Public school, homeschool, or Christian private school? These are the options Christian parents have before them when deciding where their kids are going to spend the majority of their time growing up. Who is going to be their main influence? What worldview will they be taught? A godless, Marxist, racially divided and highly sexualized worldview or a Biblical worldview that teaches love for God and neighbor, good character and a strong work ethic?

During the Village Church of Barrington’s seminar titled, ‘Parenting in a Godless Culture: Educating Parents and Grandparents,’ you’ll get a good look into these three education options. The first school type looked at is Christian private school. Calvin Lindstrom, who is the pastor of Church of Christian Liberty and the school administrator for Christian Liberty Academy in Arlington Heights, Illinois, speaks about how it’s in Christ that all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are found (using Colossians 2:3) and summarizes the pros and cons of public school versus private school.

Pastor Lindstrom is followed by a panel of parents who discuss the reasons they sent their children to a private school and how they have found it a blessing. Please watch and share!

The Christian School Option from Village Church of Barrington on Vimeo.

There are a lot of people proclaiming public schools as harmful – bastions of evil, intent on ruining innocent minds and brainwashing hearts. A lot of it can seem like just plain noise, but how much of it is true? What is truly going on in public schools? Is there actually anything going on, or are people just crying wolf?

During the Village Church of Barrington’s seminar “Parenting in a Godless Culture: Educating Parents and Grandparents,” church elder David Cartwright answers this question by tracing the history of public schools from their classical Christian parent or church-led roots to the progressive humanistic socialist worldview of government schools.  Cartwright goes through some of the curriculum being taught, as well as the LGBTQIA+ push going on behind closed doors.

This video is a must see for any parent trying to make a school decision (or curious non-parent’s wanting to remain informed). Please watch and share!

Public Education History & Godless Worldview from Village Church of Barrington on Vimeo.

Download the PDF of the Presentation HERE

Download the bibliography HERE

The video, Gender Identity: Can a 5’9, White Guy Be a 6’5, Chinese Woman?, can be viewed HERE.

Is it possible that our legislators are trying their best to make Illinois the California of the Midwest, without the mountains or beautiful weather? Our Governors, most certainly, are competing. Both have wildly inflated egos, both ignored their own directives during the height of the pandemic, and both have designs on the White House.

We already have many other similarities as well. Our largest cities are infested with crime and plagued with Soros backed prosecutors. English language and math proficiency for all students also is bleak for both states, although Illinois is worse. California is 50% and 34%, while in Illinois it is 29.9% and 25.8% for English and Math. And both states are losing population in record numbers. The 2020 figures show California losing 182,000 of its population of 39.5 million and Illinois has dropped 104,000 of its 12.5 million total population.

Instead of addressing these and other serious issues, our august lawmakers are trying to stay neck and neck with the Golden State on woke bathroom policies. Our General Assembly just passed an amendment (HB 1286) to the “Equitable Restroom Act,” that allows that “[a]ny multiple-occupancy restroom may be converted into an all-gender multiple-occupancy restroom.” It goes on to describe a variety of requirements for partitioned stalls and urinals. It was passed by a vote of 60 to 40, all Republicans voting against it.

Why?

California passed a similar bill that was signed into law by Newsom last year. The reasoning for the legislation was thin. One explanation was that parents could take their opposite sex minor child into the restroom with them . . . But, wait. Hasn’t that already been going on everywhere, forever?

Then there was the explanation that it allowed for more equitable gender inclusion. Isn’t that a separate argument? Haven’t we already been fighting that issue as it relates to gender identity, allowing people to use the restroom of the sex they identify with rather than their biological sex? I guess it answers the problem of the non-binary. If you don’t identify with either sex, where do you go? Literally, where do you go? Voila, an all-gender restroom.

Some pundits claim that the sex separated restroom prudery didn’t begin until the Victorian era, although many also mention that Paris began using separate public restrooms in the 1700’s.  What nobody mentioned is that throughout most of the world there were no public facilities other than outhouses, alleys and the great outdoors. Ancient Rome had public toilets, but I could not find any definitive source that could say one way or the other if facilities were separate for men and women. Logic indicates they were, since Roman baths were used by men and women, but there were separate designated times for men and for women to use them. Even in Rome, modesty prevailed.

Harvard Law Professor and columnist for the New Yorker, Jeannie Suk Gersen, has a more practical reason for combined restrooms. Saving time. In an article she wrote in 2016, Gersen recounted the occasion when she took the bar exam at the Jacob Javits Center in New York. She had to go to the restroom, but the ladies room had an “enormous line.” Instead of waiting, she walked into the men’s room, where there was no line, used one of the many empty stalls and expeditiously returned to successfully complete her exam. It wasn’t fair, according to Gerson, that the women had a long line while the men had none. So, she corrected the injustice. Professor Gerson observes:

Today, men and women, not assumed to be only heterosexual, are expected to function at work alongside one another, eat at adjacent seats in restaurants, sit cheek by jowl in buses and airplanes, take classes, study in libraries, and, with some exceptions, even pray together. Why is the multi-stall bathroom the last public vestige of gendered social separation? When men, gay or straight, can stand shoulder to shoulder at urinals without a second thought, is there much to back up the view that men and women must not pee or poop next to one another, especially if closed stalls would shield them from view?

Does modesty have no value, privacy and safety no utility, professor?

Why are our legislators devoting time on such issues as this? Is this really something that a majority of Illinoisans want? An identical bill was passed 63-43 in the Illinois House in 2021, but was not voted on in the Senate. Why bring it up again? Why do people with such strange priorities keep getting elected? And why is this a political issue?

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to your local state senator to ask him/her to vote against this legislation when it comes up for a vote on the Senate floor sometime this session. Urge them to reject this foolish woke agenda that fails to recognize biological facts. Ask them to protect the privacy, dignity and safety of all Illinois citizens.

Please, speak out against this destructive bill.

It seems like common sense: parents of school-aged children should know (or at least be able to find out) what their kids are being taught, what kinds of content are being made available to them, and how school officials are using their students’ private data. Even a few decades ago, there would have been a consensus among parents, educators, and legislators that moms and dads, not the public school system, are the primary decision-makers and responsible parties in the lives of their kids. But in the modern, dystopian American educational system, involved parents are now considered a threat to the self-proclaimed experts tasked with teaching our kids.

In the old days, school was where students learned reading, writing, math, geography, history, science, music, and art. Generally, these topics were taught objectively, with teachers communicating the facts and inviting thoughtful engagement. As students were given the tools to think critically by applying logic and asking good questions, they could form their own stances and opinions, rather than having moral judgments presented to them, fully formed and beyond the point where they could be debated.

To be sure, many of us who were educated outside the home (myself included) would willingly say one or several of our teachers played an important role in helping us become who we are, but this happened largely in the context of relationships, not through curricula that teach a new, government-sanctioned orthodoxy on issues of sexuality, race, justice, and politics, to name a few.

Somewhere along the way, administrators and educators began believing they could and should usurp the God-given role of parents to morally shape children. In many cases, federal and state governments affirmed this perspective, pouring taxpayer dollars into agenda-driven programs and curricula. Sadly, many parents also gave their assent by handing their kids over for roughly 35 hours a week, allowing not just their intellect, but also their moral compass to be oriented by the state.

Mary Miller and her grandson Nathaniel.

That is, until the COVID-19 pandemic when many moms and dads found themselves sharing workspace with their students and overhearing what went on in their classrooms. Since then, the groundswell of pushback among concerned parents who are standing up to guard the hearts and minds of their kids has been both a shock to liberals and a rallying cry for conservatives. Parents are re-asserting their rightful place as the primary authority in their kids’ lives, and they’re not the only ones. Now members of Congress are putting on a full-court press, too.

U.S. Representative Mary Miller (R-Quincy) is a mom and grandmother from rural Illinois and Vice Chair of the U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee. With other conservative members of the U.S. House of Representatives, she is working to reset the boundary between parents’ rights and the responsibilities of the state. Miller is heavily involved in this multifaceted effort as a co-sponsor of a constitutional amendment (H.J.Res.38) introduced by U.S. Representative Debbie Lesko (AZ-08) affirming parents’ right to function as the final authority on their kids’ education. Miller also drafted two key provisions in the Parents Bill of Rights Act (H.R.5), which passed the U.S. House on March 24th by a vote of 213 to 208 (with 14 not voting).

Of this crucial piece of legislation, Miller said,

“I have strongly opposed every effort by radical elites in DC to bypass parents and push racist Critical Race Theory, perverted sex-ed curriculum, and dangerous transgender policies that harm our children in our schools. The Parents Bill of Rights Act includes two provisions I drafted to protect children’s privacy from Big Tech and affirm a parent’s right to opt their children out of taking surveys regarding sexual orientation, transgender ideology, and woke politics. Congress must pass The Parents Bill of Rights to empower parents and increase transparency in the classroom.”

Naturally, the Biden White House has already made a statement, describing this commonsense bill as putting “LGBTQI+ students at higher risk” and accusing supporters of “politicizing our children’s education.” The democrat-controlled U.S. Senate is not expected to take up the legislation, so as it stands, the Parents Bill of Rights Act will not go into effect. What it will do, however, and what U.S. House Republicans no doubt expect, is reveal to American parents exactly who is politicizing and poisoning the American educational system. It isn’t the lawmakers who are seeking to reduce government involvement in what is the purview of the family, but the radical, leftist activists who see American public schools as an obvious training ground for the next generation, who they wrongly believe belongs to them.

Parents across the nation are saying “no more,” and these legislative efforts on their behalf are just one sign that a sleeping giant has been awakened. There’s a popular t-shirt that says, “I don’t co-parent with the government,” and they are putting a face on the sentiment. From local school board meetings all the way to the U.S. Capitol, these conversations will continue, alerting more and more moms and dads to the agenda that has crept into classrooms, school nurse and counselor offices, libraries, locker rooms, and beyond. Once parents sense their kids are in danger, they won’t stop until they know they’re safe. It’s how good moms and dads are made, and it’s putting American schools on notice.

Why has our culture gotten so bad, so fast? This question has been posed by many of us in recent days: young adults looking at the world we’re about to step into and wondering how we’ll manage, grandparents trying to figure out why their sweet granddaughter wants to be called Bert, parents watching the government school system trash their child’s faith, and pastors, trying to lead their flock away from glittering worldly baubles.

The Village Church of Barrington recently held a seminar series they titled “Parenting in a Godless Culture; Educating Parents and Grandparents.” Dr. Erwin Lutzer was a special lead speaker in this series and he addresses this question in his lecture he titled “The Eclipse of God in American Culture.” He did a wonderful job, weaving together the historical and sociological reasons for the downfall of society and walking us through how the west’s desire to “kill God” (figuratively – meaning no longer believing that He is the basis for reality and we must answer to Him) has set our country and culture on the same slippery slope Germany slid down in the 1930’s or Russia in the 1910’s.

Dr. Lutzer ends with some important thoughts on what parents and grandparents – and everyone else! – can do to help young people walk a different path. Please watch and share!

Understanding our Culture and how it Impacts our Children – Dr. Erwin Lutzer from Village Church of Barrington on Vimeo.

There are a lot of people proclaiming public schools as harmful – bastions of evil, intent on ruining innocent minds and brainwashing hearts. Some of it can seem like just plain noise, but how much of it is true? What is truly going on in public schools? Is there actually anything going on, or are people just crying wolf? During the Village Church of Barrington’s seminar “Parenting in a Godless Culture: Educating Parents and Grandparents,” church elder David Cartwright answers this question by tracing the history of public schools.

Elder Cartwright goes through some of the curriculum being taught, as well as the LGBTQIA+ push going on behind closed doors. School District 38 Superintendent Bob Gold admits that the environment in schools have become very political in recent years, but warns that not every school is dealing with the problems we see reported on Fox News Channel. He rightly advises that parents and grandparents know what is going on in their own local schools, the teachers and administrators. Above all, he encourages listeners to be very involved in discussions with your children.

Illinois Family Institute is deeply concerned that our children are being dumbed-down and trained in left-wing political ideology on purpose in order to fundamentally transform our nation; to rest our national values, and its Constitutional system of government. According to a 2018 Program for International Student Assessment report, students in 19 other locales scored higher than U.S. students in reading; 22 education systems scored above the U.S. in science; and 29 nations and other jurisdictions outperformed the United States in math. In the state of Illinois, the 2022 proficiency rates in these three core subject areas are unacceptable. See for yourself HERE.

This video is a must see for any parent trying to make a school decision (or curious non-parent’s wanting to remain informed). Please watch and share!

The Public School Option from Village Church of Barrington on Vimeo.

There is an enormous threat to children from Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), and there is also a grave danger to the independence of private schools and homeschooling that comes from accepting government funding, warns education researcher Lisa Logan in this explosive interview. It is all part of a global agenda being pushed by the United Nations and UNESCO in particular.

First, Logan explains how SEL is being used to manipulate children into radical political, cultural and even spiritual beliefs by hiding behind terms that are not threatening. Next she explains the dangerous spiritual and religious agenda behind this agenda that requires the transformation of children and then society.

In the second segment, Logan breaks down how UNESCO and those who want to control all education are using tax funding as bait to get private schools and homeschoolers sucked into the public regulatory system. “Any time you have public money going to private things, it comes with strings,” she said.

Please watch/listen and share!

Any parent knows that trying to raise children is difficult. Especially if you are trying to raise your kids in the nurture and admonition of the Lord in a post-Christian society, such as our own. Everywhere you turn it seems like the world is trying to destroy any semblance of innocence in the hearts and minds of the youngest in society. How is a parent supposed to compete when the world is so dark? One of the most important decisions a Christian parent can make is where their children are going to go to school – who is going to be teaching them, and what are they going to be taught?

Well, the Village Church of Barrington recently held a seminar that helped to answer this question entitled: “Parenting in a Godless Culture: Educating Parents and Grandparents,”

Elder Greg Nash kicks the seminar off by discussing what the Bible says about educating children and why so many young adults and kids have a worldly worldview. Videos of each speaker have been posted online, and we’ve linked the first video here. Please be sure to watch and share!

Parents will be held responsible by God for their children’s education, says the Bible. This was a view shared by the majority of America’s founders. But today there is a great defiance against this on the part of many in our educational establishment. Many leaders in the educational system seem to think they know better than the parents as to what should and should not be taught.

FoxNews.com reports (3/4/23): “A Colorado elementary school’s private emails show secret plans to defy parents’ wishes on transitioning their child’s gender.”

Recently, a Fairfax (Virginia) County parent, Neeley McCallister noted:

“As parents, it is our primary duty to protect our children and preserve their innocence…Unfortunately, there is a toxic movement infiltrating our schools that is more interested in pushing a political agenda rather than teaching…our children the subjects we were taught in school: math, reading, science, history.”

McCallister made these remarks during hearings to promote a bill in the new U.S. House of Representatives, under the leadership of Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). The new bill seeks to assert parental rights when it comes to what is taught in the schools.

This is right and good. Centuries ago America made great strides in becoming a “city on a hill” in part because of the great education so many citizens received. Initially it was based on the Bible and resulted in astounding levels of literacy.

As James Madison, a key architect of the U.S. Constitution, observed,

“A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.”

The first Congress under the U.S. Constitution that gave us the First Amendment also passed a law that ensured that each state to be added to the new nation should be committed to education. If the American experiment were to work, it could only do so if the people could read and write for themselves. So on August 4, 1789, Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance. This important document said in Article III:

“Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

This was in a day when “Religion” meant Christianity of one stripe or another.

Even Thomas Jefferson, who departed from Christian orthodoxy later in life, allowed the Bible and Isaac Watts’ hymnals to be used to teach reading at two schools for which he served as president of the board of trustees. Isaac Watts was a great writer of classic Christian songs, including “Joy to the World,” “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross,” and “Jesus Shall Reign.”

However, in the last few decades, there has arisen an anti-God tenor in the schools. Last week, Foxnews.com reported on a story out of the Phoenix area, where a school board rejected hiring teachers from a Christian college because these teachers were deemed “not safe”: “An Arizona school board member wearing cat ears during a meeting said she would oppose having a contract with a Christian university over the religious and Biblical beliefs they espouse.”

Another board member concurred with her, as he decried the university for “teaching with a Biblical lens.” The board agreed with the anti-Christian ban.

The school board says in effect, “Teachers needed. Biblical Christians need not apply.” This sort of discrimination is clearly unconstitutional. But is it what parents want?

We all have a lens, a worldview. It was a Biblical worldview, a “Biblical lens,” that made us the most free and prosperous nation. But if the Left had their way, only those with godless values should be teaching our children—with little or no significant input from the parents.

Americanwirenews.com noted a similar example of anti-Christian bias at work in the schools. A public school teacher in Washington state said we need to keep the schoolchildren safe from their “Christo-fascist parents.”

Some parents teach their children to follow the Bible—the way Washington, Lincoln, and Reagan learned their values. “Horrors,” say many in the education establishment today, trying to separate parents from their children’s education.

Thankfully, the new Congress is fighting back, as noted. Former Speaker of the U.S. House Newt Gingrich writes,

“Speaker Kevin McCarthy and House Republicans have given the American people an opportunity to dramatically strengthen the role of parents in the education of their children.”

The preamble to The Parents Bill of Rights Act declares:

“Parents have a God-given right to make decisions for their children. Unfortunately, many school districts have been ignoring the wishes of parents while special interest groups try to criminalize free speech.”

The preamble adds,

“This list of rights will make clear to parents what their rights are and clear to schools what their duties to parents are.”

Perhaps U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) says it all:

“Parents are the primary stakeholders in their child’s education, and they have a right to know what is going on inside their child’s classroom.”

Hear, hear.

Why are so many public schools in Illinois keeping so many secrets from the public? Last August, Christopher Rufo disclosed that Lurie’s Children’s Hospital, unbeknownst to parents or the general public, was collaborating with Chicago area schools to promote “radical gender theory, trans activism, and sexually explicit materials in at least four Chicago-area public school systems: District 75, District 120, District 181, and District 204.” Three of these school districts are elementary districts and one is a high school district.

We don’t know how many other school districts receive training from Lurie. But we have learned of at least one other, Palatine School District 15, another elementary school district. In January, Dawn Ravine, Lurie’s Sexuality Education Program Coordinator reportedly provided training to the District’s P.E./Health teachers during a planned institute day.

When parents learned of this training that was provided to the teachers, it came as a surprise since the District had voted to reject the National Sex Ed Standards. Why are the teachers being taught about subjects that were part of those standards, the parents asked? The District 15 school board did nothing to resolve the confusion. Instead of explaining the purpose of the training, the board Chair attacked the critics as liars at the most recent board meeting last week.

Does the school board even know why the training was held?

It appears that this training first exposed by Rufo has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not the National Sex Ed Standards will be implemented by any specific district. Instead, it appears to be the result of guidance directed by the Illinois State Board of Education found here.

Several acts and suggested policies were developed after Governor JB Pritzker issued an executive order in 2019 to create a task force to investigate and report on creating affirming and inclusive schools to welcome, support and affirm transgender, non-binary and gender non-conforming children and adolescents.  The Task Force issued its report in January, 2020.

It doesn’t look like there was a single conservative, or even a liberal with a differing view, on the Task Force. The ACLU was represented, but neither ADF nor the Thomas More Society were anywhere to be seen. There were several students on the Task Force, but no former students who had de-transitioned. The Task Force sought the views and advice of the Trevor Project, but not the position of the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine. Do you suppose the Governor decided what the report would say before it was written?

The laws, regulations and suggested policies under Pritzker’s administration fully embrace the view that children suffering from gender dysphoria should be affirmed, that children should be allowed to “transition” without parental knowledge or involvement, that trans girls should be allowed to use the same facilities as biological girls and that they be allowed to play on girls teams.

Under Governor Pritzker’s guidance, the Illinois State Board of Education has set up a network of laws, regulations and suggested policies that seemingly tie the hands of local school boards. Ideologically, the board administrators and elected board members in Illinois schools mostly are not inclined to push back against the ISBE. If a majority of the board were so inclined, they likely would get advice from the board lawyers that the schools have to go along with what the state wants. Besides, they would be (and have been) told, suing the state over any issue would be very costly and not good stewardship of public tax funds.

Lost in the discussion is consideration for what is best for the children and what parents want.

Parents are not powerless, however. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled on numerous occasions that parents have a right to control what their children are taught. Given the current state of education in Illinois, it might be best for parents to home school their children or to send them to a private faith-based school that focuses on STEM subjects and English. If enough children are pulled out of school, it might prompt a more child and parent friendly environment.

If home schooling or sending children to a sane private school is not possible, the only thing that can be done is for parents to opt their children out of everything they don’t like—sex ed, SEL, counseling by any member of the school staff or any contractor, instruction on any subject other than math, science, biology, engineering, technology, English, or other subject the parents might approve. At the very least, though, parents will have to closely monitor what their children are taught in those classes–what textbooks, websites, videos, research projects, etc.

Illinois government, the ISBE, local boards along with the lawyers and administrators they hire, the teachers’ unions, and activist teachers have proven themselves to be completely secretive and untrustworthy. Inaction and inattention have brought us to this point. The result is we get exactly the government we deserve and there is nobody out there to fix it for us.

Unless parents get involved like they did in Virginia, nothing is going to change.

Holiness is a foreign topic for most people. Even Christians. We have a vague familiarity with the context in which it is usually found.

First and foremost, we are told that God the Almighty is “holy.” As the Israelites were getting familiar with their Divine Deliverer, these words were given to them: “For I am the LORD your God, so you must consecrate yourselves and be holy because I am holy.” (Leviticus 11:44,  CSB) This is repeated three more times in Leviticus.

New Testament readers are told, “That’s why the Scriptures say, ‘I am the holy God, and you must be holy too.’ (1 Peter 1:16, CEV) Rather intimidating instruction! The Hebrew word for holiness is qōdes. That which is holy is sacred, in contrast to everything common and profane. How did we allow this to slip by?

I encountered the importance of the godly character of holiness in the foreword of Chuck Colson’s excellent book, Loving God. Chuck had come across a resource of profound insight on the subject written by theologian R.C. Sproul. It was titled (appropriately) The Holiness of God. Chuck stated that after reading Sproul’s book, he fell to his knees deep in awe over the holiness of God!

I would later read that same book by Sproul. And others of his. R.C. was a man who clearly took God at His Word.

Holy. It’s one word—among many—that we abuse in our world today by minimizing its significance. How often do we hear holy used in conjunction with terms such as holy cow, holy moley, holy guacamole, holy hell (wow), holy cr*p, and the even more offensive holy sh**? Other variations certainly exist and all of them run quite counter to the instruction to be holy. Ironic.

In our modern thinking, words apparently don’t really matter. This is why I was struck by a recent Christianity Today story titled, “Words are Holy. so Why Don’t We Talk Like They are?” It’s written by Paul J. Pastor, who is a pastor, author, and editor.

As Pastor states, “Today, we live in a crisis of language. Not only is the sacred nature of our words largely forgotten, but language is becoming degraded. In a world of significant social, ecological, and spiritual crisis, this may seem like a low priority. But healthy language, like clean air or water, is something we take for granted until it is gone.”

Pastor uses illustrations from the legendary George Orwell, who found political speech quite disturbing in his day. Imagine what his perspective might be like in 2023! Pastor determines this about our times, “So the great threat to language is not from a shadowy politburo. It is from the sheer disposability of words as part of a general glut of information. Words are everywhere. What is everywhere must not be precious. Language becomes disposable.”

What words can you think of that have lost their meaning? How about amazing. Incredible. Unbelievable. Even great. All attributed to ideas, thoughts, or acts that are nothing more than ordinary. And let me add one of my favorites to the list: perfect. I’ve heard waiters and waitresses use that word when I tell them we need a table for two.

Admittedly, none of those word trivialities rank up there in my book with the abuse of the word holy.

To be clear, our call to holiness is not a call to live a life of perfection. That is an impossible task and attempting to do so can quickly move into legalism. But our call to live righteous lives is the target for which we aim in the faith. Even in our language.

How comfortable have we become with the abuse of the word holy? Enough so that when it is used in any derogative form, few are the souls who would dare correct or challenge it. Even among the church faithful.

I’m often haunted by Jesus’ words about words. “I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak, for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.” (Matthew 12:36-37, ESV) I plead guilty to that charge often and have needed the healing words of forgiveness.

How about you? It might be worthy of some holy conversation!

Dozens of government schools across Illinois have been unable to produce even one single student proficient in reading or math, according to new date from the Illinois State Board of Education. In hundreds of schools across the state, just 10 percent of children are proficient in the basics. And it is getting worse.

The new state data show that less than 30 percent of students in the public “education” system achieved even basic proficiency in reading, down from a measly 37 percent in 2019. Just one fourth of children tested proficient in math, down from already unfathomably poor 32 percent just a few years earlier.

This total failure to educate children on even the most basic elements of learning comes despite massive spending levels dwarfing the cost of government “education” in most other states and countries. Even as spending ballooned, academic results declined, the state board of education’s “Report Card” for 2022 revealed.

Perhaps even more astoundingly, some of the schools that failed to produce even one proficient student in either English or math were rated as “commendable” by the Illinois education bureaucracy — the second-highest ranking possible. How the schools scored so well when the students failed so miserably was not immediately clear.

Even many of the children labeled “proficient” are barely literate at best. But while the students may not be able to read or do math properly, and they almost certainly fail just as bad in science and history, they are almost all very well versed in gender theory, climate-change alarmism, race hysteria, and more. LGBT indoctrination is mandated by law across the state, too.

Breaking down the specifics of the educational disaster, there are 30 schools across Illinois — more than two thirds of them in Chicago — where not a single student ranked even “proficient” in reading. Meanwhile, more than 50 schools across the state failed to produce one single student rated proficient in mathematics. Almost two dozen schools failed to get even one child proficient in either subject.

Critics were aghast. “The absolute failure to teach even a single child to read and do math in so many schools is yet another indictment of the state’s educational system,” explained education analysts Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner at Wirepoints.org in a commentary on the educational catastrophe sweeping Illinois.

Citing the same state data, Dabrowski and Klingner also noted that almost 20 percent of government schools in Illinois — more than 600 in total — were only able to get one in ten victims to basic reading proficiency. Over 25 percent of the schools — almost 1,000 in all — were only able to get one in ten proficient in math. And yet, they continually demand more money.

This is evidence of collective insanity, Dabrowski and Klingner concluded in their widely cited analysis of the state data. “In a sane world, schools that don’t and can’t teach a single student the most basic of skills would be shut down,” they explained. “But here, they carry on…the system thrives while students wither.”

In fact, in any other industry, not only would the entity or entities in question be shut down, the scam artists defrauding and bilking customers out of billions of dollars so flagrantly would be prosecuted for fraud and then thrown in jail. It happens all the time in other sectors of the economy not controlled by government.

Imagine, for example, a fast-food restaurant where only a handful of those who ordered a meal actually got anything remotely resembling food, while most customers were handed toxic waste or a rat carcass on a moldy bun. State police SWAT teams would be kicking in the doors by the next morning, if not before. Politicians would be tripping over themselves to condemn the horror.

And yet, what is happening with government schools is orders of magnitude worse than a mere rip-off fast-food operation peddling inedible meals. In the case of schools, the minds, hearts, and souls of innocent children are being poisoned and irreparably damaged. Meanwhile, families, churches and civilization are crumbling as a result. This is an intergenerational crime of monumental proportions.

Of course, Illinois is hardly alone when it comes to the widespread dumbing-down of children in government schools. Results from across America — even in red states — are atrocious. On average, less than one in three victims of government schools are proficient in any core subject, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (also known as The Nation’s Report Card).

But Illinois spends more, and gets even worse results, than almost all other states. This is a state and national crisis. Children are in grave danger. And as President Ronald Reagan’s National Commission on Excellent in Education warned in 1983, this so-called “education” is now literally an existential threat to America’s very survival as a nation.

Parents must understand clearly that choosing to send their children to a government indoctrination center posing as a “public school” is practically guaranteeing that they will fail to learn even the most basic subjects, to say nothing of basic morality. Not only will that make it tough to have a real job and support it family, it means those children will be easy to manipulate, deceive — and ultimately, enslave.

Fortunately, for those parents who refuse to accept such a bleak future for their children, there has never been a better time to get them out of the system. Homeschooling has never been easier. Excellent Christian schools are proliferating in churches across Illinois and beyond, thanks in part to the efforts of the Illinois Family Institute.

Millions of families have already fled the government “education” system in recent years. As the latest academic results show, it’s time for many more to join them.

According to Plato the two most important questions for society is who will teach the children and what is taught to them. That was true 2,500 years ago and it is still true today. Sadly, today there simply is no agreement on who teaches the children and nothing but confusion and wildly different positions on what should be taught.

Therein lies the greatest threat to children in our modern age.

Children are inundated from all sides with conflicting messages. Some say that America is the greatest country to ever exist, while others assert that America has never been great. The United States always rushes aid to areas anywhere in the world that suffers any kind of disaster. Yet we remain reviled by many for greed, corruption and overuse of natural resources. We fought a civil war to free the slaves, leaving hundreds of thousands dead and many more than that disabled. Yet there are a significant number of people who claim we remain a systemically racist nation. Some believe and teach that we should be sexually abstinent until marriage, while others encourage sexual experimentation whenever and with whomever you want, at any age.

In many of our schools it is the dark view of America that is being taught to students. Since 2003 the percentage of Americans who report they are extremely proud of our country fell from 70% to 38% today. For those 18 to 34 years old it’s fallen to 25%. Increasingly, our schools are indoctrinating children with negative messages about our history, about our form of government, about the state of our environment, about racial and sexual injustices. Children are simultaneously becoming hooked on a host of social media platforms which have been designed, intentionally, to be addictive. Much of what we learn about current events is learned through ideologically skewed and biased social media.

Entertainment—television, movies, music, video games—likewise has become a vehicle for promoting a progressive ideology. Even formerly family friendly Disney has become fully woke, promoting race and sex-based agendas. The left leaning tilt of corporate entertainment is now being mimicked by the rest of the corporate world under the guise of ESG (environmental, social, governance).

Government at all levels has adopted one of two polar opposite approaches, progressive vs. populist. The progressives aim for more centralized government control, more socialist policies. The populists favor smaller government, more personal control and more free market polices.

Children do not understand these differences. Not even high school students have brains that are developed sufficiently to effectively sort through the key factors necessary even to understand the differences. The brain continues to grow until about age 25, when the frontal lobe, the center of reason, becomes fully developed. Until then, children tend to be governed by their feelings and are highly vulnerable to suggestion and to manipulation by adults.

Parents today largely are disengaged from their children’s education, involvement with their children’s friends, even with their extra-curricular school activities—other than acting as cab drivers. This leaves the education and influence of their children mostly in the hands of other people. Many parents do not even know what their children are learning in school, other than in very general terms. They may pay no attention to what they are watching on television, what movies they go to, who their friends are or anything about their friends or their friends’ families. Nor do they often have any idea how their children are using the smart phone they gave them or the computers and laptops they use. On average, those between 8 and 28 spend 44.5 hours a week on their digital devices, according to the Center for Parenting Education.

Remember, all during these 44.8 hours per week, as well as in school, or hanging our with their friends, children are being bathed in conflicting information. Conflicting information they are mentally incapable of resolving other than by relying on those who are most influential in their lives. Too often the most influential are peers or teachers whose values and perspectives may not align with those of the parents. Frequently, children remain confused, depressed and anxious as a result of the conflict and chaos that reigns in most elements of our culture.

It is unhealthy for children to live in this state of confusion. Children need clarity, certainty, stability. Our society is increasingly becoming hostile to childhood. In 2020, 12% of children 3 to 17 years old “had reported as having ever experienced anxiety or depression, up from 9% in 2016.” It’s no wonder. Children increasingly are being taught that it’s not even certain they are boys or girls. Instead, the educational trend now is to teach children that doctors guess what sex they are based on how they look at birth. It is up to the child, they say, to determine as they grow older what sex they really are.

One of the lesser-known experiments by Ivan Pavlov involved dogs distinguishing between a circle and an oval. The dog would be rewarded if it pointed to a circle, but punished if it pointed at an oval. The experiment involved gradually changing the oval to look more and more like a circle to see how the dogs reacted. At some point the dogs became confused. Some dogs refused to choose, but others became agitated and anxious, spinning around in circles, barking and yelping. This is what we are doing to our children.

Parents need to retake control of what their children are being taught. We can no longer depend on proxies to do our job.

The most important job of a parent is to provide a stable, safe and secure home. A big part of that is for parents to be actively engaged in what their children are being taught at school, involved in their children’s activities, fully knowledgeable about their children’s friends and their families, and actively involved in supervising their children’s online life. If parents do these things, many of the dangers children face in our culture become somewhat insignificant.

It is especially important to help their children differentiate between right and wrong, between true and false, between good touch and bad touch, between safe people and unsafe people. They need to know the difference between good guys and bad guys. And don’t neglect describing what the wolves look like.

Children need to be raised with clearly understood values, preferably Christian values. If parents do not have a clear understanding of a biblical worldview (less than 10% of Christians do) then they need to educate themselves to pass it along to their children. The Bible identifies three kinds of people: the wise person, the foolish person and the evil person. There are no other kinds. Learn how to identify them, and teach your children to do so as well.

Predators, whether sexual predators or other kinds of predators, tend to target lonely children whose parents are not engaged or whose parents are easily fooled. They capitalize on the confusion of children in order to emotionally manipulate and exploit them. Children whose parents have not provided emotional stability or are uninvolved in the child’s life, are prime targets.

Don’t let your child become one.

Leftists, recruited by teachers’ unions with woke anti-Christian ideologies, have made their way onto school boards, causing much grief for parents as they wonder why their children are no longer sharing the values they have been taught at home.

While the source of the problem goes far beyond the influence of school boards, as we have repeatedly demonstrated, some good districts have actually refused to succumb to the radical mandates to indoctrinate children with CRT, “comprehensive” sex ed, and much more, because of the conservative people elected to these local boards, including people of faith.

It is still our intention to encourage parents to remove their children from government schools, but we know that this is not always possible and that our neighbor’s children are stuck in these indoctrination centers. It is vitally important for taxpayers to get behind good solid candidates for school board.

The Primary is now past and the Consolidated Election will be held on April 4^th, in which many communities will elect candidates to fill local positions such as school board. These candidates are as local as you can get — citizens from your community – running to set policies that effect you and your family directly. With a little research on Facebook or whitepages.com, for example, you can find ways to connect with these candidates.

To help you and your neighbors navigate this critical election, IFI has put together a list of 10 questions for school board candidates. We need your help to get them into the hands of the candidates and then out to voters. You can send these questionnaires to candidates via Facebook messenger, email or contact them by another means and ask them to answer and return the questionnaire.

Once answered and returned, we encourage you to share the responses on your social media pages and return them to IFI by email or through the IFI Facebook page.

We hope this effort bears fruit. Our goal is to post them according to school district, making them available to other voters. But we can’t do this without your help to make the candidates positions known more widely.

We only have 5 weeks, so please start your candidate research now. Start by going to your county clerk’s (NOT your circuit court clerk) election page to get a list of candidates. Try searching, for example, (Fill in the county) list of candidates. You should be able to find a list in a matter of a few clicks. If not, call their office and ask where to obtain the list.

Here is a list of clerk offices by county. There are also 8 cities with election boards – Chicago, Bloomington, Aurora, Danville, East St. Louis, Galesburg, Peoria, and Rockford.

CLICK HERE for the school board candidate questionnaire. Forward this questionnaire to candidates by mail or message them through Facebook messenger. You can send an attachment that way. Or look them up on whitepages.com and mail it with a self-addressed return envelope.

Thanks for your help!

Click for Questionnaire

We’ve already given Stanford’s Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative (EHLI) a word or two over their confused categories of “ableist language” and “racist language” but the horse we’re beating is not quite dead yet. It’s one thing to stigmatize normal phrases because their connotation or origin supposedly evoke offensive topics, as the Stanford harmful language list did with those two categories. It’s another thing to stigmatize normal phrases because their grammatical structure evokes insensitivity. But believe it or not, academia at the highest level has managed to do just that with the advent of “person-first language.” Grab onto the seat in front of you as we plummet to new depths of ridiculosity.

• “Convict” is politically incorrect. One ought to say “person who was incarcerated.”

• “Immigrant” is harmful language. One ought to say “person who has immigrated” or “non-citizen.”

• “Disabled person” is best left unsaid. One ought to say “person with a disability.”

• “Homeless person” is a no-no. One ought to say “person without housing.”

But why, you ask, are we no longer allowed to use these basic nouns and adjectives in their organic form? Stanford explains that person-first language “helps to not define people by just one of their characteristics.” Apparently, using the noun “convict” defines the convict according to his criminal record, while using the relative clause “person who was incarcerated” emphasizes that there is more to the convict than his criminal record—he is merely a person who has done jail time. Similarly for “immigrant,” etc. Get the picture? In case you didn’t, the EHLI even meticulously spells it out when it addresses “disabled person:” the phrase “implies that the disability defines a person, whereas ‘Person with a disability’ gives the ownership of the disability to the person.”

Sigh. As I said in my earlier analysis of ableist language, I hope you sense the confusion of an average English-speaker striving to justify the way language has worked for, well, forever. Let’s address this assumption that using nouns to refer to people is equivalent to defining them.

The way the world is structured, it is full of categories and subsets. The category of “father” refers to any male who has a child, and if I have a child, I now am a subset of the category “father.” The category of “manager” refers to anyone who supervises employees, so if I run the local grocery store, I am now a subset of the category “manager.” The category “comedian” refers to anyone who is repeatedly making people laugh, and if I am that kind of person, I now am a subset of the category “comedian.”

Now, there may be many other managers in the world besides me. So, if you were asked to pick me out of a crowd—and all you knew was that I was a manager—you wouldn’t be able to single me out without more information. “Manager” is not a definition of me, because there are many other managers besides me and a definition is neither too broad or too narrow for what it’s defining. Furthermore, “manager” isn’t even a defining characteristic of me; I could easily change my occupation status and remain the same kind of person I was before. Rather, when you say that I am a manager, you are saying that I am a particular member of the larger category of “those who supervise employees.”

This is true for many more such words. Saying that someone is an “immigrant” is not “defining” them by their immigration status; it’s just observing that such a person is a member of the larger category of “all people who have changed their country of residence.” Etc., etc. People can belong to zillions of categories without being defined by any of them!

There is no moral difficulty with using our current terms. But now let’s look at what Stanford’s list has revealed with all its politically-correct mumbo-jumbo: person-first language is just bad writing. If I am a firefighter, the “person-first” way to describe me would be as “a person who fights fires.” If I am a thief, my “person-first” designation would be “a person who steals things.” And beware if you are ever a person who patrons a bank, talking to the person who performs the teller’s duties, when a person who likes to steal comes in, demanding cash from all the people who have money. Yikes.

If this reminds you of your seventh-grade English class, it should. We were all coached to not use more words than we need to. Filling your prose with relative clauses—when simple nouns will do just fine—clogs up your writing. So, we all learned, refuse to continue to be the kind of person who does not allow himself to diminish the number of words that he types as he draws up a draft of the assignment that his teacher told him to come up with! In other words, just write concisely.

Let academia continue to obfuscate.