EIGHT

RECLAIMING OUR SCHOOLS AND LEARNING HOW TO THINK AGAIN

Wisdom is supreme—so acquire wisdom, and whatever you acquire, acquire understanding!

—PROVERBS 4:7 NET

The beginning of wisdom is: get wisdom! And along with all your getting, get insight!

—PROVERBS 4:7 CJB

For more than three decades, american colleges and universities have been leaning more and more to the left, moving steadily from education to indoctrination and from the free exchange of ideas to the suppressing of viewpoints not conforming to progressive orthodoxy. This trend has been growing for many years. As Roger Kimball observed in 1998:

The much-publicized controversy over attempts to enforce “politically correct” thinking on American campuses in the name of “diversity” and higher virtue, for example, has underscored the extent to which higher education has been transformed into a species of ideological indoctrination—a continuation of politics by other means. The politics in question are the politics of victimhood. Increasingly, academic study is organized not around intellectual criteria but simply to cater to the demands of various politically approved “marginalized” groups.¹

This has resulted in books like Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge, which claims that “geography is masculine” and that “the notion of reason as it developed from the seventeenth century is not gender neutral. On the contrary, it works in tandem with white bourgeois heterosexual masculinities.”²

Kimball rightly noted:

No one familiar with the kind of thing that passes for scholarship today will be surprised to discover—to take just one example—that the presentation of a paper called “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” at the 1989 meeting of the Modern Language Association was matched by a paper at the 1990 meeting on “The Lesbian Phallus: Or Does Heterosexuality Exist?” and, in 1994, “The Epistemology of the Queer Classroom.”³

What makes this all the more distressing is that, as we saw previously (chapter 2), many of the greatest universities in our nation were founded by and for Christians, while children’s schools were first established in America to be sure that young people could read the Bible for themselves. And so, while America continues to lead the world in higher education, boasting ten of the top fifteen universities in the world,⁴ American universities often serve as bastions of radical left ideology where opposing views are suppressed.

At the same time, there has been a consistent dumbing down of children’s education in America, as illustrated by a 2012 report from the Council of Foreign Relations, which found that:

       •   While the USA invests more in K–12 public school education than the rest of the world, our students are not competing well with their peers in other nations.

       •   More than 25 percent of our students (including an even higher percentage among Hispanic and black students) do not graduate from high school in four years.

       •   Despite high unemployment rates, American companies are having a hard time finding qualified employees.

       •   “75% of U.S. citizens ages 17–24 cannot pass military entrance exams because they are not physically fit, have criminal records, or because they lack critical skills needed in modern warfare, including how to locate on a map military theaters in which the U.S. is fulsomely engaged, such as Afghanistan.”

The report also outlines the implications of this study for national well-being, claiming that “the lack of educational preparedness poses threats on five national security fronts: Economic Growth and Competitiveness; Physical Safety; Intellectual Property; U.S. Global Awareness; U.S. Unity and Cohesion.”⁵ This sounds pretty serious—after all, it doesn’t get much more serious than talking about our public safety—and on a practical level, these educational deficiencies are being felt as students graduate from college and enter the workforce, where many are not doing well.

According to a 2013 article posted on Time.com,

employers are facing some hard facts: the entry-level candidates who are on tap to join the ranks of full-time work are clueless about the fundamentals of office life.

A survey by the Workforce Solutions Group at St. Louis Community College finds that more than 60% of employers say applicants lack “communication and interpersonal skills”—a jump of about 10 percentage points in just two years. A wide margin of managers also say today’s applicants can’t think critically and creatively, solve problems or write well.⁶

Yes, young people are having a harder time thinking critically and creatively. Some even have a hard time sitting down and reading through a book. I’ve heard this firsthand from educators in the States, and in April 2016, professors from the University of Sheffield in England created an uproar when they made this very claim. As the United Kingdom’s Independent reported, “Students have reacted to claims from university professors that they struggle to read books from cover to cover by admitting it is true—but insisting it’s because universities don’t give them enough time to finish them.”⁷

I too have noticed that I have to force myself to focus more when studying, the obvious result of years of constant digital communication (and interruption). In many ways, America has become an ADHD nation.⁸ Younger men in particular seem to have been hit hard here, and Samuel D. James asked, “Where have America’s young men gone?” He answered:

According to Erik Hurst, an economist from the University of Chicago, they haven’t gone anywhere—they’re just plugged in. In a recent interview, Hurst says that his research indicates that young men with less than a four-year degree (according to virtually all data, that’s an increasing number) are spending their days unemployed and unmarried, but not unamused. “The hours that they are not working have been replaced almost one-for-one with leisure time,” Hurst reports. “Seventy-five percent of this new leisure time falls into one category: video games. The average low-skilled, unemployed man in this group plays video games an average of twelve, and sometimes upwards of thirty hours per week.”⁹

But we are not only a nation of hyper-distraction; we have also become a nation of hyper-sensitivity.¹⁰ Our universities are leading the way here as well, now providing “safe spaces” where you can be sure that your feelings won’t be hurt or your viewpoints challenged. And so we have gone from the closing of the American mind (in the words of philosopher Allan Bloom’s 1987 classic, which focused on higher education)¹¹ to the coddling of the American mind, to borrow the title of a 2015 article by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. They wrote, “In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like.” And, the authors noted, “that’s disastrous for education—and mental health.”¹²

How far has this gone? During the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Case Western Reserve University, which was located four miles from the convention, provided a “safe space” for students who were upset by the proceedings of the RNC. Yes, “a July 11 statement in The Daily, Case Western’s internal e-newsletter, informs students—and professors, and administrators—that the private school’s Social Justice Institute ‘will host a “safe space” in the basement of concrete-laden Crawford Hall for the duration of the convention, which runs from July 18 to July 21.’”¹³

For good reason Karin Agness, founder and president of the Network of Enlightened Women, wrote on Time.com, “There should be no safe spaces from intellectual thought. University administrators should rethink their policies to encourage more intellectual diversity on campuses.” She noted:

Students should not be intellectually bubble-wrapped, shielded from any idea that they might find new or frightening. They shouldn’t be retreating to “safe spaces” and worse, our universities themselves shouldn’t become intellectually homogenous “safe spaces” where everyone marches to the same tune. The world does not work that way—nor should it—and universities do a disservice to their students by pretending otherwise.¹⁴

And make no mistake: it is primarily conservative, right-leaning, biblically affirming thought that is being suppressed on our campuses, which now reflect anything but true diversity.

This can be seen, for example, in the high percentage of law professors who are Democrats (outnumbering others five to one)¹⁵ and the low percentage of conservatives who are asked to deliver commencement addresses at leading schools (at the very least, less than 20 percent).¹⁶ When it comes to religious faith, a 2011 survey indicated that although most professors claimed to believe in God, the percentage of those who identified as atheist or agnostic was much higher than in the general population. Specifically, 3 percent of the population identified as atheist and 4.1 as agnostic; the rates among college professors surveyed were 9.8 and 13.1 percent, respectively (so, more than three times higher than the general populace). A whopping 50 percent of psychology professors identified as atheist (no surprise to hear that), while among biology professors “33.3 percent were agnostic and 27.5 percent were atheist” (no surprise to hear that either).¹⁷ You can be assured that many of them are quite aggressive in their nonbelief.¹⁸

But as disconcerting as it is to see what’s happening on the college and university level, what’s happening in our children’s schools is of even greater concern. We’re talking about impressionable little children who are much less able to think for themselves, yet they are getting indoctrinated. There are even educational materials designed to teach preschool children (kids as young as three or four) the definitions of words like gay, bisexual, and transgender.¹⁹ What could these materials possibly mean to a three- or four-year-old? And how in the world did we fall so far from our Bible-based, Christian educational roots? Can you imagine what our Founding Fathers would have thought of curricula like this?²⁰ Matthew Spalding noted, “Colonial America was a highly literate society, despite its overwhelmingly rural population. The two books likely to be found in every home were a well-worn copy of the Bible and a volume of Shakespeare, Milton, or other great literature.”²¹ That’s quite a contrast with today!

Again I ask the question: How did we get here from the lofty educational vision we embraced for our first two hundred years as colonies and a nation? According to Kraig Beyerlein, now a sociology professor at the University of Notre Dame, much of this antireligious shift can be traced to the National Education Association, dating as far back as the early 1870s. In the years before that, beginning with its founding in 1857, the NEA supported “the teaching of ‘common Christianity’—which included, among other things, devotional Bible reading.” But by the late 1890s and early 1900s, the NEA supported “educational positions and policies forbidding public schools from engaging in formal religious teachings and expressions.” And so, “The leading organization in American public education had become a leading advocate for secularizing public education.”²² Today, it is a leading advocate for radical left ideologies, consistently opposing conservative social positions.²³

Countless thousands of educators in our country are working tirelessly and sacrificially for our children’s good, but there is little doubt that (1) our educational system is getting worse in many ways; (2) when it comes to moral, social, and spiritual issues, the system often indoctrinates more than it educates; (3) having abandoned the concept of absolute truth, schools have embraced the concept of relative truth, and so what’s true for you may not be true for me; (4) the same now goes for morality, since everything is relative.

In an environment like this, how can kids learn science and math and history, let alone be encouraged to think critically, let alone be equipped to make sound moral choices? Even reality is relative today, since, we are told, you are whatever you perceive yourself to be. As I’ve said many times before, if perception is substituted for reality, there is no end to the social madness that follows. You do not just have a man being named Woman of the Year. You do not just have a white woman who identifies as black. Instead, you have a father of seven who identifies as a six-year-old girl. You have a man who identifies as a dog named “Boomer.” You have a young lady who believes she is a cat trapped in a woman’s body. You have a man who has his ears removed because he identifies as a parrot. And you have a man who changed his identity to female but who has now had “her ears and nose removed to transform into a ‘dragon lady’ with scales, a forked tongue and a horned skull.” But why not? More power to him/her/it! If that’s what he/she/it perceives himself/herself/itself to be, why not?²⁴

In no way do I want to mock the individuals I mention here. I simply want to point out that, if perception really is reality, then the sky is the limit. Yet this mentality is pervading our schools today, and because of it kids believe they can have their realities and their truths. So much for education being objective!

In many ways, though, all this is just the tip of the iceberg. Homeschool icon John Taylor Gatto, who was a public school teacher in Manhattan for thirty years, raises some larger, important questions:

Do we really need school? I don’t mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine necessary? And if so, for what? Don’t hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because a million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn’t, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever “graduated” from a secondary school.²⁵

Our students are not doing as well as they used to, and a radical, liberal bias dominates many of our campuses. This means that we need to become much more serious about getting involved in reforming the educational system if we are to rebuild the nation.

How then do we address the massive problems in this critically important part of our society? The solution is simple and doable, although daunting in scope: (1) we confront the spirit of relativism with absolute truth and morality; (2) we learn to reengage our own minds, and we teach our kids to think; (3) we get more involved in children’s education, becoming school teachers and administrators and librarians and counselors and local school board members (or at least, meet with our kids’ teachers and be aware of what’s happening in their schools); (4) we prioritize raising up more Christian schools and developing more homeschooling networks; (5) we get more involved in higher education, becoming professors and administrators at secular colleges and universities; (6) we develop more Christian alternatives for undergraduate and graduate studies with the end goal of either influencing current accreditation institutes (which often lean left) or rendering them unimportant.

And this is where we start: we engage our minds in serious study of the Scriptures. In doing so, we will be stretched, we will be challenged, we will grow, and we will learn to love God with our hearts and minds. Then we teach our kids to do the same.

DO YOU REALLY LOVE GOD’S WORD?

Here’s a little test you can take to assess your love for the Scriptures. When you’re able to get alone in a quiet place, read Psalm 119 out loud, asking yourself as you read, “Do these words reflect my heart, or do I feel like a hypocrite, saying things like, ‘I prefer the teaching You proclaimed to thousands of gold and silver pieces’ (Ps. 119:72 NJV)?” If you realize as you read this psalm that you do not love God’s Word as the psalmist did, ask the Lord to give you a fresh love for his teaching, even praying to experience what Jeremiah experienced: “Your words were found, and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart, for I am called by your name, O LORD, God of hosts” (Jer. 15:16). How delicious are God’s words! And how life-transforming and life-imparting those words are. As expressed in Psalm 1, the one whose “delight is in the law of the LORD,” and who “meditates day and night” is given a promise: “in all that he does, he prospers” (vv. 2–3).

This does not mean that everyone is called to be an intellectual who studies day and night or that scholarship is the goal of every American. But it does mean that we make a real effort to sharpen our thinking, that we put our brains to work, that we take in the Word every way we can—be it in writing or in audio or video form or a combination of forms—and that we push ourselves to go deeper, not competing with others but getting intellectually “tuned up” for ourselves, just like a car gets a tune-up to run more efficiently. We must learn to think again, and we must recover the rock-solid foundation of divine absolutes. While society is drowning in a sea of relativism, we stand safe and secure on an immovable Rock.

I have the utmost admiration for homeschooling moms who taught their kids from kindergarten through high school, all while juggling the demands of motherhood and wifehood and personal and community interests, producing a generation of young people far more equipped to deal with the world than so many kids who attended the “best” schools in the country. These moms are a vital part of a revolutionary movement that could literally influence the nation, and we are indebted to them. (We’re also indebted to the homeschooling dads for their many important contributions.)

And I have deep appreciation for those who have invested their lives in raising up solid Christian schools, often taking major pay cuts in order to teach and administrate and serve. These people deserve the support of their churches and the encouragement of the body of Christ as a whole.

My hat is also off to those who have determined to make a difference in secular schools, swimming against the tide and putting themselves in uncomfortable situations, all with the goal of shining as lights in dark places. Would to God that there were more of these courageous people too!

But it’s not easy. A college professor once called my radio show and told me that in her school, which was fairly well known in her area, she is not allowed to mention God in class, since she is not teaching religion. As hard as I found this to believe, knowing that some of her atheistic or agnostic colleagues commonly mocked God in class, she assured me that it was true. So I wonder, perhaps she needs to cross this line herself? Perhaps she needs to get Christian legal counsel and, if she’s sure that her Constitutional rights are being undermined, perhaps she should intentionally violate her school’s illegitimate standards? Should others do the same?

To move forward, we need to smash the idol of secular academics, a topic I addressed in my book Revolution!²⁶ I spent some of my most fulfilling years engrossed in university studies, and I have devoted even more fulfilling years to teaching in or directing Bible schools and seminaries. Thank God for literacy and the pursuit of knowledge. Yet academic pursuits, specifically secular academic pursuits, have become an idol. And this idol needs to be repudiated. Most Christian teens end up attending secular colleges in America, even though the atmosphere there is often immoral and even though the professors there are often anti-God in their philosophies. Yet it is to college—specifically, the secular university—our teens must go. Why? Because they need to get a degree! Why? Because everyone has to get a degree; or, because you can’t get a good job without a degree; or, because you will not enter adult life rounded and balanced without a degree. Yet so often secular college experience doesn’t prepare us for life or improve us for life or enrich us for life or expand our horizons for life. Rather, it is often something to be endured, leaving a huge financial debt in the end.

I have found it illuminating to survey college graduates (who are today believers) about their experience in secular college. Did it help them fulfill their purpose in God? Did it ultimately enrich and benefit their lives? Only a small minority say yes.²⁷ And yet many of these same believers will insist that their kids go to secular college. Why? Because everyone has to get a respected degree! God forbid that your kids enroll in a specialized vocational program that will help them do inner-city work or that the Bible college they want to attend is not listed in the nation’s top schools.

How utterly worldly this mind-set is. How it smacks of bowing down to the system of this age, and how it measures itself by the standards of flesh and blood. It is especially ugly when it becomes a matter of prestige for the parents, as if sending their kids to a famous—although godless—school makes the parents look better. It is especially challenging when a particular culture demands that we send our kids to such schools—regardless of the financial burden entailed. This is idolatry.

Christian schools can fall into this same trap. They can bow down to the same idol. Unless they offer certain courses and meet certain guidelines, they will lose their accreditation, and if they lose their accreditation, they will lose potential students, and their degrees will not be recognized by other universities, and then that will make Christian education look bad. How so? Because the Christian college failed to live up to the standards set by the state. But why must the state (or accrediting agency) set the standards? What if that school has a unique purpose and function? What if it needs to major on things the state considers minor and minor on things the state considers major? Why must it conform? To offer degrees, of course! This too is idolatry.

Why must we prove that we are just as smart, just as educated, just as astute, just as academically excellent as the world? To whom are we proving this, and what, after all, does it prove? In the long run, will it really produce that much fruit for the gospel? Where does the Word hint at this kind of orientation?

Even godly seminaries can be snared here, spending hundreds of hours combating liberal heresies (although most of the people to whom these graduates minister will never even know these heresies exist) or making sure that graduates are of the highest intellectual caliber without also guaranteeing that they are strong in the experiential knowledge of God. Jesus is more interested in using people who know him than in using people who merely know about him.²⁸

I personally long for the day when God will raise up an army of highly educated, deeply intellectual, and mentally sharp radicals: men and women like Pascal with minds on fire and souls aflame. It will be wonderful to hear them refute the cultists and confute the atheists, providing us with a revolutionary strategy to take this generation for Jesus and shake this society for the King. My own life has been shaped by my educational experiences, and I would not be able to do most of the things I now do in Jewish ministry (especially apologetics) or biblical scholarship without that training. But it is only a tool, not an idol, and I willfully—and joyfully—“go to [Jesus] outside the camp, bearing the disgrace he bore. For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come” (Heb. 13:13–14 NIV). This is another way we live with a multigenerational mentality while recognizing that we are only passing through.

On that great day of accounting, we will stand before our God: not our professors, not our accrediting agency, not our board of regents. We must bow down to no god but him, regardless of the cost. That is how idolatry is defeated.

Along these lines, we should be encouraged by the progress made in the homeschooling revolution, where the number of kids being taught at home continues to grow²⁹ and the academic progress made by those kids continues to grow. Already in 2009 the Washington Times could report that “in reading, the average home-schooler scored at the 89th percentile; language, 84th percentile; math, 84th percentile; science, 86th percentile; and social studies, 84th percentile. In the core studies (reading, language and math), the average home-schooler scored at the 88th percentile.” In contrast, “The average public school student taking these standardized tests scored at the 50th percentile in each subject area,” meaning that “the average homeschool test results continue to be 30-plus percentile points higher than their public school counterparts.”

What explains this success, seeing that most parents are less equipped to teach school subjects than trained school teachers? In the opinion of the Times article,

there are two main factors for these outstanding results: the educational environment where learning takes place, and the individualized, one-on-one instruction. Most home-school students are directly taught by their parents, who love their children enough to make the sacrifice to stay at home to make sure their child is taught in a safe and loving learning environment. Second, one-on-one instruction emphasizes the best interests of the child rather than the best interests of the group.

In a sentence, home-schooling is a recipe for academic success.³⁰

I’m quite aware that homeschooling is not a viable option for everyone, and it may be completely impossible in single-parent homes. But getting involved with our kids’ education should be a priority for all of us, especially as we realize that education really does begin in the home and that education is far more than just taking classes. Let us educate ourselves in the things that matter most, and let us impart godly education to our children.

A faculty member at Liberty University, which now boasts a residential enrollment of 14,500 students and an online enrollment of 95,000 (!), told me that Liberty is now producing half of all military chaplains.³¹ Do you think this will make a difference in the years to come?

After I spoke at a church in Indiana in 2015, a man approached me with a glowing report about what was happening in the local school district. The schools were wide open to the gospel, and local pastors were ministering to the students with extraordinary freedom and favor. He then explained to me that he was a retired school principal, and after his retirement his pastor told him that the schools there still needed him. So he became an active (and influential) member of the local school board, and he was a key reason the schools were so friendly to the churches. What if more retired teachers and administrators followed his lead?

While ministering in Korea in 2016, the pastor of the church hosting my last meeting there told me how his kids are excelling in their school’s debate club. (He is an American lawyer married to a Korean woman, and he was a leading debater while a student at Liberty.) His son, now seventeen, and his daughter, now fifteen, previously divided their time between America and Korea, but they were homeschooled in both settings until recently. Now that they’re in the Korean school system, which is quite rigorous, they have won national debating contests and are able to hold their own against anti-Christian instructors.

This is the potential of godly kids and godly college grads and godly retired educators, and this is the kind of vision we need to set before us for the improving of our nation. Renewing our minds and recapturing our schools is an obvious, major key.