to feature “nontraditional” families in all kinds of contexts.

Educators have long celebrated “diversity.” Now they can expect heightened pressure to do more, and to ensure that nothing stymies a student’s “identity.” When a tiny handful of social crusaders complain that this play feels too stereotypically masculine or that those stories don’t include enough LGBT students, they’re going to pull Obergefell out of their pocket. Things will prove particularly contentious in history, where a dearth of gay marriages and nontraditional families will invite creative efforts to “balance” things out.

School leaders have judged that American flag T-shirts are unacceptably provocative when worn on Cinco de Mayo. Clothing and artifacts perceived as hostile to another’s “defined and expressed” identity, such as badges of religiosity, may well come under the closest of scrutiny. After all, the Court has long held that freedom of speech and religion may be circumscribed in educational settings. Now, protestations on behalf of free expression and free speech can be answered with Fourteenth Amendment claims.

Expect demands for schools to amp up their efforts to feature “nontraditional” families in all kinds of contexts. Schools may be scrutinized for the mixture of families that wind up in posters, brochures, student art displays, instructional materials, and the rest. Failure to include a satisfactory percentage of gay parents (or other nontraditional family groupings) may be judged evidence of a hostile environment.

And casual language will have to change. Teachers may instinctively ask a volunteer father about his wife or mention mothers and fathers; when they do, it won’t be long until a sensitive parent decides that this kind of “heteronormativity” is an unconstitutional violation of their identity. Pity the poor assistant principal who knows two parents are attending a meeting and mistakenly asks the woman sitting in the office if her “husband” is running late — rather than asking about her “spouse.” In the wrong circumstances, that could be a career-ender. Minimizing such mistakes means schools will soon be at pains to replace the terminology of “moms and dads” with that of genderless dyads.

America’s principals, superintendents, and school boards generally don’t have a lot of stomach for waging these fights. Even those who hate being bullied don’t want the exhausting slog or public criticism. Far more likely is that they’ll pack it in, lending Justice Kennedy’s rhetorical flourishes a practical import even he may not have imagined.

— Frederick M. Hess is director of education-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.  This article was originally posted at National Review Online.