Where's the Outrage?
by Kathy Brown on June 8th, 2009 | 0 comments
Last week The Wall Street Journal published an article "School Reform on the Brink". It was a look into the New York and Milwaukee schools and how the efforts of reform have met resistance. Its final two sentences are worth repeating: "The great moral outrage of our time is the way the public schools establishment puts its interests ahead of children, trying to kill every school choice program whatever its success. Genuine reformers should be shouting from the rooftops."
In previous posts, the teachers' unions have been sited as one reason there are road blocks to educational change. Unions, wherever they are, exert powerful peer and political pressure. However, they are not the only problem. Here are some other possibilities that are worth considering:
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The private schools, mostly holding to the Christian worldview, are fragmented entities in competition with one another. They have largely relinquished their duty to look out for those left in unGodly government schools. Without an understanding of Christ's command to "go" and be redeemers of all things and people, the Christian community has "left" and has not looked back. This is an overstatement, it could be argued, but evidence abounds that "setting captives free" is a not an ongoing concern for them.
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Home schoolers who have abandoned public statist schools have their hands full with a task that, to most, is overwhelming. However, their voice is needed in the "shout" on behalf of children receiving indoctrination of a very detrimental sort. There has been mostly silent.
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It seems that very few are able to connect the dots between the culture we have and the education that we pay for. Until there is a realization that ideas matter and that no worldview is religiously "neutral", there will be little enthusiasm for the effort required to throw off the status quo.
William Wilberforce, the instigator of slave trade's end, was a Christian who worked for years on his mission. He believed in physical freedom, as the Bible instructs. How much more important is the freedom to believe, think and learn? Children inside a humanistic system cannot escape unless they buy their way out. This is our next civil rights battle: freedom for every parent and child to go to the school of their choice. If parents want a humanistic worldview institution, it should be an option. But if parents want a Biblical worldview school, it also should be available. Tax dollars should not be used to prefer one religious worldview over another.
What will it take to begin the transformation needed to loosen the academic chains? Probably reformers shouting from the roof tops.
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