Emily stood at the front door, packed and ready to leave for a high school–sponsored weekend with her friend Terilyn.
“When do you get home from this conference thing with Terilyn?” her mother asked, fluffing her daughter’s hair as she spoke.
“It’s a three-day conference,” Emily replied. “We’ll be back Sunday evening about six.”
“And what is this conference, exactly?”
Emily had told her mother about the conference before, but not exactly. If she had told everything, her mother would have freaked out and slammed the door on the whole weekend.
“It’s the Young Women’s Leadership Conference at the Hilton in San Francisco,” she said. “Terilyn says it’s the best way to get into the student government at Hoover High School. The student council adviser is taking ten girls from Hoover, and Terilyn got me in.”
It was all true. But what Emily was not telling her mother was that the conference included a major unit on tolerance.
After checking into the downtown Hilton the next day, Emily and Terilyn went for pizza with Hoover’s student adviser, Lisa Carmona. They were discussing the topics of the conference listed in the program, when one of the other students said that she sometimes got confused when people talked about tolerance. She wasn’t sure what it really meant, sometimes.
“Tolerance is the highest of all virtues,” Ms. Carmona said, smiling. “It is the highest virtue because it acknowledges and celebrates the personal rights and values of all cultures and peoples. But it is often misunderstood because some people in our culture have improperly defined it.”
Ms. Carmona twirled her soda straw between her manicured fingers. “The virtue of tolerance is based on the reality that everyone is equal in value. Nobody at this table is better than anyone else, right?” The girls nodded as if on cue. “That’s right. We’re different from each other in a lot of ways, but we’re all equal in value. And if all cultures and all persons are equal in value, then all lifestyles are equal, too. Tolerance is simply accepting and celebrating another person’s beliefs and lifestyle choices.”
Emily nodded along with the other girls. She wondered if her mom and dad would find something wrong with Ms. Carmona’s ideas, but Emily sure couldn’t find any fault with them herself. After all, Ms. Carmona was a teacher; she obviously knew what she was talking about.
The above story, while fictional, is based on actual events happening today in community after community. As you read Ms. Carmona’s description of tolerance, it actually sounds quite good until she uses her accurate premise, “If all cultures and all persons are equal in value…” to reach a false conclusion: “…then all lifestyles are equal, too.” That is not only an unwarranted assumption; it is an incorrect one. All persons are of equal value before God, but all choices and lifestyles definitely are not. And the problem is that this one clause—“then all lifestyles are equal, too”—in Ms. Carmona’s definition is at the core of the culture’s push for tolerance.
A generation or more ago, schools focused primarily on such subjects as English, history, math, and science. Today one significant educational goal—at the primary, secondary, and college levels—is for students to learn a variety of subjects through the lens of cultural tolerance.
Short of complete isolation from society, how do we counter the influence of cultural tolerance our children are subjected to within the educational system? A growing number of Christian parents have elected to educate their children through homeschooling. Others have enrolled their children in Christian schools. Many, however, still rely on the public school system for their children’s education. That being the case, what can we do to diminish the effects of cultural tolerance and the moral relativism it spawns? First and foremost, we must become thoroughly acquainted with what the doctrine of cultural tolerance teaches—understanding it is based in a cultural narrative about truth. We must also equip ourselves with the biblical narrative about truth that comes from the loving heart of God, and in a Christlike manner, speak his truth boldly yet in love. These past seven chapters have been devoted to providing guidance toward that goal.
When you are armed with a Christlike attitude and a biblically based message (more accurately a biblical worldview), God is able to empower and lead you to lovingly counter the culture. Countering cultural tolerance within education is largely a matter of awareness. Become aware of what is taking place in the hallways, classrooms, and educator-sponsored outings of your child’s school. This requires open communications with your children about what is going on in school. It also requires taking the initiative to learn from teachers and administrators what is being taught and how it is being taught.
Discover how your children are being educated at school. Get exposed to the classroom curriculum they are using and the mind-set, philosophy, and educational worldview of those who teach them.
The public school system employs teachers who have successfully attended universities and earned education degrees. The educational worldview engrained within most public and private universities, which inevitably influences teachers, is one of cultural tolerance and its moral relativism. Duke Pesta, professor at the University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh, makes this astute observation about the consequences of moral relativism on the educational system and those being trained to teach our children:
For thousands of years, the chief aim and civilizing purpose of education had been moral development, an incessant recognition of the limits of human wisdom in the face of the divine, and an insistent reminder of the greater, unseen moral order that underpins the naturalistic world of the jungle, a world where power alone dictates right, and mere survival at any cost equals “truth” in the rawest, most naked sense of the word. Yet the educational paradigms of today—manifested most acutely in the morally relativistic approaches of the humanities—actually reinforce this Darwinian primacy of nature, and work against civilization.
It starts at the top, in the journal articles and published books that secure tenure and impose the ideological dictates determining the construction of curricula, the pedagogy taught in graduate programs, and the way we train teachers from kindergarten through high school and beyond. At the highest levels of academia, the tenured professoriate—and the professors, deans, provosts, chancellors, and university presidents who almost always arise from the privileged ranks of this tenured class—there exists a dangerously monolithic echo chamber, where relativistic, post-modern ideas about the world, culture, and truth have become calcified. The consequences to education of this ideological conformity can be witnessed at every level of public, and in many cases private, instruction, for many private schools only hire teachers trained and certified by state-run education programs. The dominance of moral relativism in our humanities curricula, from kindergarten through graduate school, guarantees that the study of philosophy, history, art, and literature amounts to little more than an amoral, un-reflexive acknowledgment of the random, chaotic, arbitrary, and ultimately meaningless nature of “reality.”1
Consequently, many teachers view all learning through the lens of moral relativism from the start. They see cultural tolerance as the moral glue that holds schools together. This perspective is reinforced by the curriculum that teachers are assigned to use in the classroom, and it often trumps the moral values that the church and Christian families are trying to instill within their children. This, in effect, signals to your child that what the school teaches on moral values should be embraced even if parents or churches teach otherwise.
Throughout the United States, Canada, and other Western nations, books and classes have been revised to make schools more “inclusive,” more “diverse,” more “sensitive,” “gender neutral,” “antiracist,” and “disability aware.” Some of these changes are positive, of course. It is good for students to learn not only about William Shakespeare and George Washington but also about Sequoyah (the inventor of the Cherokee alphabet), Martin Luther King Jr., and Gandhi. It is good for us all to learn from the often-neglected music, literature, drama, and customs of other cultures.
But some of the studies and curriculum in the public school system go beyond that. They advocate a cultural narrative about truth that denies the existence of any moral truth outside of what a person chooses to believe. Some curriculum goes so far as to teach a child the difference between fact and opinion by reinforcing that all values and moral claims are a matter of opinion only.
Justin McBrayer is an associate professor of philosophy at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. To acquaint himself with how his second-grade son was being taught, he visited the classroom during open house. He said he found a troubling pair of signs hanging over the bulletin board. They read:
Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.
Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes.
Motivated by the words on the signs, professor McBrayer researched the curriculum to answer a troubling question: How does the dichotomy between fact and opinion relate to morality?
Here is what he discovered:
I learned the answer to this question only after I investigated my son’s homework (and other examples of assignments online). Children are asked to sort facts from opinions and, without fail, every value claim is labeled as an opinion. Here’s a little test devised from questions available on fact vs. opinion worksheets online:
Are the following facts or opinions?
__ Copying homework assignments is wrong.
__ Cursing in school is inappropriate behavior.
__ All men are created equal.
__ It is worth sacrificing some personal liberties to protect our country from terrorism.
__ It is wrong for people under the age of 21 to drink alcohol.
__ Vegetarians are healthier than people who eat meat.
__ Drug dealers belong in prison.
The answer? In each case, the worksheets categorize these claims as opinions. The explanation was that each of these claims is a value claim, and value claims are not facts. This is repeated ad nauseum: any claim with good, right, wrong, etc. is not a fact.
In summary, our public schools teach students that all claims are either facts or opinions and that all value and moral claims fall into the latter camp. The punchline: there are no moral facts. And if there are no moral facts, then there are no moral truths.2
This isn’t to say all public school teachers and administrators are sinister disciples of moral relativism intent on indoctrinating your children in cultural tolerance. Many of them are decent, upstanding citizens who care about children. Most teach because they love seeing students learn. Yet many well-meaning educators simply fail to see the danger or the damage that the doctrine of cultural tolerance has done and is doing. On the other hand, we must recognize that there are teachers who aggressively attempt to indoctrinate their students in cultural relativism and shame those who reject it.
Because scripture admonishes us to speak the truth in love doesn’t mean we are not to speak up against injustice and prejudice toward Christians who have the right to freedom of religion in America. Take advantage of instances that garner news headlines, especially those that attack common sense and your child’s freedom of religion in the name of cultural tolerance. See them as opportunities to speak up and share with friends and educators how unreasonable cultural tolerance can be.
For example, consider the case of a twelve-year-old boy who was told he could not read the Bible during free reading time at school. A Florida teacher at Park Lake’s Elementary School in Fort Lauderdale ordered young Giovanni Rubeo to pick up the phone on her desk and punch in the number of his parents.
As the other students watched, the teacher took the phone from Giovanni’s hands and left a terse message on the family’s answering machine. “I noticed that he has a book—a religious book—in the classroom,” she said on the recording. “He’s not permitted to read those books in my classroom.”3
This was not a student pounding the table and waving his Bible over his head, declaring, “You are all going to hell unless you accept Jesus.” This was a twelve-year-old boy quietly reading scripture to himself during free reading time. Obviously, the teacher went to extremes in an attempt at creating “greater diversity.” It is amazing how voices that are diverse from the official lockstep thinking are excluded in the name of “diversity.”
Use these kinds of instances to discuss the problem with fellow parents and even teachers. Point out how respecting others of different beliefs and faith doesn’t warrant the shaming of those who respect and revere the Bible. Acquaint yourself with what religious activity is and is not permitted in a public school by the US Department of Education. The truth is, the DOE guidelines do allow students to read their Bibles during noninstructional time. The guidelines read in part: “Students may read their Bibles or other scriptures, say grace before meals, and pray or study religious materials with fellow students during recess, the lunch hour, or other noninstructional time to the same extent that they may engage in nonreligious activities.”4
While extreme incidents like the one in Fort Lauderdale have been rare, they are becoming more and more prevalent, especially as Christians throughout America make their voices heard. Consider the following cases:
• A school employee tells a five-year-old student she can’t pray over her lunch.5
• A teacher refuses to let a ten-year-old student write about God for a school assignment.6
• School officials tell students to stop praying to Jesus and singing “Amazing Grace” together during free time.7
Some of these actions by school officials seem hard to believe. It appears in those situations that religious freedom and common sense have been thrown out the window. It is clear there are those in the public educational system who are intent on enforcing diversity as defined by cultural tolerance, even if it means trampling on the freedom of religion. And yet it is important to realize that most educators and administrators don’t have a hidden secular agenda—they primarily want to help children develop and learn. And yet there are certainly a few agenda-driven influential educators, like those, who act with ignorance and (possibly) malice toward believers.
Perhaps one of the more egregious and extreme examples of cultural tolerance in the classroom surfaced when Ryan Rotela refused to engage in a classroom exercise at Florida Atlantic University (FAU).
Communications instructor Dr. Deandre Poole asked students to write “Jesus” on a piece of paper then stomp on it.8 The incident gained statewide attention when acting Governor Rick Scott got involved. He wrote FAU chancellor Frank Brogan, saying, “The professor’s lesson was offensive, and even intolerant, to Christians and those of all faiths who deserve to be respected as Americans entitled to religious freedom.”9
The university initially defended the classroom activity drawn from an instruction manual on intercultural communication. The exercise was designed to prompt discussion about the importance of symbols in culture. The university eventually apologized and said professors would not be using the exercise again.
Refraining from reacting aggressively to some of these extremes is difficult. It’s not that these incidents shouldn’t anger us; in fact, they should. Scripture, however, admonishes, “Don’t sin by letting anger control you” (Ephesians 4:26). A loving and possibly firm response is better than an angry reaction.
Here are some suggestions as to how you might respond to a public educational system that is teaching in the context of cultural tolerance.
• There is effectiveness in numbers. Gather other Christian parents who have children enrolled in your public school district. Establish a strategy to monitor what your schools are teaching. Pledge to work together as a coalition of parents who are committed to instilling biblical values in your children.
• Remember that you, not their teachers, not their principals, and not their school or school board, are in charge of your children’s education. Pay attention to what they are being taught; browse through their textbooks; drop into an occasional assembly; chaperone a field trip now and then. Express any concerns in a gracious manner (Colossians 4:6), and make an extra effort to express appreciation when the school or teacher shows sensitivity to or support for your rights as a parent.
• Make every effort to build strong relationships with your children’s teachers, principals, superintendents, school board members, PTA presidents, and school janitors. Attend open houses. Ask for teachers’ e-mail addresses. Learn which teachers (and others) share your values and convictions and which do not—not so that you may “get rid of” the wrong-minded individuals but to better understand them and, when necessary, counter their influence and ideas.
• Look for opportunities to express kindness and appreciation toward teachers and administrators. Make it your goal to perform at least two loving acts for every criticism or concern you express to a school official.
• Don’t shy away from confronting those who aggressively try to indoctrinate your children in an extreme application of cultural tolerance. “Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry” (James 1:19). Act wisely with a Christlike attitude, but do act. Enlist your parent coalition to act with you.
• Keep the lines of communication open with your children. Make it a practice to ask about their day, how it went in school, what was the most interesting thing that happened, what was the most boring, and so on. Let them know you are sincerely interested in them, what they are learning, and how their teachers are teaching them.
Remember above all the power of your own influence in the lives of your children. Be a role model who “speak[s] the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ” (Ephesians 4:15). You have an advantage over public school educators. You have a loving relationship with your children that opens them up to receive from you much more than they will ever receive from someone else. Cherish that relationship; build it deep and strong. As you do, you will have a fighting chance to instill your values and a love for God in your children so that they can live as “‘children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation.’ Then you will shine among them like the stars in the sky” (Philippians 2:15 NIV).