STORY: Public opinion surveys almost always show that people with more education are generally more liberal than other people of the same age. One main reason is that college and university students are influenced by the liberalism of their professors. In effect, universities act as a factory that produces liberal students, include your own children.
Background:
In North America, enrolment in Christian schools has risen 10% per year during the last decade and has more than doubled.
· The Bible took the institution of the family for granted because it is the natural order intended by God so the Bible does not explicitly promote it.
· The husband and wife are of equal worth before God, since both are created in God’s image. The marriage relationship models the way God relates to His people. A husband is to love his wife as Christ loves the Church. The husband has the God-given responsibility to provide for, to protect, and to lead his family. A wife is to place herself in support of the servant leadership of her husband even as the Church willingly places herself in support of the headship of Christ. She, being in the image of God as is her husband and thus equal to him, has the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve together in managing the household and nurturing the next generation. (Eph 5:22-25)
· In a marriage lived according to these truths, the love between husband and wife will show itself in listening to each other’s viewpoints, valuing each other’s gifts, wisdom and desires, serving in partnership to impact the culture redemptively, honouring one another in public and in private, and always seeking to bring benefit, not harm to one another.
· Children, from the moment of conception, are a blessing and heritage from the Lord. Parents are to demonstrate to their children God’s pattern for marriage. They should teach their children spiritual and moral values and lead them, through consistent lifestyle example and loving discipline, to make choices based on biblical truth. Children are to honour and obey their parents. (Eph 6:1-4; 1Ti 3:4)
· The institution of family demonstrates God’s supreme intelligence in design.
· The mysterious link between both parents and the offspring [half of the genetic makeup (DNA) from each parent] is an important element in parental love.
· The blood relations and physical and psychological resemblance shared by the siblings create a permanent link and close personal relationship.
· Children strengthen the marriage bond. The permanency of such bond reflects the will of God that a marriage vow once committed should be permanent.
· The education of children and youth is the responsibility of the parents (Dt 6:5-9; Eph 6:4). Part of that responsibility may be delegated to either the church or public institutions of education. But the responsibility or the controlling power stays with the parents and is never relinquished. When conflicts arise, the parents always have the power to make the final decision.
· Some liberal judges have tried to take away the right of education of children from the parents. They wanted to stop parents from “imposing their narrow religious views from their children.”
In R. v. Audet (1997), the Supreme Court of Canada reaffirmed that the parents are the primary educators of their children. A teacher's authority is a delegated authority, and not inherent. Parents can revoke that authority, and their right to do so was affirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada in Adler v. Ontario [1996].
· A humanist says, “Our schools may not teach Johnny to read properly, but the fact that Johnny is in school until he is 16 tends to lead toward the elimination of religious superstition.”
· A radical liberal says, “The Left can’t survive politically without a public school system to spread leftist attitudes.”
· Another humanist writes: “Education is thus a most powerful ally of Humanism, and every American public school is a school of Humanism. What can the theistic Sunday-schools, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?”
· Christian children and youth who attend public schools should be exempted from assignments and activities which conflict with their Christian values (for example, an essay promoting the exclusion of God from the society). We should ask for alternate assignments so that the student’s academic standing not be jeopardized.
· The most effective way to prevent the secularization of children is to build a solid Christian moral and spiritual foundation at home and at church.
· Most of all, children must be committed to divine protection through prayer. No one can look after the children all the time, except God.
· Usually, the mother spends more time with the children and has great influence over the children, but the role of the father is always underestimated.
· Research shows that paternal involvement in bringing up the child can greatly impact a child in many areas: management of emotions, academic achievement, verbal communication, problem-solving skills, and the development of empathy.
· Kids between 13 and 17 say that, next to their peers, their father is their most important role model. [Peer pressure, termed the “terror of the peer group” by Dr. James Dobson (1Co 15:33) is a major influencing factor on behaviour that children need to deal with, and often need to resist.]
· Recent research has shown that fathers actually seem to have absolute veto power over the homosexual development of their sons. A counsellor for hundreds of homosexuals said, “I have never met a homosexual male with a loving, respectful relationship with his father.”
· Unfortunately, there has been a trend toward more children born to unmarried women. In the US, 1970 figures show that 6% of whites, and 38% of blacks were born to unmarried women. In 2002, it has risen to 29% for whites and 68% for blacks.
· Many children in single parent homes are found to have lower academic achievement and with antisocial behaviour.
Children forced to accept homosexuality
In 1997, Surrey School Board banned books about same-sex marriage from kindergarten and grade 1 (allowed in grade 2 and upwards). The ban was overruled by the British Columbia Supreme Court. The ruling was later overturned. However, the Supreme Court of Canada heard the case in 2002 and ordered the school board to reconsider its decision, meaning that the Court may force the Board to include those books if the Board does not voluntarily do so.
“Value-free” curriculum
In university, students in education (future teachers) are taught that words like “good” and “bad” have no place in class. Therefore, smoking should not be described as “bad”; instead, students should only be taught that smoking can cause health problems like lung cancer. They are then given the freedom to choose.
Feeling good more important than good performance
In a 1989 study, grade 7 students from 6 countries were given a difficult mathematics test. The performance is best in Korea, followed by Spain, Britain, Ireland, Canada, and the US. After the test, they were asked to rate their performance compared to 5 other countries. The most optimistic were the American students (68% rate themselves good) while of Koreans were most pessimistic (only 23% rate themselves good).
· to completely ban Creationism from the schools,
· to put in place permissive sex education,
· to insure that abortion on demand remains the law of the land,
· to include ‘homosexual orientation’ as a protected civil rights category,
· to vigorously oppose tuition tax credits and homeschooling,
· to gain complete control over the school libraries [the purpose is to ensure that only humanist books are allowed and any book with mentioning “God’ is banned (as demonstrated in the news)].
Canadian Education Association
* Strong, vibrant publicly funded education and learning systems as the cornerstone of a democratic society characterized by equity and diversity.
· A comprehensive study of 60 social studies textbooks (grades 1 to 12) done for the US National Institute of Education concluded that “Religion, traditional family values, and conservative political and economic positions have been reliably excluded from children’s textbooks.”
o not a single word of the more than 1.5 million total words referred to any religious activity in contemporary American life.
o the words “marriage,” “wedding,” “husband,” and “wife” did not appear once
o of the 23 “role models” held up as examples to modern youths by the sixty texts, only one was a conservative. Not a single contemporary role model was a white male, of course no Billy Graham.
· not influenced by humanist philosophy, situation ethics, sexual deviations as alternative
· not exposed to ridicule or embarrassment if too slow, or too religious
· not exposed to negative peer pressure to violate his Christian value system on sex, drugs, and violence.
· receive the proper training in Christian values
· learning can be speeded up or slowed down according to individual students’ learning ability
· enjoy personal attention of the parents
· Numerous studies and interviews by a wide variety of organizations (some of them quite liberal) reveal that homeschooled children score higher on achievement tests, are superior in their breadth and depth of knowledge, and are more adaptable and sociable than children in public schools.
· require extra financial and time commitment from the parents
· need to follow existing well-developed homeschooling curriculum
· need to coordinate extracurricular activities
· Children who were brought up in a protective environment will need to eventually face the challenge from the secular society.
Physical discipline and antisocial behaviour
A survey of 807 mothers of 6-9 year olds found that 44% spanked their child at least once in the preceding week, and 10% spanked their child three or more times. Two years later, the children that were spanked most often were also more likely to exhibit antisocial behaviour, such as breaking things deliberately or being disobedient at school.
Even so, the study could not conclusively prove cause and effect between spanking and antisocial behaviour.
In addition, there may be a reversal of cause and effect, i.e. those who were spanked most often were already the ones with behavioural problems.
An ultra-liberal document: “A Child’s Bill Of Rights”
1. THE RIGHT TO SELF-DETERMINATION. Children should have the right to decide the matters which affect them most directly.
2. THE RIGHT TO ALTERNATIVE HOME ENVIRONMENTS. Self-determining children should be able to choose from among a variety of arrangements: residences operated by children, child exchange programs, 24-hour child-care centers, and various kinds of schools and employment opportunities. Parents are not always good for their children ...
3. THE RIGHT TO RESPONSIVE DESIGN. Society must accommodate itself to children’s size and to their need for safe space. To keep them in their place, we now force children to cope with a world that is either not built to fit them, or is actually designed against them.
4. THE RIGHT TO INFORMATION. A child must have the right to all information ordinarily available to adults -- including, and perhaps especially, information that makes adults uncomfortable.
5. THE RIGHT TO EDUCATE ONESELF. Children should be free to design their own education, choosing from among many options the kinds of learning experiences they want, including the option not to attend any kind of school. Compulsory education must be abolished because the enforced threatening quality of education in America has taught children to hate school, to hate the subject matter, and, tragically, to hate themselves.
6. THE RIGHT TO FREEDOM FROM PHYSICAL PUNISHMENT. Corporal punishment is used impulsively and cruelly in the home, arbitrarily in the schools, and sadistically in penal institutions.
7. THE RIGHT TO SEXUAL FREEDOM. Children should have the right to conduct their sexual lives with no more restrictions than adults. Sexual freedom for children must include the right to information about sex, the right to nonsexist education, and the right to all sexual activities that are legal among consenting adults.
8. THE RIGHT TO ECONOMIC POWER. Children should have the right to work, to acquire and manage money, to receive equal pay for equal work, to choose trade apprenticeship as an alternative to school, to gain promotions to leadership positions, to own property, to develop a credit record, to enter into binding contracts, to engage in enterprise, to obtain guaranteed support apart from the family, to achieve financial independence.
9. THE RIGHT TO POLITICAL POWER. Children should have the vote and be included in the decision-making process. To become a constituency they must have the right to vote.
10. THE RIGHT TO JUSTICE. Children must have the guarantee of a fair trial with due process of law, an advocate to protect their rights against the parents as well as the system, and a uniform standard of detention.
Domination of liberals in universities
In 2003, a Gallup poll in US reported that of those age 18 to 24, 29% consider themselves to be conservatives, while 30% consider themselves liberals. Yet, a survey of university professors found that only 15% said they were conservatives, 30% said they were moderates while 55% considered themselves liberals.
In 2000, among Ivy League school professors: just 9% voted for Bush; 3% considered themselves Republicans and 57% considered themselves Democrats.