Education has become a Battle Ground

Anyone who believes that education can be neutral is mistaken. Ideas have consequences. Actions flow from thought patterns. Parents are not faced with a choice between sending their children to a religious school or to a non-religious school.

All schools are religious. Parents must rather choose which religion will be taught to their children. Will it be Christianity, Islam, Humanism or something else?

Will it be the secular humanism of American state schools - where prayer is illegal but pornography can be part of the sex education syllabus? Where evolution is an article of faith, a sacred cow, and scientific evidences for Creation are outlawed. The facts that one in ten violent crimes in the USA now occur in schools, and that each year over 700 000 high school graduates are functional illiterates have led American parents to take seven million children out of government schools. Secular humanist education has proven to be the most effective way to produce illiterates, to lower moral standards and to proliferate venereal diseases.
Will your children receive the revolutionary humanism of the failed socialist experiments of Eastern Europe, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Ethiopia and Mozambique? The wrecked economies and wasted potential of these countries, and their killing fields and concentration camp gulags, hardly serve as recommendations for "scientific" or revolutionary socialism.

Perhaps it will be the "people's education" of the ANC/SACP comrades? An education of politicisation, cheap slogans, clichés, parrot cries, "freedom songs", raised fists and the "toyi toyi" zombie dance. The endless boycotts, strikes, marches, riots, stone-throwing, vandalism and violence produced a lost generation of millions of untrained, unemployable thugs, thieves, beggars, rioters, terrorists, and "political activists".

Are your children perhaps already receiving some mystical humanism or new age occultism under the guise of education? The point is that education is inherently religious because it presents a certain perspective and selection of history, values and practices, and it prescribes a worldview.

"See to it that no-one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ." Col 2:8

Parents Can Delegate the Task But Not the Responsibility for the Education of Their Children

Children do not belong to the state. They belong to God and are entrusted by Him to parents to "bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord" Eph. 6:4. Parents are responsible under God to oversee the teachers, textbooks, and syllabuses that will shape and fill their minds for the 15 000 hours of school teaching. All Christian parents should be involved in the School Governing Body of their local school and take an active role in the education of their young according to Biblical principles. The control of education should be in the hands of parents, and the content of education must be Bible based.

"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" Psalm 111:10

Accordingly, the KwaSizabantu Affirmation 1991 affirmed: "5.b) The right to send children to schools of the parent's choice (Col. 2:8). Because the education of the children is essentially the duty of the family and the Church and not the State, parents should become far more involved in the parents teachers associations and school governing bodies, even to the point of influencing the curriculum. Government schools should be made open to the preaching of the Gospel and should base their curriculum upon moral and family values. If the new dispensation introduces an educational system which refuses this, Christian parents should be encouraged to look at alternatives which will include a return to private Christian schools."

With recent developments in education in South Africa - with the moves to try to eliminate Bible reading, prayer and the singing of hymns at assemblies, even more parents are withdrawing their children from government schools and turning to private Christian schools and home schooling (Deut 6:6-9).

This article comes from Biblical Priciples for Africa by Peter Hammond