Tag: T. S. Elliot - Illinois Family Institute

Written by Rey Flores

Parents have plenty of concerns as they do their best to raise their children. From the moment they are born, God entrusts parents to make the best choices for their children regarding everything from their basic needs to how they are educated.

For a very long time, most families have had no choice when it comes to the schools their children attend. Income and neighborhood determine which schools families will have to send their children to, and for many Illinoisans those schools are dangerous, underperforming, and engaged in indoctrination. Far too many government schools are led by school administrators and faculty who care more about union activities and Leftist sexuality indoctrination than they do about children.

In recent years, school choice has been a battle many parents have joined, because it should not be only wealthy parents who have the freedom to choose their children’s schools. All parents should have that freedom.

The latest challenge Illinois parents face is trying to save a fairly new private scholarships program that enables parents to have available better education options for their children and empowers parents to exercise their parental rights. If Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has his way, this program will end.

The “Invest in Kids Program” website summarizes how this program works to help provide donor-powered scholarships for Illinois families:

“Illinois enacted the Invest In Kids Scholarship Tax Credit Program in 2017. This program offers a 75 percent income tax credit to individuals and businesses that contribute to qualified Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs). The SGOs then provide scholarships for students whose families meet the (low and middle-income) income requirements to attend qualified, non-public schools in Illinois.”

According to Empower Illinois, SGO’s have raised over $61.5 million dollars from thousands of individual donors who want to help provide these scholarships and a bright future for Illinois students, schools and communities.

School choice is critical to Illinois families. It offers children much-needed opportunities to reach their educational potential early in their formative years and on through the ninth grade. Denying school choice to Illinois families is condemning kids to subpar, politicized education simply because of their family’s socio-economic status and geographic location.

Pritzker, who seeks to limit the freedom to choose for less privileged Illinoisans, comes from an affluent and influential family, who sent him to the elite and pricey Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts, where cultural luminaries like T.S. Eliot, Robert Kennedy, Ted Kennedy and James Taylor attended.

Without the “Invest in Kids Scholarship” program, most low- and middle-income Illinois families will never have the incredible educational opportunities that Pritzker (and his children) enjoyed and from which they benefitted. Giving a quality educational opportunity to these children today is a long-term investment in the growth of our state’s success tomorrow. Denying Illinois children this opportunity today is denying the success of Illinois tomorrow.

The #SaveMyScholarship campaign organized by Empower Illinois, and the many parents of the Tax Credit Scholarship Community with whom the organization collaborates, are working diligently to convince Governor Pritzker not to eliminate the “Invest in Kids” program.

The campaign is also educating and encouraging Illinois lawmakers about the importance of this five-year pilot program. The governor’s proposed budget would phase out the program over the next three years so that the state can direct revenues to public schools.

As The Center Square recently wrote,

“Opponents of the program have said the tax credits given to donors is revenue that could have potentially gone to public schools. The loss of public-school students to private schools also represents a loss in government funding that’s tied to total students attending the districts. In his budget proposal, Pritzker estimated cutting the program in half would bring $6 million into the state’s coffers in the fiscal year beginning in July (2019).”

What Pritzker is proposing is preposterous. He is attempting to do away with a potentially terrific program before it has time to demonstrate its efficacy. Pritzker and other supporters of his budget proposal would rather keep kids corralled in public schools that have amply demonstrated over decades their inability to provide good educations to Illinois children.

For more information and to join the #SaveMyScholarship #SMS campaign, click here.

There’s a battle raging right now over sex education, and our kids are in the line of fire.“Your teacher told you what?” These are the first words of too many parents when they discover what their teens and pre-teens are learning in health class. Happily for Ashley Bever, the mother of an 11-year-old in San Diego public schools, she found out before class started.The curriculum was called “Rights, Respect, Responsibility,” and it was put together by a group called Advocates for Youth, which unsurprisingly, is affiliated with Planned Parenthood.Among other things, this course uses non-gender-specific pronouns, taught students that they can be attracted to any gender, and described in vivid detail sexual practices I cannot mention on air.

Worse still, this course informed middle-schoolers that they can self-refer to a clinic “like Planned Parenthood” without telling their parents, and warned that abstinence education websites lie.

This is the new face of what’s called “comprehensive sex education.” As Emily Belz explained at WORLD Magazine, it’s not just a problem for ultra-liberal school districts in California. Progressive and LGBT organizations are pushing to implement such standards nationwide. By “comprehensive,” it seems these groups mean curriculum that actively encourages sexual experimentation among teens.

School districts around the country are locked in a battle between groups that prioritize abstinence as the only 100-percent effective method of protection, and groups that teach casual sex, gender ideology, and abortion. “Sex ed curriculum,” Belz explains, “is often determined through a battle of PowerPoint presentations at the school board meeting.” Frequently, all it takes is one vote to transform your child’s school from a place of education to a place of sexual indoctrination.

In response to all of this, some churches are stepping up and offering alternative sex education that’s consistent with a Christian ethic and worldview. That is great, and I applaud the pastors doing it. They have a vital role to play in “equipping the saints for the work of ministry.”

But we should also recognize that sex ed is not primarily the church’s job. As Abraham Kuyper might have put it, the church is only having to step in because the sphere that’s most responsible for rearing children is failing. And that sphere is the family. It’s here we learn to walk, to talk, and what love means. It’s also here that kids should be learning what it means to be male and female, and what God’s intention was when He created image-bearers in two sexes.

So we parents have to do the thing we dread: give our kids “the talk,” (which should really be “talks”—many of them, over several years). In the process, we have to avoid the mistake common to virtually all modern sex education, even some well-intentioned, abstinence-first programs. When teens are taught about sex, what they usually hear is a list of dos and don’ts. They learn about “the birds and the bees.” But they seldom learn what sex is for.

As T. S. Elliot said, before we decide what to do with something we need to know what it’s for. And that’s what good sex education—real sex education—must do.

As parents, we’re responsible to teach our kids more than how not to get pregnant. We’re charged with teaching them God’s design for marriage, procreation, human flourishing and community, and how all of this reflects Christ, the Church, and the central place of love in creation. It’s in these truths that parents must ground their children’s understanding of sexuality. And it’s in these truths that they’ll find the arguments and will power to stand up to “comprehensive sex ed” and the culture behind it.

Let’s Talk About the Talk: Bringing Sex Ed Home

As Eric has encouraged, helping our kids understand God’s design for sex is the best sex education of all. And it’s grounded in wisdom and truth. For help with “the talk(s)”, check out the resources linked below.

The Only Good Choice for Illinois Families is School Choice

Let’s Talk About “The Talk”

FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION: