The Future of Our Nation Depends on the State of Our Schools

May 30, 2019

This week the Supreme Court declined to accept a case over whether government schools may force students to follow transgender ideology in official school policies, against science and female students’ privacy rights.

They won’t be able to avoid the issue for long.

We send our children to private, Christian schools. Tuition is high; the financial burden on our family is significant.

But we have determined that government schools are just not an option.

Still, I have come to believe that the future of our nation depends on the state of our public schools.

Last week I chaired a panel on education at Family Research Council’s Watchmen on the Wall conference for pastors.

I opened the panel with the premise that today’s government schools are a serious threat to the minds and souls of Christian children in America.

Is that an overstatement? I don’t believe it is.

Fewer than 5 percent of U.S. kids are homeschooled today. Only 10 percent attend private schools.

The vast majority of American children are educated in government schools—schools that are declining academically, despite the mountains of tax dollars we heap on them.

The notion that a nation’s schools might promote the cause of the nation is a relic of the past. American public schools are often hostile to America. There is much less history taught today—less civics, but more activism. Capitalism is degraded, socialism is promoted—with our tax dollars.

Every week brings news of another school district embracing radical sex-ed for kids, in the face of parental objections—or worse: behind parents’ backs.

Worse even than graphic sex lessons is the new transgender ideology that is forced on children in public schools.

The Human Rights Campaign, Planned Parenthood, Genderspectrum.org, and GLSEN (the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network) are targeting public schools.

They’re going into schools with slick lesson plans for teachers. They demand an answer to the question: “Are you a safe space for LGBT kids? If so, put up this sticker in your classroom.” And so the walls of our public schools are littered with political propaganda that families would never allow in their own homes.

Genderspectrum.org has what looks like a war room chart—four ways to get transgender theory into a public school. They call them “entry points”: interpersonal, instructional, and so on.

One mom at a targeted school said: “Entry points are what a thief uses to break into your house. It feels very much the same way to me.”

And they have gained entry.

Many school districts are now teaching the innocent souls under their care that some of them are born in the wrong body.

Most people know that’s a lie. We know that every child is born in exactly the right body. But it’s children who are being propagandized this way. And it’s a very short step from rejecting God’s creation to rejecting God.

What are these schools doing to children’s souls?

A 2016 nationwide survey found that 35 percent of college freshman call themselves atheist or agnostic. Thirty-five percent.

Now, keep in mind, this is not the result of some radical college professor. These are incoming freshmen, reflecting the cumulative influence of 13 years of public education.

The environment in public schools is hostile to people of faith today. Religious viewpoints are shunned and are replaced with a dogmatic secularism.

Christian families must wake up to the fact that public schools are an actively and strongly secularizing agent in Christian children’s lives.

But the answer cannot be simply to turn our backs or walk away.

There is far too much public money on the table to leave to the ideologues in the education industry to mold the next generation in their image.

Justice demands that we help these children—we’re talking about 86 percent of American kids.

But wisdom demands it, too. These kids will be our nation’s future teachers, doctors, lawyers, politicians, and presidents.

As Abraham Lincoln said: “The philosophy of the school room in one generation, will be the philosophy of government in the next.”

And also the philosophy of the culture in the next.

We must help families who have no other choice for their kids. We must also help the many good and faithful teachers and administrators who are faithful to their calling to educate and not indoctrinate, but who feel isolated and alone against the tide.

If we care about our nation, we must care first about our nation’s schools.