TLP 80: Should You Consider Sending Your Kids to a Public School this Fall?

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If we're going to delegate part of our parenting, we better make certain of two things. One, we're doing the job

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God requires of us. And two, the person we're engaging to help educate our children is doing the job

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God requires of them as well. Welcome to Truth, Love, Parents, where we use

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God's Word to become intentional premeditated parents. Here's your host,

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A .M. Brewster. Thank you for joining me today. I'm very much looking forward to taking the Bible and using it to decide whether or not we should delegate our children's education and to whom.

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But more on that in a minute. We are fast approaching our one -year anniversary, and I was thinking about this last night.

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I really, I can't believe it's been almost a year. And I just want to tell you about something very special.

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In celebration of our anniversary and all that God has done to bring us here, we'll be offering a new parenting resource on our website.

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We have grand plans for developing various parental curricula that will equip you to be intentional premeditated parents.

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And the first of these parenting courses is called 25 Days to Becoming a Premeditated Parent.

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And we're going to let you enroll for free. I'll give you more details as we get closer about how you can take advantage of this free parenting resource.

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And if you're listening to this episode after September 21st of 2017, that resource or one like it is already available to you if you just go to our website, truthloveparent .com.

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But don't go there yet. Finish the episode first, and then you can go, you know, check that out. Okay, so should you consider sending your kids to a public school this fall?

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May I say that the answer is not an easy one. I also need to point out that the Bible doesn't give us a direct answer, but the good news is that there are plenty of principles and examples that I believe we can come to a

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Christ -honoring answer on the subject. And I'm going to start by acknowledging the general considerations, then work to the specific from there.

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But I need to make the observation that I'm just not going to waste any of our time talking about all the bad reasons people send their kids to public schools.

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As we discussed last time, people do lots of terrible things for lots of terrible reasons, and I'm not going to sit around talking about why they're terrible.

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The things I'm going to discuss are legitimate considerations for Christian parents who want to glorify

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God. The first of those considerations is the financial consideration. Let's face it, many of us just don't have a lot of money.

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But just because something is cheap or free doesn't mean it's a good idea. I'm not going to talk about school vouchers, though I think they're a great idea since public schooling isn't free to anyone paying in taxes anyway.

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But I do want to simply acknowledge that the public school system most often appears to be the least expensive option.

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And I believe that's a fair assessment from a monetary standpoint. But as we will see later, the other costs may be too heavy for anyone to bear.

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But before we move on to the second consideration, we need to grapple with these two realities. The first is that you get what you pay for.

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I know that trillions of dollars are poured into the American public school system every year, but when you divide that by all the schools in the

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U .S., you will find that most public schools are terribly underfunded or their funds are painfully misappropriated.

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This means that if you're paying a sliver of your taxes for schooling, just don't be surprised when the schooling isn't that good in multiple ways.

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Second, I have found from running my own businesses that people who don't invest financially often don't invest in any other ways as well.

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We treat cheap things like cheap things. We don't take as much care of the things we're given as the things we worked hard to buy.

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This affects both the student and the parent. Often neither of them are heavily invested because school appears to be little more than a governmental expectation that doesn't cost me anything.

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To sum this consideration up, yes, the public school will keep more money in your bank account than other options, but just because it's financially frugal doesn't mean it's a good idea.

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And that leads us to our second consideration, the academic consideration. Listen, I have to be honest with you.

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There is a preponderance of research on the American school system. You can easily see how the nations of the world rank in education, how the states rank, and even how the school districts rank.

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But the reality is that even the best American public schools don't hold a candle to other educational options we'll discuss in this series.

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I believe the biggest failure in the academic category is really tied to the fact that everyone in every grade is required to do the same material.

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Thousands of third graders are going to learn third grade math and English in science this fall because that's what was assigned for 8 -year -olds.

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But not every 8 -year -old is capable of the same things. And regardless of where they fall, nearly every 8 -year -old is capable of more than the public school system is requiring of them.

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My illustration, I admit, is anecdotal and based on my personal experiences, so I know they're easy to negate, but please take them for what they are.

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As a trained and degreed educator, I immediately and easily saw the great academic potential my son had.

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But it didn't take too long to see that my daughter had developmental challenges that my son didn't.

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In addition to a lazy eye, bad eyesight overall, nearly every speech impediment imaginable, and a number of other delayed maturation issues,

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I was pretty certain my daughter wasn't going to thrive in an academic setting the same way that my son would. So it was easy to do for my son what my mom did for me.

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He started informally learning 4th grade math when he was in kindergarten. Okay, so it wasn't actually as awesome as what my mom did for me.

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She managed to teach me algebra and geometry, trigonometry, and calculus before I even got into junior high. She's amazing,

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I know, but anyway. So when we moved to Victory Academy and I was able to take full responsibility for my children's math education,

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I made the decision that I wasn't going to hold my daughter back simply because she seemed slower than her brother in getting things like basic math skills and language development and reading.

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I was just going to give her a chance to thrive, you know, throw her in there and see how she would do. So last year,

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I decided that both of my children were going to use nothing but 6th grade material, with the exception that my daughter would still be using a younger reading curriculum.

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Let me tell you what, my daughter did thrive. Yes, it's true that my then 9 -year -old could do the 6th grade material with little to no assistance, and my 7 -year -old needed me there to guide her through the process, but there were many times her ability to reason through math and language problems or to formulate deep conclusions about scientific or historical events was astonishing, and it far surpassed my son.

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This fall, Micah, my son, will be 10 and Ivy will be 8. They'll both be using 7th grade

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Bob Jones University materials, a BECA material, Saxon, and other textbooks. And if they stay on track,

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Micah will be finishing high school when he's 16, and Ivy will be 13 and a half. This would never have happened in the public school.

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In fact, because of all her physical and mental developmental issues, they probably would have slapped her into a special class.

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There's just not enough time, money, or personnel in the public school system to give each child the unique educational experience that they need.

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They try, and sometimes, you know, they try really hard, and sometimes they do a pretty good job, but they just can't do it for everybody.

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And this will always happen when you have one teacher with a room full of students. Always. By the way, this happens to be true in the

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Christian school as well. We'll give them a chance next time that we talk about this, but it's just fair to acknowledge the point right now, that even when you have a 10 to 1 ratio, you cannot specialize the way the children need.

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But neither the financial considerations nor the academic considerations of the public school system are the biggest or the most important considerations.

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As we talked about last time, you can teach your child to be the greatest scientist on the planet and give them great life skills and teach them to read and write, but if they reject

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God's truth or exist in a kind of a wishy -washy state of nominal Christianity, who cares what they accomplish with their lives?

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It will have meant nothing when they end their mortal existence. So now we turn to the third and final spiritual consideration.

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Let me start this consideration by acknowledging that there are many born -again believers in and part of the public school system.

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There are saved administrators, teachers, involved parents, and students. I know many of them. I'm related to many of them, and I'm thankful for what they do, and we're going to talk about them more in a minute.

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I just want to state that in light of my next comment. My next comment is this. The public school system in America is friendly to nearly every religion, sexual persuasion, and deviant philosophy, but no one can argue that the public school is friendly to Christianity.

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We don't have time to discuss why, but suffice it to say that men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil.

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Unregenerate men will always shun the light and embrace anything that helps them enjoy the darkness. And again, like I said,

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I have many friends and family members who teach in the public schools, and every single one of them have told me how they have to dance around religion.

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And it's actually pretty funny that my friends who have taught English in Chinese schools, communist

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Chinese schools, you know where it's illegal to be a Christian, they have more freedom to talk about the

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Bible, read the Bible, and evangelize in class than Christians in America do. At the very best, the school system just kind of tolerates its

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Christians as long as they don't get too loud or the group gets too big. And again, the religious persecution in the hallways and teacher's lounges is very real and well -documented.

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But not only is the system anti -Bible, but as I mentioned before, it pretty much embraces anything and everything else.

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We're going to talk about this more next time, but what amazes me is that so many so -called Christian schools do a better job merely teaching subjects and trying to ignore the moral and philosophical implications than the public schools do.

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Nearly every class in the public school is served with a massive side of the teacher's worldview, whatever that worldview may be.

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And again, the experiential anecdotes of wicked, foolish, and just simply blind teachers abound.

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In addition, not only do the teachers bring their own belief system to bear on the subject, but increasingly the government's trying to manipulate the children's minds into seeing life the way they want.

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Whether it's safe zones or the LGTB and gender platform, sex education, or how children don't need to respect their parents, the failure philosophies abound.

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By the way, if you want to see if some failure philosophies have sneaked into your home, I recommend you listen to episode 61,

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Are There Failure Philosophies in Your Home? And then you have the students. Each one of them comes from a home where they have been taught how to think, believe, and live, and most of them feel right at home with the twisted, worldly, sinful lifestyle public education is force -feeding our kids.

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So even if your child gets that one Christian teacher in their school, they're in class, and at lunch, and in the locker room, and on the bus, and in the hallways, and standing in the bathroom with kids who are preaching, and screaming, and singing as loudly as they can how they think the world's supposed to work.

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My friends, the public school system is not some sanitized, just -the -facts -ma 'am environment where Johnny and Susie learn their timetables.

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It's a purposeful and premeditated training ground for godless philosophy. And this is where the fingernails meet the chalkboard.

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Are your kids ready to do day -in and day -out spiritual battle and come out on the winning side?

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Yes. I believe with all my heart there exists somewhere in the world a group of Christian high schoolers who are spiritually mature enough to intentionally meet the professional, well -funded, and coordinated daily onslaught of wicked humanistic perversion.

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But I haven't met many. When I worked at Chomber Christian School, we would frequently see our shiniest students leave our program and enter public education, sometimes in high school and sometimes for college, and when they came back, they were practically indistinguishable from the world.

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Yes, the Bible does tell of Joseph in Egypt, Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in Babylon, and Nehemiah in Persia, but which of us is comfortable comparing our children to the teenage versions of those men?

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So before I continue, I will leave the door cracked slightly that if you've done an amazing job as a parent and have introduced your kids to the

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Lord, equipped them to be vibrant, energetic, uncompromising, outspoken, apologetic followers of Christ, and they've proven their spiritual maturity and loyalty over the years, and you and your child have purposely decided that attending the public school, not for the education or even the financial reasons, but in order to be a witness in this dark and dying world, and you've decided that that is the most

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Christ -honoring thing you can do, and if you've set up a dynamic spiritual support system for them that involves counseling, accountability, and Bible study, then sure, it might be a good idea to send your teenager to the public school this fall.

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But this does not describe the situation for most of the professing Christians in the public school system today. And before my inbox gets slammed with a bunch of emails, you know, from Millennials and Generation Xers trying to prove that they went through the public school system and came out just fine, please just recognize at least that the public school system today is just not the one you grew up in.

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I'll talk about this more in a minute, but I want to look at some biblical examples again. Just like on one end, mature

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Christians can glorify God in secular schools, immature Christians and unbelieving children will not survive in today's school system.

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Consider Peter, Judas, the nation of Israel. Israel rejected their heavenly king,

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Judas betrayed his perfect teacher, his role model and savior, and even Peter was a rocky heart up until the

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Sea of Galilee after the resurrection. And we know how the nation of Israel fared under wicked kings who introduced idol worship.

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Imagine how much worse Judas would have turned out being raised by Romans, and consider Peter as a

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Jewish zealot. My point is, we know that Satan is like a roaring lion walking about seeking whom he may devour.

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He hates you, he hates your kids, and he wants to destroy your family. He will use everything he can in the public school setting to lead your family from truth, and there are a lot of ways to do that in the public school.

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And his demonic ravens are so busy eating the seeds of truth they hear at church, how much more diabolical are their schemes when your child is immersed in humanism?

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I want to close with this. Matt Walsh, a Christian columnist for The Blaze, wrote an article called

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Christian Parents, Your Kids Aren't Equipped to be Public School Missionaries. And I want to read to you an extended portion, and I'm going to link the whole thing for you in the description.

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And as a side note, if you follow us on Facebook, we've already shared the article there, so you may have seen it. Anyway, Matt just told in the article of a school newspaper in Virginia that had an article on transgender rights, and he says, quote,

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Look, I know that the public school may really be the only option for some people. There are single parents of little economic means who find themselves backed into a corner where government education appears to be the only choice.

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And if a parent can't or won't homeschool, a private Christian education can be prohibitively expensive.

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Not only that, but some Christian schools are as bad as or worse than the average public school. Abandoning the public school system is not an easy thing, and it presents many hurdles that right now may be impossible for some people to get over.

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The collapse of the family union, not to mention our recent economic woes, have contributed to creating a dependence on public education.

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Not everyone can break free all at once, I realize. But we should certainly all agree at this point that public school is not an option for those of us who have another feasible option.

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We should agree that the public school is a matter of last resort and necessity. We should agree that public education is inherently hostile to true

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Christian values and for that reason is not anywhere close to the ideal environment for our kids.

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We should agree on these points, but we still won't, incredibly. I had this discussion on Twitter recently, and it prompted several emails from Christian parents who appear to believe that kids should still be sent to public school, even if there are other valid options available.

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They suggested somehow the sort of madness outlined above could present faith -affirming opportunities for our children, and we would actually be depriving them of something if we did not give them access to those opportunities.

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They claim that public school is a mission field where our kids can be salt and light to their friends. They said that it's not fair to our kids or our communities if we shelter them.

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They suggested that somehow it's our children's duty to minister to the pagan hordes. They said that the system needs our kids.

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A few responses to this rather confused point of view. First of all, the system needs our kids is just a weird and creepy statement.

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It reminds me of something someone would say on Black Mirror or The Twilight Zone. Here's the truth about the system.

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It's not my job to give it what it needs. Even less is it my kids' job. There's nothing in the Bible that says we must dedicate ourselves to maintaining a government -run education system at any cost.

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My first responsibility is to my family, not to the community or the school system or my kids' classmates. I will never put the interests of the system above that of my own children.

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Whether the system lives or dies is not my concern. My family's my concern. I have an obligation to them, not the local superintendent.

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Second, anyway, if I did put my kids in the system for the sake of the system, I'm not the one making the sacrifice.

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I'm forcing my kids to make it. At least face what you're doing. When it comes down to it, the burden of public schooling is something your child will have to shoulder, not you.

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Third, yes, my kids will eventually be exposed to all kinds of strange and terrible things. As much as I'd like to keep them shielded from the evils of the world forever,

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I know that I can do no such thing. The question is not whether our kids will be exposed to this or that depravity, but when and how and in what context.

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Are you prepared to trust the school's judgment on when Junior is ready to learn about concepts like transgenderism?

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Do you trust their judgment on how he learns about it and what he's told about it? If you do,

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I suppose you aren't even reading this post right now because you've been in a vegetative state for the past thirty years. Fourth, when a kid is sent to public school, he's expected to navigate and survive and thrive in a hostile, confusing, amoral environment basically untethered from his parents six to eight hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year for twelve years.

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Is a child ready for that challenge by the time he's five years old? Is he ready at eight, at ten?

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No. Our job as parents is to train them up in the way they should go, equip them with the armor of God, fortify them in the truth, and then release them into the world.

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That process has not been completed in conjunction with them first learning to tie their shoes. I mean, for goodness sake, most adults can't even manage to withstand the hostilities and pressures of a fallen world for that amount of time and we expect little kids to do it?

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That's not fair to them. It's too much to ask, way too much. They aren't equipped. They aren't ready.

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They aren't strong enough and they will get eaten alive. Fifth, related to this point, your child is not ready to be a missionary.

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He cannot be a witness to others until he himself has been properly formed in the faith. It's no surprise that most of the young missionaries we commission and send forth to minister to the lost souls in public schools quickly become one of the lost souls.

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We don't need to sit around theorizing about whether the missionary approach to education is wise or effective. We already know that it isn't.

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The vast majority of the parents who think their kids are being salt and light to their peers in school are simply oblivious to the fact that their little

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Bible warriors have long since defected and joined the heathens. You can hardly blame the kids for this.

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They're just kids after all. They aren't warriors. Warriors are trained and disciplined. Children are neither of those things.

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I imagine this is why St. Paul didn't travel to Athens and Corinth recruiting toddlers to help him carry the gospel into pagan lands.

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Education is supposed to prepare a child to carry the torch of truth. That is, he's supposed to be ready to carry it once his education has been completed.

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This should not be a throw them into the deep end and see if they can swim strategy. They can't swim. You and I can barely swim, morally and spiritually speaking, and we're adults.

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Do you expect your child to be more spiritually mature and morally courageous than you?

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Unquote. My friends, I share this with you because I love you.

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When I read and interact with our public school systems across the U .S. and when I meet professing Christians who are supposedly making it through in a

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Christ -honoring way, I involuntarily cringe. The system is messed up and the kids who think they're thriving are almost always lost or at least very double -minded.

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I don't want that to happen to your kids. My friends, there are better options and I look forward to sharing them with you as we continue in this series.

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I do want to go back to what I said earlier about the men and women who are in the Christian school trying to be a salt and light as the teachers.

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You know what? These people are equipped oftentimes. These people are prepared. These people have the answers to apologize for the scripture and to set forth the gospel to these men and women, to these children that they work with.

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And it's difficult and I know it's difficult and I praise God for the ones who are doing it well. There are a lot of them out there who claim to be

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Christians who aren't doing it well, who are just there. They're meshing in with everybody else and playing the game and kind of camouflaging themselves and they don't say anything and they go home and their light is very dimmed if it's on at all.

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And I think that oftentimes the teachers out there who claim to be Christians find themselves in the exact same place that the students who claim to be

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Christians do after a while. They start to being indistinguishable from the world. But I do praise

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God for the ones who are trying to do a good job. But that's the point. They've been educated. They've been trained. They know what to do to go out there and to stand in that dark world for Christ.

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Not our third graders. Should you consider sending your kids to the public school this fall?

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If it's that financially difficult, maybe. But you know what?

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You need to premeditatively, intentionally have a support plan for your kids. You need to connect them with somebody.

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Look through the school. See if there's a Christian person you can connect them with. Possibly a coach or somebody.

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Get them involved with their youth pastor. You need to be able to invest in God's truth as much, if not more, than what the public school is lying to them.

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It's not going to be easy. And if you have questions about this, we want you to ask us. We want you to send us emails at counselor at truthloveparent .com.

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We want to help because it's not going to be easy. Now listen, don't forget to check out truthloveparent .com

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today for today's episode notes. And please, all of you, join us next time as we continue this discussion about educational choices and talk with my dear friend,

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Alan Benson, about whether or not you should consider sending your kids to a Christian school this fall. Listen, I know like Matt Walsh said, the financial thing can just be so big sometimes, but it's not the most important.

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And God promises that He will provide all of your needs in Christ Jesus.

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If you need to have your kid in a Christian school or you need to homeschool your child, God will provide.

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How big is your God? How much do you trust Him? Don't be afraid of the finances to such a degree that you shortchange your child academically or you throw them to the lions spiritually.

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And I know that many of you may disagree with my stance today, and I welcome your feedback at teamTLP at truthloveparent .com.

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And for those of you, again, with more specific questions, don't hesitate to reach out at counselor at truthloveparent .com.

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If we're going to delegate part of our parenting, we better make certain of two things. One, we're doing the job

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God requires of us. And two, the person we're engaging to help educate our children is doing the job

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God requires of them as well. Have a great weekend. Truth.

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Love. Parents is part of the Evermind Ministries family and is dedicated to helping you become an intentional premeditated parent.

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Join us next time as we search God's Word for the truth your family needs today.