Earlier this year, a court in California ordered parents who homeschool their children to gain certification just as public school teachers must have. This meant, in California, a parent could not homeschool their children unless they had a college degree with a teaching certificate. Though this ruling was later changed, it revealed ‘top-down’ government at its boldest.
This first ruling struck at the very heart of the command in the Bible for parents to teach their children. The Bible declares: “Gather the people to Me, and I will let them hear My words, that they may learn to fear Me all the days they live on the earth, and that they may teach their children.”
(Deuteronomy 4: 10) And because all parents must be allowed to choose what their children are being taught and who teaches them, this California ruling unveiled the great danger to our civil liberty, even in Kentucky.While you may not choose to homeschool your children, the real issue here is: What will be taught to your children? Who is going to decide what’s in the textbooks and what method will be used to communicate it? This is of great concern to all good parents. It may sound good that all teachers must be approved by the state, but the reality is; that allows someone else to choose what goes into your children’s mind. And this always boils down to a handful of people at the top of the education hierarchy. Thus, a few people control the minds of the many. This is what produces ‘top-down’ control in a nation. Every dictator in history made it his first goal to get in control of the education system. This would insure his being able to control the minds of the next generation, and thus, the nation.
This simple truth is revealed to us in a statement that is attributed to Abraham Lincoln, in which he said:
“The philosophy of education in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.”
(Lincoln, Abraham. Attributed. Moody Adams, America is Too Young to Die (1976), p. 25. Stephen K. McDowell and Mark A. Beliles, America's Providential History (Charlottesville, VA: Providence Press, 1988), pp. 148, 179.)
What goes into the mind in the classroom shows up in the laws that are made in the following generation. Thus, government control is shaped by education.
Parents must be left free to choose what their children are taught. If a parent is refused the right to teach his children just because he doesn’t have a college degree, great wisdom will be lost to the child. Does a degree insure wisdom? Hardly, especially in our day!
And what would have happened in America’s past if parents could not have taught their children at home? Over half our Founding Fathers were homeschooled, including George Washington! What if we had refused the great wisdom of Washington just because his father, Augustine, didn’t have a teaching degree from one of our universities? You see the ridiculousness of such thinking?
We have had many of our Forefathers warn us what would happen if we allow government to become concentrated in the hands of a few; in other words, ‘the few ruling the many.’ Woodrow Wilson, President during WWI, plainly told us:
“The history of Liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it. When we resist...the concentration of power, we are resisting the powers of death, because concentration is what always precedes the destruction of human liberties."
(Wilson, (Thomas) Woodrow. Robert Flood, The Rebirth of America (Philadelphia: The Arthur S. DeMoss Foundation, 1986), p. 131.)
If liberty is to be preserved so our children can hear and live the truth of the Gospel of the Kingdom of Christ, education must be kept under parental control. If we bow to the few “educrats” who think they have the right to rule us, we will live as slaves!
Think about it; because if you don’t, someone else will do your thinking for you---
and for your children! And you won’t like what that brings to you. I’m Don Pinson this has been Think About It.