"Pharaoh's schools"

World Net Daily reports: Southern Baptist Convention considers resolution for all members to withdraw kids from government schools.

Boy, this is some article. I haven't heard the public/private school argument phrased quite so, uh... forcefully before. According to Bruce N. Shortt, one of the sponsors of the resolution, sending your kids to public schools is being 'disobedient to God' and is "the grossest kind of sin" (wow...just as bad as drugs, adultery, murder and abortion? No kidding...)

Okay, let's think about this... In the pre-existence God had the choice to send us to Earth and 'help' us to make good decisions all the time so we'd remain perfect, or He'd give us free agency, allow us to fall into sin but at the same time providing a Savior to overcome the sins of man. He chose the second option, of course, because in order to for us to grow and progress we have to experience both good and evil (how else would we know the difference?) Therefore, isn't the point of our existence to learn the difference between good and evil, and learn why to choose good? These Baptist activists seem to think the first of God's options would have been better--the "lock your kids in a closet so 'evil' can't touch them" philosophy.

The resolution argues that children spend "seven hours a day, 180 days a year being taught that God is irrelevant to every area of life" which is "killing our children morally, spiritually and academically". Well, whether or not that's overstating the issue a little (or...a lot, actually), that still leaves by my calculation (excluding sleep time) 4580 hours per year (an average of over twelve hours per day) where the kids should be receiving the 'proper' Christian education at home. Even if the kids are learning godless, apostate doctrines and philosophy every hour of every day of the school year (um...yeah), that still gives parents a 3-to-1 advantage in time to counter-act any such secular influence. Gee, parents...if you're teaching your kids properly at home in the time you have, why are you worried? Don't you think your kids would believe you--a close personal relative--instead of the people at school if there's a conflict? You do have a close relationship with your kids, right?

I'm not worried at all about my kids being exposed to 'secular' philosophies at school--because I plan on being there every step of the way so they can talk to me about what they're learning. If they say the teacher or a classmate said something in school that didn't correspond with what they learned in church, I'll be there to explain the 'right answer'. I expect my kids to learn wisdom--to know that there are many different beliefs in the world and that they can learn something from everyone, but to also know where truth lies and how to find it. Why in the world would you want to teach your kids that people different from you should be shunned, even fellow church members who are 'spiritually blind' and still attend 'Phaoroh's schools'? How is that going to help them learn and progress, not to mention achieve the stated goal of 'evangelizing their schoolmates'? Are you honestly going to maintain that public schools are a worse influence on children than TV and other media forms---or does that even matter?

Proverbs 22:6--"Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it"...even if he goes to public school.