Christians: Time to DITCH Public Schools? | Pastor Reacts

I don't hate my kids. I'm never going to send them to public schools.

Have public schools lost their way from the original intent and design? Absolutely. Public schools were nowhere near as insane as they are today when I was in school. Are public schools today the right solution for Christian families?

Or should we just ditch them altogether? Tucker Carlson has Tucker Max on his show to talk about a wide range of subjects. But when they talk about public school, this is where my antenna popped up. Max says public school was designed to create submissive slaves of the state.

Is he right about that? Is it time for Christians to ditch the public school system? Does the Bible have anything to say about all of this? We're going to get into all of those things in just a moment.

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I'm on the fence about which is better or worse.

So all of your children are out of the public schools?

Oh, never went into public schools. My man, I don't hate my kids. I'm never going to send them to public schools.

But that raises a philosophical, and I want to put this to the President of the United States, with a message I think is relevant to you, which is that those are not your kids, actually. Here he is.

Rebecca put a teacher's creed into words when she said, there's no such thing as someone else's child. No such thing as someone else's child. Our nation's children are all our children. So your kids are really his kids.

He owns your kids. It's like when people say, you know, I'm coming to take your guns. Like, well, stack up. Stack up and come get them. Same with kids. Now, those are my kids. Those children are mine and my wife's.

Now, I will say, let's give it a very judicious interpretation. If what he means, and I don't think this is what he means, but if what he means is, I don't own my children like they're chattel or slaves, that they are independent beings and my job is to steward them.

Totally agree. Totally on board. In no way, shape, or form do I think my kids should live their lives based on what I want. They should live it on what they want. Totally on board. I see my job is to help them become full people and find the lives they want.

I don't think that's what he means. I think what he means is...

That's not what he means. What Joe Biden means is likely what Hillary Clinton meant when she wrote the book, It Takes a Village. You remember that book when it came out? Because that was like in the 1990s, you know?

And the sentiment comes down to this. Schools train children to become contributors and members of society. Therefore, it is society's job to train up children. It takes a village to raise a children.

Now, this raises some important questions for us. Whose responsibility is it to educate children? What is the purpose of education in the first place, right? We should have answers to these questions as Christian parents because if we don't, if we just go along to get along and live our lives with no intentionality, no game plan in this area, then our children are going to be educated by somebody else with a different set of values than us.

So we need to have answers to these questions. By the way, what is your answer, you know? Whose responsibility is it to educate our children? And what is the purpose of education? Let me know in the comments.

I have an answer to this question. More importantly, the Bible has some things to say about all of this.

And we'll discuss it in a moment. It's a very typical bureaucratic, really, it's a really a communist Marxist idea that children are the property of the state, that the citizens are the property of the state.

That is And you disagree with that. Disagreement's not strong enough. It's not. It's not a strong enough term. Yeah, like I, there's just no chance that's going to exist in my words. Yeah, just not.

So I've always thought, I mean, of course I vehemently agree with you, but the number of parents who presumably love their kids more than their own lives, most parents do, I think, who are willing to let, not just Alzheimer's patients posing as precedent, but any representative of the state just kind of come in

Do whatever they want to their kids. Sexualize their kids, basically like kiddie porn s*** with their kids, and they allow it. Why?

Man, it's a good question. I don't know because, like, clearly I would never in a million years allow anything like that. I think I think I know.

As someone who was once a public high school teacher,.

I think I might have an idea. Most people can only give their kids what they got, and most people were raised by people who went to public schools, and they went to public schools, and they were raised

Public schools are designed to create obedient employees. That's the most charitable sort of interpretation. It maintains the surf class. That's the point. It does. That is, and I'm not saying this, this isn't like a conspiracy theory or a metaphor.

Like, there's a guy, John Taylor Gatto, who wrote a couple great books about this. The literal stated goal Horace Mann, all those people who invented the American public educational system, their stated goal is to create subservient employees who know how to be good citizens.

Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna push back on this a little because I don't think that's accurate. And I'm hesitating because I realized that many of you probably agree with Max here, but I think what he just said is a little too simplistic in terms of describing public schools and how they really came about in the first place.

Horace Mann did not invent public schools. He was a reformer. He was not an inventor. And I get it. You know, Max is up there riffing. You know, he and Tucker are just off the cuff, and they're having a great conversation.

And, you know, I'm grateful for the opportunity because we get to participate in this discussion in some sense. But to say that public schools were designed to create subservient employees and, you know, Horace Mann invented the American public educational system, it's just not accurate.

Horace Mann has certainly been given the title of the father of American education. That's absolutely true. But he's not the one who invented public schools. He's not the one who came up with the idea of educating children in the first place.

He's not even the one who came up with the idea of state-sponsored schools. Horace Mann is late to the game on all of these fronts. The one who came up with education for children were Christians and churches.

And it wasn't just in our American past. Christians have been educating all people, both believer and non-believer, for thousands of years. That's a Christian invention. I mean, you know, you can go back to the medieval period and look at what the Irish monks did to provide education to the people, to preserve important academic texts that, by the way, would not have survived the medieval period without Christians.

And then if you fast forward to America's past, it wasn't Horace Mann, it was Benjamin Rush who first proposed a system of public education for not only children, but for women, by the way, when that wasn't even a thing at all.

Before Rush, you know, like I said, I mean, it was the churches who provided education to the people. I mean, that's why the first universities were all seminaries, ladies and gentlemen. Did you know any of this?

Because I don't know if this is commonly taught anymore. The point is, like, why did the Christians do all of this? Their purpose in education was so that the educated could read the Bible and know God.

Christians proposed that education be a development of both academic skills, yes, as well as a strong moral character, why? Well, so that people could read and understand the Bible, so that they could know God and obey him.

That's why public schools were originally invented. As a matter of fact, Benjamin Rush said this, contemplating merely the political institutions of the United States, I lament that we waste so much time and money in punishing crimes and take so little pains to prevent them.

We profess to be Republicans, and yet we neglect the only means of establishing and perpetuating our Republican forms of government. That is, here it is, the universal education of our youth in the principles of Christianity by means of the Bible.

For this divine book above all others, favors that equality among mankind, that respect for just laws and all those sober and frugal virtues, which constitute the soul of Republicanism. Now, having said all of that, have public schools lost their way from the original intent and design?

Absolutely. Did Horace Mann come in and reform the way that public schools are run? Absolutely. So, you know, in the face of the clarification that I just gave, we're still left with the end result of the degradation of public schools.

And so the question remains for us as Christians, and I suppose Max has already given his answer for his family, but are public schools today the right solution for Christian families? Or should we just ditch them altogether?

We're gonna get into that.

And like, that's just, I didn't have children for that reason, to serve some other man or woman or some faceless bureaucratic entity. No. And so if someone was raised by people who went to public school, who were just employees, and that's who they are, it's hard, I mean this like not judgmentally, I can imagine it'd be really hard for that person to understand, well, this is where I went.

This was good enough for me. They're supposed to be experts. Why wouldn't they know better? I can understand how a lot of people would get to that spot. Now, the good news is all this nonsense lunacy with trans and other crap in schools, sexualizing little children is a lot of people starting to wake up and realize what, I mean, I knew this, I had never had any plan to send my kids to public school.

Like that was never, I went to public schools mostly, and I realized how nonsense they were. So I was born in the late 70s,.

Grew up in the 80s and early 90s. All, I went to public school everywhere, except it was for third grade, for some reason I didn't, it was a private school, but went to public schools all the rest of the time.

Now, I was raised in church, but wasn't saved. And when I was 17, I told my parents that I was done with church and I stayed gone until I was 30. But I share this to say, public schools were nowhere near as insane as they are today when I was in school.

Probably when you were in school, mom, dad, it is absolutely insane what is happening in public schools. And I'm not just speaking as a Christian, I'm speaking as someone who taught in public high schools, who had a vantage point specifically in the classroom to witness what was going on.

You know, I just looked around because I had eyes to see. And with regard to every essential measure, academically, ethically, public schools are degrading before our very eyes. Or when I was there, my parents weren't very good, but they weirdly, they gave me a gift.

They weren't, they were not good parents. They weren't bad people, they were just bad parents. But their bad parenting gave me a gift. They didn't pretend that they cared. Like they didn't mix a lot of, seriously, people laugh.

But I'm telling you, man, so many people That was the upside of my bad childhood. No, it was. My parents didn't pretend they cared. So many people's parents He was probably raised by boomers.

I was raised by boomers. I mean, you know, to grow up in the 80s, it's hard to describe to the younger generation. It was just, it was super interesting. You know, who's with me? Anybody raised by boomers in the 80s and, you know, live to tell the tale?

I mean, we didn't even have seatbelt laws when I was a kid. I mean, hello, we were all hanging half out of the back of pickup trucks flying down the freeway back when I When I was a kid.

Or caregivers mixed love with abuse. And so, so many people see those two things together. My parents didn't really pretend they cared much. And so, like, I never mixed love and abuse. And also, they didn't really show up much for me.

And so, I realized at a young age that the adults weren't coming. Yeah. And the adults, for the most part, didn't know what the hell they were doing. They didn't ever pretend they were experts or knew what they were doing or had the right answers, right?

And so, it's like, they were so bad that in a way that they were good. They set me up to see the reality. Yeah, I mean, it's true. I just love your attitude about your childhood. That's a wonderful attitude to have.

Well, I got there after a lot of emotional work. A lot of therapy, a lot of psychedelic medicine, a lot of work. I wasn't always like that. I was angry for a while. It's just pointless to be mad about the past.

Anger can serve a purpose for a period. If it gets you out of shame or other sort of essentially anti-life emotions, anger is a powerful, motivating emotion. But if you stay stuck there, it's not good.

I was stuck there for a while.

Is your wife? Well, I mean, that's a good point to bring up, which is a little unrelated, but every problem was at one time a solution. And sometimes the most difficult thing to cure is someone else's attempt at self-cure.

There's a great book called The Defining Decade. It was written by a psychologist named Meg Jay, who, as far as I can tell, is not a Christian, but she affirms a lot of the things that we know to be true as Christians from our biblical convictions.

And she points out in her book that people tend to find solutions to their problems in their own ways. And so what that means is anger and expressing anger, as Max was just talking about, that can be satisfying in the moment, but then it becomes this difficult thing to let go of.

And what was once a solution to your problem very quickly becomes your next problem, which is why when I would counsel people as a pastor, the solution to all problems at base lies fundamentally in discipleship and developing a deeper relationship with God and sort of allowing all of the wonderful benefits.

You know, as Jesus says, seek first the kingdom and all of these things will be added to you. It's like all of these wonderful benefits of just spending time focusing on developing a deeper intimacy with the Lord, sins start to fall away, things start to properly align and reorient in the ways that God has designed, you know?

Well, anyway, so now I'm diverting. It's a whole other video for another time, I suppose.

Totally on board with these attitudes? 100%. Oh yeah. My wife, I would not be married to her if she wasn't, if we didn't share these values. We were very aligned in a lot of stuff when we met and she's done a lot of her own emotional therapeutic work as well.

And we both have grown so much together over the last 10 years in parallel ways. But I've seen people who split in the last three, four years because their values just went different. Like the split was already there,.

But this kind of forced it. So you've organized your life around surviving what you think is coming and protecting your family. What's here. What's here now.

So what do you think? And then what might come. What do you think might come? Like, what does that look like? I have no idea, right? The range of outcomes I think are extremely wide.

But you're working to mitigate against those eventualities or those possibilities.

You can't prevent everything, right? Like if an asteroid hits, you know, Florida, nothing I'm doing is probably gonna make any difference, right? Like it's 95 of people are gonna die. It's gonna be horrible.

It's gonna be Armageddon.

And my, you know. What a guy says, you know, to other guys, you know what I mean? Ladies, if you're wondering what us guys think about and talk about when you're not around, pay close attention to, you know, hey man, what if an asteroid, you know, hit the earth and wiped everyone out, right?

This is the kind of stuff that occupies our minds when we're not thinking about you or reading our Bibles, I suppose. You know what I mean? Boy, thank you so much for watching this video. Did you know that the majority of people who do watch are not subscribed to the channel?

If this video is blessing you, would you do me a favor and like and subscribe to the channel? It just really helps me to get the word out about this ministry.

I greatly appreciate it. The whole point of public school is to separate the child from the family and orient them in bureaucratic, corporatist, consumerist society. And I mean, like, I'm kind of torn because like, I like electricity and I like cool stuff and I'm not like, you know, I'm not shooting with a bow and arrow.

I'm not hunting with a bow and arrow. But at the same time, I don't want all of the negative nonsense that comes with that. I want my children to grow up on land with their hands in dirt, understanding first self-knowledge above all things.

And that is the opposite of what you learn in public. Everything public school is coming from experts, obey, do what you're told. Here's how life works. The way our children grow up, first and foremost, your body, your rules.

Second, like literally, their body, their rules. That's like my kid at any point can basically stop anything going on not my body, my rules. I don't want to go. I don't want to do that. And if it's not unsafe, right, then I'm like, okay, all right.

We've got to figure it out.

And so. So I'm not entirely clear on what he means by his own children setting their own rules. I'm sure there's a charitable way to hear that. What I want to point out though, is how spot on Max is about the indoctrination of youth, particularly at the high school level and the college level, right?

And we're seeing this now as an expression of, the kind of indoctrination that children go through at the college level. Cause we're looking at all the protests going as of the recording of this video, all of these protests are hitting the headlines right now.

Right? And it's weird because I suspect a lot of teachers don't even realize what's happening. On the ground level, what's happening. When I was in grad school for teaching, there was a great concern to push teachers into a method that was more student directed and student led.

A method of formulating lesson plans and units around those kinds of things, which sounds great on paper, but in reality is a horrific strategy for teaching teenagers in today's culture. And that's just my opinion as a former educator.

And the reason I say that is because of what happens to students in public school. They are taught, like if you go zoom all the way out, they are taught academic fundamentals in elementary and middle school.

And they are already, by the time they reach high school, prone to this form of teaching, which is much more teacher centered, right? Teacher led, where essentially the teacher speaks and the students take notes and then take tests.

And they're a lot more passive in that sense. But then all of a sudden it's like this magic thing happens where just graduating from middle school, now the attitude, and then going into high school, now the attitude is in high school, the students should be able to have the freedom to direct their own learning.

And they should have the freedom to direct their own lessons and units. Those lessons and units should be more student centered. At a time though, when students desperately need structure. And so they go into this kind of an environment and who do they look to?

The liberals, the woke teachers who are activists and outspoken about everything. And guess what happens? Students soak it up. They just, they're like sponges. They soak everything up because they crave the structure.

And then they turn around and regurgitate what they heard because they don't know how to assess information critically. And that seeps into all other aspects of learning, which again is largely student centered already.

And that's how schools become this weird laboratory of sorts for growing liberals and progressive ideologues. And by the way, that's not true of every student, but man, it's true for a lot of them. So Max is right about that.

Basic things like that, man, I just, I wasn't thinking about until two, three, four or five years ago, but having kids and getting on land, I didn't realize how poisoned and how toxic almost everything in our culture is.

Not just American, the world. Like the way humans relate to each other.

And this is something I've been talking about at this ministry for at least the last six years. You know, the way that we communicate to each other, the way that we engage each other is a dumpster fire.

It's just a disaster. And it fuels tribalism. It fuels adversarialism. We're at odds with each other. Even those of us in church are at odds with each other, just as much as with those outside the church.

You know, we clash now with everybody and everything. It's insane. Okay, well, so you have to watch the whole interview. I think it's fascinating. There's like an hour of this or something, particularly when he starts talking about believing in God.

I think that is something that you should pay close attention to. But let's just do this. Let's circle back around on the issue of education. What I asked at the outset was, whose responsibility is it to educate our children?

That's the $6 million question, okay? Here's what the Bible says. Deuteronomy chapter six, verse one. Now this is the commandment, the statutes and the rules that the Lord your God commanded me to teach you.

This is Moses. That you may do them in the land to which you are going over to possess it. That you may fear the Lord your God, you and your son and your son's son by keeping all his statutes and his commandments, which I command you all the days of your life and that your days may be long.

Okay, already there are some principles in here that I think are incredibly important as it connects to education, even today in the 21st century. But let's keep going. Hear therefore, O Israel, and be careful to do them, that it may go well with you and that you may multiply greatly as the Lord, the God of your fathers has promised you in a land flowing with milk and honey.

Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.

You shall teach them diligently to your children and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.

You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. Okay, a couple of things here. First, who is you? Right? Who is the educator of your children? The Bible says it's you, you know?

You're the educator of your own children. And the attitude and expectation of God is that everything about you, including your entire house, should be a series of teachable moments. Things to teach your children so that they will learn who God is and what he expects of us, right?

By the way, this connects to a very famous proverb that a lot of us know. Proverbs 22, verse six, train up a child in the way he should go. Even when he is old, he will not depart from it. And you know, this has been said quite a bit already, but I'll say it one more time.

The Proverbs is not a guaranteed outcome. They are just a set of principles that are typically true, right? But there's always exceptions, okay? So that's the answer to the question, right? But here's another thing, because I also asked this question, like, what is the purpose of education?

And I kind of touched on it a moment ago, right? The purpose of education is that children must learn who God is. And they must learn how to have a long life of flourishing according to God's design, okay?

But it begins with knowing who God is. Take a look at this. Proverbs chapter one, verse seven, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and instruction. So the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.

There's another part in the scripture that says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, right? But why is wisdom so important? Proverbs chapter three, verse 13, blessed is the one who finds wisdom and the one who gets understanding for the gain from her wisdom, that's the her, is better than gain from silver and her profit is better than gold.

She's more precious than jewels and nothing your desire can compare with her. Long life is in her right hand, in her left hand are riches and honor. Her ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace.

So there's a much longer video to make here, I'm sure, about all of this, but Jesus is the very wisdom of God. Take a look at how Jesus personifies wisdom in the Sermon on the Mount, okay? Especially when he talks about entering the narrow gate, which leads to life.

He's referencing the Proverbs, but he's putting the notion of wisdom on himself, right? So he's taking his listeners right back to Lady Wisdom in Proverbs. And anyway, the point is true wisdom, when someone has true wisdom, it leads to obeying Jesus, which leads ultimately to eternal life.

That means that education is for our children to know who God is and to have a long life of flourishing. That carries them into eternity with the father. Now, think about that. That is a much deeper answer than simply being a contributor to society.

You see that, right? It certainly entails being a contributor to the flourishing of society, because the way to do that is to display the type of moral qualities that God desires for us anyway. But this education should go much further into discipling our children so that they know who God is and so that they have eternal life as well.

And obviously eternal life is not a gift that everyone receives. And we know that as parents and grandparents. That's a hard lesson for us to learn, but it should not deter us from understanding these biblical answers, right?

Whose responsibility is it to educate our children? Yours, mom and dad. And what is the purpose of education? It's for children to know who God is and so that they can have a long life of flourishing that continues on into eternity with the father.

Which is interesting now, because I'm starting to think about what Max originally said, you know, where we originally started with this whole issue in the first place, right? We talked about Hillary Clinton, right?

It takes a village. I mean, isn't that what we're noticing right now? Because if you start thinking about the degradation of public school, where we originally started with our original stated intentions as Christians with public school, what we're really talking about is taking the Bible as a central document out of children's education and replacing it with the value of our society, with culture, with whatever the society deems is important at that particular time as a snapshot in history.

That is what explains a lot, I think. Now, a lot of you might be thinking, well, you know, wait a second, Nate, I'm working hard to put food on the table. And, you know, the reality is I can't do all things, right, for my children.

I can't work hard and make money to feed them and clothe them and also be around during the day all day to educate them as well. I totally understand that, you know? And so I just want you to make sure you don't hear what I'm not saying.

I'm not saying you should be the only one who educates your children. I'm saying that you're the one responsible for your children's education. How that looks practically is it's just gonna be different for parents, you know?

Some parents are gonna homeschool because they can, because God has given them an ability to be able to do something like that and praise the Lord for that, right? Others are going to put their schools in some kind, or put their children in some kind of private school, you know, or they're gonna do their due diligence and recognize that maybe in their public school that's just down the road there from wherever they are, that has not been infiltrated or permeated by woke progressive culture, right?

And so they're gonna choose public school, which I suppose answers another question for some of you, right? Considering everything, is it time to ditch public school altogether? I think the answer is no.

I think there are still some areas where Christians teach in public schools, just like I did, and where Christian parents can intentionally place their children in that environment because they recognize that it has not been completely infiltrated and degraded by liberal and secular and woke garbage.

On the other hand, man, it's getting harder and harder these days to find those kinds of schools, you know what I mean? But technically they're still out there. And so at the end of the day, I just think God gives liberty and grace to parents as they figure this out for their own families, right?

But the key is intentionality. We have to be purposeful and intentional about the education of our children, why? Because the responsibility is on us. It's our responsibility to shoulder as parents. And even more than that, when we are home, okay?

Whatever our situation looks like. As parents, I think we really need to remember to be intentional about discipling our children, of finding the time to talk about God and to talk about his word to them, to read the word with them, to talk about the Lord and his word when we're sitting, when we're walking, when we're traveling around with them, to put these things on our doorposts, so to speak, right?

In other words, to constantly be engaging our kids about the gospel, about what God desires for us, and also how the world runs counter to our biblical convictions in order to inoculate our kids to what they're going to discover as they go out as young men and women in today's culture independently, right?

If we do that, I think we will fulfill our responsibilities as Christian parents in today's culture. There's a lot more to say about all of this, but that's the very least that I can say in this video.

All right, now it's your turn. What do you think? Is it time for Christians to ditch public schools altogether? Let me know in the comments below. I'd love to get your take on it. If you were or are a parent of a child in public school, man, I'm really curious to hear what you have to say.

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