Public education has moved far away from it's roots and even farther from the traditional values that were once a part of the United States. Most people don't realize that public compulsory education did not begin to exist until the 1840s, mostly using the press to instill fear and claiming that a free public education would prevent crime and poverty.

"They appealed to people's fears about growing economic and religious tensions in the United States as immigration of various ethnic groups increased. The reformers believed that common schooling could create common bonds among an increasingly diverse population." ¹

Then in the 1960's another shockwave moved through the public school system. The removal of God in the classroom, in the science lab and in American History.

"I don't mean to be inflammatory, but it’s as if government schooling has made people dumber, not brighter, made families weaker, not stronger...has ruined formal religion with its hard-sell exclusion of God, has set the class structure in stone by dividing children into classes and setting them against one another, and has been midwife to an alarming concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a fraction of the national community."²

Instead of freedom from poverty and crime as was hoped to fix in the 1850's, these social issues have permanently moved into the schools, creating a prison for children with metal detectors, drug sniffing dogs and locked doors. And within those walls:

• Our "square peg" children are drugged to conform to that round hole called average and normal, then told that drugs are bad.
• An educational system that introduces evolutionary theories as fact and creation science as religious fiction.
• That sex education is no longer the responsibility of parents but a social topic introduced to preschool and kindergarten children.

So what are our options, as parents?  According to the Bible, it is OUR responsibility to teach our children... not the government or the community.

"Therefore you shall lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall teach them to your children, speaking of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied in the land of which the LORD swore to your fathers to give them, like the days of the heavens above the earth." Deuteronomy 11:18-21

 In an effort to teach our children the values and rewards of simple living, our believes are often overpowered by the commercial and social norms subjected on our children by peers, teachers and administrators. This is part one of an ongoing article regarding the traditional school system and alternative Christian education.

¹"Public Education in the United States," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2001
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