TLP 80: Should You Consider Sending Your Kids to a Public School this Fall?

8/11/2017

Is the public school system a viable option for Christian families? Join AMBrewster as he unravels this complicated and controversial subject.

Read Matt Walsh’s “Christian Parents, Your Kids Aren’t Equipped to Be Public School Missionaries.”

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Discover even more places to enjoy Truth.Love.Parent.

What's the Parent’s Role in their Children’s Education?
Should You Consider Sending Your Kids to a Public School this Fall?
Should You Consider Sending Your Kids to a Christian School this Fall? | Alan Benson Interview
Should You Consider Homeschooling this Fall? | Scott and Becky Aniol Interview
Should You Consider Sending Your Son to Victory Academy for Boys this Fall? | Mark Massey Interview
The Future of Christian Families and Higher Education | Dr. Steve Pettit Interview

Episode Notes

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Transcript

Introduction

Thank you for joining me today. I’m very much looking forward to taking the Bible and using it to decide whether or not we should delegate our children’s education and to whom.

But more on that in a minute.

We are fast approaching our one year anniversary, and I want to tell you about something very special. In celebration of our anniversary and all that God has done to bring us here, we’ll be offering a new parenting resource on our website.

We have grand plans for developing various parenting curricula that will equip you to be intentional, premeditated parents.

The first of these parenting courses is called “25 Days to Becoming a Premeditated Parent,” and we’re going to let you enroll for free.

I’ll give you more details as we get closer about how you can take advantage of this this free parenting resource.

And, if you’re listening to this episode after September 21st, 2017, that resource or one like it is already available to you if you go to our website, TruthLoveParent.com.

Okay, so “Should You Consider Sending Your Kids to a Public School this Fall?”

Topic

May I say that the answer is not an easy one?

I also need to point out that the Bible does’t give us a direct answer, but the good news is that there are plenty of principles and examples that I believe we can come to a Christ-honoring answer.

I’m going to start by acknowledging the general considerations and work to the specific from there. But I need to make the observation that I’m not going to waste any of our time talking about all the bad reasons people send their kids to public schools. As we discussed last times, people do lots of terrible things for lots of terrible reasons, and I’m not going sit around talking about why they’re terrible. The things I’m going to discuss are legitimate considerations for Christian parents who want to glorify God.

Financial Considerations
1. Let’s face it, many of us just don't have a lot of money.
2. But just because something is cheap or free doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. I’m not going to talk about school vouchers though I think they’re a great idea since public schooling isn’t free to anyone paying taxes, but I do want to simply acknowledge that the public school system most often appears to be the least expensive option.
3. And I believe that’s a fair assessment from a monetary standpoint, but as we’ll see later, the other costs may be too heavy for anyone to bear.
4. But before we move on to the second consideration, we need to grapple with this reality.
  1. First, you get what you pay for. I know that trillions of dollars are poured into the American public school system every year, but when you divide that by all the schools in the US, you will find that most public schools are terribly underfunded or their funds are painfully misappropriated. This means, that if you’re paying a sliver of your taxes for schooling, don’t be surprised when the schooling isn’t that good — in multiple ways.
  2. Second, I have found from running my own businesses that people who don’t invest financially often don’t invest in any other ways as well. We treat cheap things like cheap things. We don’t take as much care of the things we’re given as the things we worked hard to buy. This affects both the student and the parent. Often neither of them are heavily invested because school is appears to be little more than a governmental expectation that doesn’t cost me anything.
5. To sum this consideration up, yes, the public school will keep more money in your bank account than other options, but just because it’s financially frugal, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. And that leads us to our second consideration.
Academic Considerations
1. There’s a preponderance of research on the American school system. You can easily see how the nations of the world rank in education, how the states rank, and even how the school districts rank. But the reality is that even the best American public schools don’t hold a candle to other educational options we’ll discuss in this series.
2. I believe the biggest failure in the academic category is tied to the fact that everyone in every grade is required to do the same material. Thousands of third graders are going to learn third grade Math and English and Science this fall because that’s what was assigned for eight year olds. But not every eight year old is capable of the same things. And regardless of where they fall, nearly every eight year old is capable of more than the public school system is requiring of them.
3. My illustration is anecdotal and based in my personal experiences, so they’re way to negate, but please take them for what they are.
4. As a trained and degreed educator, I immediately and easily saw the great academic potential my son had. But it didn’t take too long to see that my daughter had developmental challenges my son didn’t. In addition to a lazy eye, bad eyesight overall, nearly every speech impediment imaginable, and a number of other delayed-maturation issues, I was pretty certain my daughter wasn’t going to thrive in an academic setting the same way my son would.
5. So it was easy to do for my son what my mom did for me. He started informally learning fourth grade when he was in kindergarten. Okay, so it wasn’t as awesome as my mom. She managed to teach me algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus before I got into junior high.
6. Anyway, when we moved to Victory Academy, and I was able to take the full responsibility for my children’s math education, I made the decision that I wasn’t going to hold my daughter back simply because she slower than her brother in getting things like basic math skills, language development, and reading. I was going to give her a chance to thrive.
7. So, last year I decided that both of my children were going to use nothing but sixth grade material with the exception that my daughter would still be using a younger reading curriculum.
8. Let me tell you what, my daughter did thrive! Yes, it’s true that my then nine year old could do the sixth grade material with little to know assistance, and my seven year old needed me there with her to guide her through the process, but there were many times her ability to reason through math and language problems, or to formulate deep conclusions about scientific or historical events was astonishing and far-surpassed my son.
9. This fall Micah will be ten and a half and Ivy will be eight. They’ll both be using seventh grade Bob Jones University, Abeka, Saxon, and other textbooks. If they stay on track, Micah will be finishing high school when he’s sixteen, and Ivy will be thirteen and a half.
10. This would never have happened in the public school. In fact, because of all her physical and mental developmental issues, they probably would have slapped her into a special class.
11. There’s not enough time, money, or personnel in the public school system to give each child the unique educational experience that they need.
12. And this will always happen when you have one teacher with a room-full of students. Always. By the way, this has to happen in the Christian school as well. We’ll give them their chance tomorrow, but it’s fair to acknowledge the point right now, that even when you have a ten-to-one ratio, you cannot specialize the way the children need.
13. But, neither the Financial Considerations nor the Academic Considerations of the public school system are the biggest or most important considerations. As we talked about last time, you can teach your child to be the greatest scientist on the planet, but if they reject God’s Truth or exist in a wishy-washy state of nominal Christianity, who cares what they accomplish with their lives? It will have meant nothing when they end their mortal existence.
14. And so we now turn to the Spiritual Considerations.
Spiritual Considerations
1. Let me start this consideration by acknowledging that there are many born again believers in and part of the public school system. There are saved administrators, teachers, involved parents, and students. And I’m thankful for the what they do, and we’ll talk about them more in a minute. I just wanted to state that in light of my next comment.
2. The public school system in America is friendly to nearly every religion, sexual persuasion, and deviant philosophy. But no one can argue that the public school is friendly to Christianity. We don’t have the time to discuss why, but suffice it to say that men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil. Unregenerate man will always shun the light and embrace anything that helps them enjoy the darkness.
  1. I have many friends and family members who teach in the public schools, and every single one of them have told me how they have to dance around religion. It’s actually pretty funny that my friends who have taught English in Chinese schools have had more freedom to talk about the Bible, read the Bible, and evangelize in class than Christians in America do. At the very best, the school system tolerates its Christians as long as they don’t get to loud, or the groups get too big.
  2. And again, the religious persecution in the hallways and teachers lounges is very real and well documented.
3. Not only is the system anti-Bible, but as I mentioned before, it pretty much embraces anything and everything else.
  1. We’re going to talk about this more next time, but what amazes me is that so many so-called Christian schools do a better job merely teaching subjects and ignoring the moral and philosophical implications than public schools do. Nearly every class is served with a massive side of the teacher’s worldview . . . whatever that may be. And again, the experiential anecdotes of wicked, foolish, and simply blind teachers abound.
  2. In addition, not only do the teachers bring their own belief system to bear on the subject, but increasingly the government is trying to manipulate the children’s minds into seeing life the way they want. Whether it’s “safe zones,” the LGTB and gender platform, sex education, or how children don’t need to respect their parents, the Failure Philosophies abound. By the way, if you want to see if some Failure Philosophies have sneaked into your home, I recommend you listen to episode 61, “Are There Failure Philosophies in Your Home?”
  3. And then you have the students. Each one of them comes from a home where they have been taught how to think, believe, and live. And most of them feel right at home with the twisted, worldly, sinful lifestyle public education is force-feeding out kids. So even if your child gets that one Christian teacher in their school, they’re in class, and at lunch, and in the locker room, and on the bus, and in the hallways, and standing in the bathroom with kids who are preaching and screaming and singing as loudly as they can how they think the world’s supposed to work.
  4. My friends, the public school system is not some sanitized, just-the-facts-ma’am, environment where Johnny and Susie learn their times-tables. It’s a purposeful and premeditated training ground for godless philosophy. And this is where the fingernails meet the chalkboard — are your kids ready to do day-in-and-day-out spiritual battle and come out on winning side?
    1. Yes, I believe with all my heart there exists somewhere in the world a group of Christian highschoolers who’re spiritually mature enough to intelligently meet the professional, well-funded, and coordinated daily onslaught of wicked, humanistic perversion. But I haven’t met that many.
      1. When I worked at Schaumburg Christian School, we would frequently see out shiniest students leave our program and enter public education — sometimes in high school and sometimes for college — and when they came back they were practically indistinguishable from the world.
      2. Yes, the Bible tells of Joseph in Egypt, Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in Babylon, and Nehemiah in Persia. But which of us is comfortable comparing our children to the teenage versions of those men?
      3. So, before I continue, I will leave the door cracked slightly that if you’ve done an amazing job as a parent and have introduced your kids to the Lord equipped them to be vibrant, energetic, uncompromising, outspoken, apologetic followers of Christ, and they’ve proven their spiritual maturity and loyalty over the years, and you and your child have purposefully decided that attending the public school — not for the education or even the finances, but in order — to be a witness in this dark and dying world is the most Christ-honoring thing you can do. And if you’ve set up a dynamic spiritual support system for them that involves counseling, accountability, and Bible study . . . then sure, it might be a good idea to send your teenager to the public school this fall.
    2. But this does not describe the situation for most of the professing Christians in the public school today. And before my inbox gets slammed full from millennials and generation Xers trying to prove that they went through the public school system and came out just fine . . . please recognize at least that the public school system of today is not the one you grew up in. I’ll talk more about this in a minute. But I want to look at biblical examples again.
    3. Just like mature Christians can glorify God in secular schools, immature Christians and unbelieving children will not survive today’s school system. Consider Peter, Judas, the Nation of Israel. Israel rejected their Heavenly King. Judas betrayed his perfect teacher, role-model, and Savior, and even Peter was a Rocky Heart up until the sea of Galilee after the resurrection. And we know how the nation of Israel fared under wicked kings who introduces idol worship. Imagine how much worse Judas would have turned out being raised by Romans. And consider Peter as a Jewish zealot.
      1. My point is, Satan is like a roaring lion walking about seeking whom he may devour.
      2. He hates you, he hates your kids, and he wants to destroy your family.
      3. He will use everything he can in the public school setting to lead your family away from Truth. His demonic ravens are busy eating the seeds of Truth they hear at church, how much more diabolical are their schemes when your child is immersed in humanism?

I want to close with this.

Matt Walsh, a Christian columnist for the Blaze, wrote and article called “Christian Parents, Your Kids aren’t equipped to be Public School Missionaries.” I want to read an extended portion, and I’ll link it for you in the description. As a side note, if you follow us on Facebook, we’ve already shared the article there.

Anyway, Matt just told of a school newspaper in Virginia hat had an article on “transgender rights.” And he says, ”Look, I know that public school may really be the only option for some people. There are single parents of little economic means who find themselves backed into a corner where government education appears to be the only choice. And if a parent can’t or won’t homeschool, a private Christian education can be prohibitively expensive. Not only that, but some Christians schools are as bad as, or worse than, the average public school. Abandoning the public school system is not an easy thing, and it presents many hurdles that, right now, may be impossible for some people to get over. The collapse of the family unit, not to mention our recent economic woes, have contributed to creating a dependence on public education. Not everyone can break free all at once, I realize.

“But we should certainly all agree, at this point, that public school is not an option for those of us who have another feasible option. We should agree that public school is a matter of last resort and necessity. We should agree that public education is inherently hostile to true Christian values, and for that reason it is not anywhere close to the ideal environment for our kids. We should agree on these points. But we still don’t, incredibly.

“I had this discussion on Twitter recently, and it prompted several emails from Christian parents who appear to believe that kids should still be sent to public school, even if there are other valid options available. They suggested that, somehow, the sort of madness outlined above could present faith-affirming opportunities for our children, and we would actually be depriving them of something if we did not give them access to those opportunities. They claimed that public school is a “mission field” where our kids can be “salt and light” to their friends. They said that it’s not fair to our kids or our communities if we “shelter” them. They suggested that somehow it’s our children’s duty to minister to the pagan hordes. They said that “the system” needs our kids.

“A few responses to this rather confused point of view: First of all, “the system needs our kids” is just a weird and creepy statement. It reminds me of something someone would say on Black Mirror or the Twilight Zone. Here’s the truth about “the system”: It’s not my job to give it what it needs. Even less is it my kid’s job. There’s nothing in the Bible that says we must dedicate ourselves to maintaining a government-run education system at any cost. My first responsibility is to my family, not to the community or the school system or my kid’s classmates. I will never put the interests of “the system” above that of my own children. Whether “the system” lives or dies is not my concern. My family is my concern. I have an obligation to them, not to the local superintendent.

“Second, anyway, if I did put my kids in “the system” for the sake of “the system,” I’m not the one making the sacrifice. I’m forcing my kids to make it. At least face what you’re doing. When it comes down to it, the burden of public schooling is something your child will have to shoulder, not you.

“Third, yes, my kids will eventually be exposed to all kinds of strange and terrible things. As much as I’d like to keep them shielded from the evils of the world forever, I know that I can do no such thing. The question is not whether our kids will be exposed to this or that depravity, but when and how and in what context? Are you prepared to trust the school’s judgment on when Junior is ready to learn about concepts like “transgenderism”? Do you trust their judgment on how he learns about it, and what he’s told about it? If you do, I suppose you aren’t even reading this post right now because you’ve been in a vegetative state for the past 30 years.

“Fourth, when a kid is sent to public school, he’s expected to navigate and survive and thrive in a hostile, confusing, amoral environment, basically untethered from his parents, 6–8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 9 months a year, for 12 years. Is a child ready for that challenge by the time he’s 5 years old? Is he ready at 8? At 10? No. Our job as parents is to “train them up in the way they should go,” equip them with the armor of God, fortify them in the truth, and then release them into the world. That process has not been completed in conjunction with them first learning how to tie their shoes. I mean, for goodness’ sake, most adults can’t even manage to withstand the hostilities and pressures of our fallen world for that amount of time. And we expect little kids to do it? That’s not fair to them. It’s too much to ask. Way too much. They aren’t equipped, they aren’t ready, they aren’t strong enough, and they will get eaten alive.

“Fifth, related to the last point, your child is not ready to be a missionary. He cannot be a “witness” to others until he himself has been properly formed in the faith. It’s no surprise that most of the young “missionaries” we commission and send forth to minister to the lost souls in public schools quickly become one of the lost souls. We don’t need to sit around theorizing about whether the missionary approach to education is wise or effective. We already know that it isn’t. The vast majority of the parents who think their kids are being “salt and light” to their peers in school are simply oblivious to the fact that their little Bible warriors have long since defected and joined the heathens. You can hardly blame the kids for this. They’re just kids, after all. They aren’t warriors. Warriors are trained and disciplined. Children are neither of those things. I imagine this is why St. Paul didn’t travel to Athens and Corinth recruiting toddlers to help him carry the Gospel into pagan lands.

“Education is supposed to prepare a child to carry the torch of truth. That is, he’s supposed to be ready to carry it once his education has been completed. This should not be a “throw them into the deep end to see if they can swim” strategy. They can’t swim. You and I can barely swim, morally and spiritually speaking, and we’re adults. Do you expect your child to be more spiritually mature and morally courageous than you?”

Conclusion

My friends, I share this with you because I love you. When I read and interact with our public school systems across the US, and when I meet professing Christians who are supposedly “making it through” in a Christ-honoring way, I involuntarily cringe.

The system is messed up.

And the kids who think they’re thriving are almost always lost or very double-minded.

And I don’t want that to happen to your kids.

My friends, there are better options, and I look forward to sharing them with you as we continue in this series.

Don’t forget to check out TruthLoveParent.com for today’s episode notes, and . . .

Please join us next time as we continue this discussion about educational choices and talk with my dear friend, Alan Benson about whether or not you should consider sending your kids to a Christian school this fall.

I know that many of you may disagree with my stance today, and I welcome your feedback at [email protected]. And for those of you with more specific questions, don’t hesitate to reach out at [email protected].

If we’re going to delegate part of our parenting, we’d better make certain of two things: 1. We’re doing the job God requires of us, and 2. The person we’re engaging to help educate our children is doing the job God requires of them as well.

Have a great weekend!