Jefferson Review

"Your Liberty is Our Interest"

Home /  Archives / Search / Links / Quotes / Book Reviews / Advertise /Contact us / Subscribe / Calendar

Are Southern Baptists About To Abandon

Government Schools?

http://www.lewrockwell.com/yates/yates94.html

by Steven Yates

A resolution recently submitted to the Southern

Baptist Convention for its annual meeting to be held

in Indianapolis on June 15–16 calls on parents in

this country’s largest Protestant denomination to

pull their children out of government schools, and

either homeschool them or send them to private

Christian schools.

Charleston, S.C. native Thomas C. Pinckney, a retired

Air Force brigadier general and longstanding critic

of state-sponsored education, and Bruce Shortt, a

Texas attorney, jointly submitted the resolution.

Pinckney is a past Second Vice President of the

Southern Baptist Convention and publishes The Baptist

Banner from Alexandria, Va. His voice carries a great

deal of weight within the denomination, which has

over 43,000 churches with more than 16.3 million

members. Shortt is Texas coordinator for the South

Carolina-based Exodus Mandate project. The Resolution

has caused enough of a stir to warrant coverage in

major newspapers around the country.

For several years now Exodus Mandate has been calling

on Christian parents to abandon Pharaoh’s school

system, as Exodus Mandate founder Rev. E. Ray Moore

calls it in his book Let My Children Go (2002). In

his book Rev. Moore argues in detail that government

schools were a bad idea to begin with. From the start

they were steeped in assumptions that were both anti-

Christian and alien to the principles on which the

United States was founded. For example, the

government schools initially established in

Massachusetts by Horace Mann and his Unitarian

cohorts followed what has become known as the

"Prussian model," holding that the individual should

be educated into the service of the omnipotent state.

Despite all the efforts afoot to "reform" government

schools, the problems are intrinsic to the government

education model itself. Therefore they cannot be

reformed, and we shouldn’t try.

According to the strongly-worded resolution,

"children taught in the government schools are

receiving an anti-Christian education" because

"government schools are by their own confession

humanistic and secular in their instruction, [thus]

the education offered by the government schools is

officially Godless …" and "millions of children in

government schools spend 7 hours a day, 180 days a

year being taught that God is irrelevant to every

area of life …" (italics in original).

The resolution also cites the growing acceptability

of homosexuality by government schools as evidence of

their corruption: "homosexual organizations are

present as approved student ‘clubs’ in thousands of

government schools and are spreading rapidly … Just

as it would be fooling for the warrior to give his

arrows to his enemies, it is foolish for Christians

to give their children to be trained in schools run

by the enemies of God."

Pinckney and Shortt also invite us to consider a

study by the Nehemiah Institute based on extensive

surveys of student worldviews, attitudes and beliefs.

According to this study, children growing up in

Christian homes tend more and more to adopt a

humanist worldview after attending government

schools. The Institute has discovered "that

acceptance of a secular humanist worldview by

Christian children attending government schools has

increased dramatically over the last fifteen years …

the Southern Baptist Council on Family Life reported

to the 2002 Annual Meeting of the Southern Baptist

Convention that 88 percent of the children raised in

evangelical homes leave church at the age of 18,

never to return; …"

The Resolution thus urges Christian parents "to

remove their children from the government schools and

see to it that they receive a thoroughly Christian

education …" It also urges Southern Baptist churches

to offer facilities where Christian education may be

delivered: "Be it further resolved that the 2004

Annual Meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention

encourages all churches associated with the Southern

Baptist Convention to work energetically to counsel

parents regarding their obligation to provide their

children with a Christian education" and "to provide

all of their children with Christian alternatives to

government school education, either through home

schooling or thoroughly Christian private schools."

First and foremost, argues the Resolution, are

Scriptural reasons: "the Bible commands that fathers

are to bring up their children in the training and

admonition of the Lord (Eph. 6: 4)." In his book Rev.

Moore cites a number of relevant passages. Deut. 6:

6-7 says, "And these words which I command you today

shall be in your heart. You shall teach them

diligently to your children, and shall talk of them

when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way,

when you lie down, when you rise up." Proverbs 22: 6

is also telling: "Train up a child in the way he

should go, and when he is old, he will not depart

from it."

Thus to paraphrase Rev. Moore, Scripture commands

parents to assume control of their children’s

education with assistance from the church.

A second reason is Constitutional. Nowhere does the

U.S. Constitution mention education as a federal

responsibility. The Framers considered education to

be a matter for states and local communities to

undertake. The bottom line from a Constitutional

point of view therefore is that under any literal

reading of the Constitution, the massive

federalization of government schools in recent years

is blatantly un-Constitutional.

There are other reasons Southern Baptists (or others)

might consider abandoning government schools. These

have to do with government schools’ increasing

failure to educate. For over 20 years now, their

decline has been in evidence, with the well known

study "A Nation At Risk" (1983) sounding the first

official alarms. Moreover, the more money the federal

government has thrown at the schools, the worse they

have gotten. Billions have been spent on public

education since Jimmy Carter created the U.S.

Department of Education in the late 1970s. From 1970

to 1995, per-pupil expenditures in government schools

increased by over 75 percent. In the 2000–2001 school

year, per-pupil expenditures surpassed $7,000 per

pupil, with little evidence of significant

improvement. According to the U.S. Department of

Education’s own statistics and recent NAEP

assessments, only 31 percent of 4th graders can read

proficiently. Only 32 percent can do simple

arithmetic. Only 29 percent have gained any

proficiency in science. Only 18 percent have learned

any U.S. history.

In the mid-1980s I taught logic at a flagship state

university. In the mid-1990s I also taught logic at

another flagship state university. The difference was

akin to day versus night. I could cover material in

the 1980s that I could not begin to cover by the mid-

1990s! Other instructors from elsewhere in the

country told me similar stories. We had all

experienced a precipitous across-the-board decline in

the level of student preparedness for college-level

work. Faculty members should have been sounding the

alarm, but too many were busy with their own

politically correct agendas.

Today, after Goals 2000 and the blatantly anti-

intellectual School-To-Work model, followed up by its

current stepchild No Child Left Behind, arguably the

most intrusive (and expensive) federal program in

U.S. history, there is no concrete, agreed-upon

evidence of government schools’ improvement. There

is, however, abundant evidence that we live in a

dumbed-down land. There are adult Americans who

cannot tell you who the vice president is, name their

state’s senators (or tell you how many U.S. senators

there are), or, say, walk up to a wall map of the

world and point to Iraq. Indeed, some cannot even

find the United States!

We are producing a generation, moreover, whose

reasoning abilities and capacity to evaluate

information are astoundingly low. Just recently I had

a conversation with an acquaintance who was

complaining about the high price of gas. I pointed

out that if you adjust for inflation, prices at the

pumps were actually higher under the Carter

Administration. "But I’m paying more today than

anyone did then!" she retorted. It dawned on me that

the concept of adjusting for inflation was simply

beyond her. She had only the vaguest idea what I was

talking about.

Public presentations on health topics ranging from

first aid to stroke prevention education are now

presented at what would once have been considered a

sixth-grade reading level. Even then, crucial

information is often not processed by listeners

unless the speaker resorts to scare tactics. It is as

if the listeners’ minds have been somehow shut off to

whatever does not affect them directly and

immediately.

According to Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, the dumbing

down of America has been systematic and deliberate –

the product of elite operatives who began their work

on government schools almost a hundred years ago –

often just following the assumptions of those who

created government schools. They worked through

highly secretive organizations such as the Council on

Foreign Relations and immense tax-exempt foundations

such as that of Rockefeller. The promotion of

materialism and humanism was no accident. The

architects of the current educational world order

relied upon the thoroughly materialist theories in

"experimental psychology" (such as those of Wilhelm

Wundt) and regarded children as the moral equivalent

of animals. The Rockefeller Foundation bankrolled

John Dewey’s "progressive education" which began the

long, intergenerational process of dumbing down. The

schools were further corrupted when Alfred C.

Kinsey’s theories of sexuality – also materialist

through and through – broke the ties between

sexuality and Judeo-Christian moral imperatives, and

these were incorporated into government schools in

the guise of "sexuality education."

This, of course, was long before the federal

government fully centralized its educational system

through the Carter-created U.S. Department of

Education, and we moved toward the School-To-Work

model pushed by the Clintons and their cronies in the

mid-1990s. According to this model, education is

exclusively vocational; children should be tracked

into one of a fairly specific set of occupations by

their middle-school years, with their subsequent

learning to be tracked around these. Thus they serve

the purposes of big government and big business

rather than being allowed to find their own way in

life. The long-term goal: a population of sheep,

suited to work in a global planned economy regulated

by a world government.

In light of all this, not just Southern Baptists but

all Christians – and all people who wish to live

lives free of the fetters of the omnipresent and

omnipotent state – have plenty of reason to leave the

federal government’s (Pharaoh’s) school system.

Clearly, government schools are producing graduates

utterly unsuited to live in a free society. There is

no need to fear that abandoning government schools

means abandoning education – as educrats will argue

hysterically if this resolution is adopted. We now

have evidence that homeschooled children are usually

around four years ahead of their government-schooled

counterparts in every major subject area. They win

awards, go on to attend prestigious universities, and

even occasionally write books.

To adopt the resolution would be a radical step for

Southern Baptists, who have always assumed that

Christianity and government education were

compatible. However, given the tailspin government

schools have been in during the past few decades,

when the Southern Baptist Convention holds its annual

meeting in Indianapolis beginning on June 15, the

nation’s largest Christian denomination might just

reconsider its stance. If it does, we can expect

shock waves to reverberate through this country’s

education establishment.

---------------

Steven Yates has a Ph.D. in philosophy and is the

author of “Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With

Affirmative Action” (1994). He is an adjunct scholar

with the Ludwig von Mises Institute. His new book,

“In Defense of Logic”, is almost completed.

|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|*|

D o w n s i z e r - D i s p a t c h

is the official email list of

http://www.DownsizeDC.org.

CONTRIBUTE to this project at

http://www.downsizedc.org/web-contribute.html

http://www.DownsizeDC.org is sponsored by the

American Liberty Foundation -- a non-profit

educational organization promoting the ideas of

individual liberty and personal responsibility.

VISIT the Foundation's web site at

http://www.AmericanLibertyFoundation.org

SUBSCRIBE to this list by sending a text only (no HTML)

email to distribution-request@DownsizeDC.org with the word

   subscribe

on the first line of the body of the message.

Please leave the rest of the message blank.

Weather (Louisville) / Mapquest / Search / White Pages / Business Search / CNN / Dictionary / E-card / MSN