From time to time God provides milestones that allow us to evaluate how well we’re doing in our stewardship responsibilities. I was recently provided with one of these milestones. But first a little background.
Four years ago my wife and I came to the decision that the Westerville School District was not providing the kind of education we wanted our 3 girls to have. Sure, they got good instruction in math, science and English. History is another story, however. One of the first things I always checked was my daughter’s history textbooks. In my children’s last year at Westerville I learned from my daughter’s history text the circumstances of the first Thanksgiving celebration. According to the text, the Pilgrims held the celebration not to give thanks to God but to the Wampanoag tribe. Thus, historical truth was swept under the rug of political correctness in order to maintain supposed religious “neutrality.” My daughters were subjected to constant but subtle attacks on the moral training my wife and I provided. In history, “social studies” and even English classes my children were subjected to training in situational ethics, moral relativism, post-modern and existential philosophies and religiously dogmatic treatment of the “forces of naturalism” as the only possible explanation for life.
Yes, I’ve heard the arguments for why I should have kept my kids in the Westerville school system. The district has many Christian teachers, my kids needed to be in the school to be salt and light, they won’t be properly “socialized” and so on. Well, it is clear that the district could have a faculty consisting of 100% Christians and it would not matter because of federal, state and district mandated policies and curricula. Most children aged 5 to 18 are not equipped with the education, training or willpower to counter the constant assault on their faiths that they encounter in the modern public education system. Most Christian kids are particularly poorly suited to standing up to teachers who single them out since they are trained to respect authority. As for socialization, I’ve never run into a homeschooler who didn’t have lots of friends, both in and out of public schools.
Recently my oldest daughter went with some of her friends (see what I mean? Plenty of socialization) to see the movie “21,” about college students who develop a card counting system to beat the odds at casino black jack tables. I told her that I had read a review of the movie which stated that the audience’s sympathy was with the students because they saw the casinos as corporate thieves and asked her what she thought. Her answer was definitely a milestone. She said, “Dad, I couldn’t root for either the students or the casinos. Both of them were dishonest. It was like watching two thieves fight over a stolen wallet. There weren’t any heroes in the movie, even though the director tried to make the students the heroes.”
My daughter showed me that my wife and I made the correct decision to pull our children out of Westerville City Schools 4 years ago. Her answer revealed not a hint of moral relativism, situational ethics or post-modernism. Unlike her public school trained contemporaries, she was able to see through a direct appeal to her emotions to the crux of the dilemma that the director was trying to convey. She was also able to see that the underlying question was not an “either/or” choice and that she was free to reject both sides as immoral.
Could she have come to the same conclusion had we looked the other way as she was trained in a system of moral thinking that is not just “morality neutral” but openly hostile and antithetical to a Christian worldview? The answer to that question can be found in examining the worldviews of the millions of Christians who have been trained in America’s public schools. In a recent survey performed by George Barna, only 9% of adult professing Christians had anything close to a Christian worldview. We think the answer to the question is “No!”
As much as I would like to, neither my wife nor I cannot take any credit for this. God planted the seed within my children. My wife and I have been entrusted by Him with the care and nurturing of that seed so that He may eventually harvest the crop and use the resultant seed to plant more. In this way does Christ grow His Church. We are merely the conduits through which He works.
Thus we have been given a milestone to measure our stewardship. Thank God!
Warning- Blatant plug ahead.
If you’re looking for good Christian worldview training, especially in the civil government realm, then consider sending your teens to Camp American