Ken Ham slam dunks it:

However, the bottom line is that I would rather my children dig ditches and eventually go to heaven than be some highly educated person and go to hell because they received biblical-authority undermining teaching and then rejected the Word of God.

Tiana over at God Made …. Home Grown writes a great piece on why public school is not an option for her family. Her reasons are solid and compelling. On top of that, they mirror many of the reasons State Re-education Camps (a.k.a. public schools) and their government welfare are NOT an option here at the Pauper’s Hovel either. Check out what Tiana has to say:

“Even so, academic mediocrity, peer pressure and bullying, stifled creativity and liberal bureaucratic agendas are not my real reasons for homeschooling.

To say so would imply that if the schools were reformed–if all the legitimate concerns and criticisms about the government school system were to be fixed forever–that I would consider sending my children to public school.

But I wouldn’t.

Why Not?

Because God has said in His Word that educating our children is our job as parents”

Read the rest of the article here: http://www.godmadehomegrown.com/biblical-homeschooling/why-not-public-school-the-real-reason/#ixzz1WFg0XcAK

From the Reverend Doctor R.C. Sproul Jr.:

Instead, a college education is for the same thing a kindergarten education is for, to repair the ruins. The great Puritan poet John Milton wisely said: “The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him.”

You should really read the rest of his article found here.

Today you have the chance to impact your children’s future for many years to come with a mere 15 minutes of your time. The question is will you invest the time to take your children with you to exercise your right and responsibility to vote or not?

Today you have the opportunity to disciple you family as they walk along the road with you (Deut 6:1-9). What better opportunity to implant your values into their heart will you have?

So take your family, get out there and vote!

Check out this upcoming Documentary:

IndoctriNation Trailer from IndoctriNation on Vimeo.

Texas Faith and Freedom Tour – Day 1 cont.

7-5-10
San Antonio, TX

Today we walked holy ground. I don’t mean spiritually holy ground  but holy in the sense of consecrated ground, ground set aside by the blood of the men who died there. We walked the grounds of the Alamo today. As an unwilling hostage in the state of Texas I often think that Texans have an inflated view of themselves and their state. This sense has certainly filtered my thoughts of the Alamo through the years. However, today I began to understand why the Alamo should matter to every christian father in the US and maybe the world. You see this little band of 180+ Texicans stood against tyranny in the face of overwhelming odds and they did so like men!

These brave men, knowingly or not were firmly in the middle of a battle of worldviews. On one side the Spanish heritage and worldview of the divine right of kings, Catholicism, imperialism driven by greed, and hunger for power was represented by Santa Anna who had set himself up as dictator and had as his aim the subjugating by force everyone within his reach. On the other the heritage of freedom born of the Protestant Reformation, incubated in Calvin’s Geneva, birthed and given legs in the Puritans of the American colonies and carried out through the vision of settling families to create a nation which would become a city on a hill to light the world with the gospel of Jesus Christ represented by the Texas colonists. There was no mistaking the prize in this battle, it was the fate of freedom that was being decided at this little Spanish mission. Both sides recognized it and neither was willing to cede their position.

It is these high stakes that make this significant to us today because when Santa Anna raised the red flag over his headquarters, he was declaring he would give no quarter. It is this declaration that makes these Texans important, they could have tried to run or sue for peace in the face of overwhelming odds but instead they did not hesitate but returned this ultimatum with a cannon volley declaring that they would rather die like men then shrink from their duty. Today we have lost most of the ideals of manliness and do not understand what it means to fight and die like men but those men did not. They clearly understood what Col. Travis was saying when he drew the line in the sand and asked who was willing to die with him. Every man who stepped across that line would die within the walls of that mission and they knew it but they crossed the line anyway. What is even more significant is that many of these men were not merely adventurers but family men who many would say had so much for which to live. Yet they saw it as they had so very much for which to die. And to the last man, they acquitted themselves as men fighting so long as they had strength, each one meeting his maker on that fateful day but each one meeting him as one dying like a man.

What is the lesson for us? What is your line in the sand? What is so important to you that you would go down fighting to the last man? What is so important in your life that you are willing to suffer deprivation, ostracision, persecution, and even prison or death to follow your convictions? May we as fathers be the protectors we are called to be and may we acquit ourselves as men fighting even to the death if neccessary in defense of our families, country and the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Here are 2 takes on the same issue and while their solutions may differ they both agree – Something is wrong in Mudville!

First we start with a secular filmmaker who takes a hard look at the education establishment in America. While I doubt I would agree with his solutions to the problem I find it interesting that a man who by all indications makes no profession of submission to Christ sees what Pastors and Christian Parents refuse to acknowledge – the youth ministry of the church of secular humanism (government schools) are horribly broken! It is to our shame that those without eyes to see the truth see in their groping what we who have had our eyes opened by Christ willfully shut our eyes against. Take a look:

The good news is, believers are beginning to wake up.

This next one is from Gunn Brothers Productions an award winning Christian production company who is tackling the issue from a distinctly Christian worldview. I really appreciate these guys and their work. I would most likely fall closer to their solutions to the issue and highly recommend you see this film when it is released this fall. Take a look at the issue through the lens of the scriptures:

“A disciple^[1] is not above his teacher^[2], but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher.” Luke 6:40 ESV

(footnotes added)

¹ μαθητής – one who engages in learning through instruction from another, pupil, apprentice (1)

² διδάσκαλος – teacher (2)

Who then will your children be like?

(1) – William Arndt, Frederick W. Danker and Walter Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, “Based on Walter Bauer’s Griechisch-Deutsches Wr̲terbuch Zu Den Schriften Des Neuen Testaments Und Der Frhchristlichen [Sic] Literatur, Sixth Edition, Ed. Kurt Aland and Barbara Aland, With Viktor Reichmann and on Previous English Editions by W.F. Arndt, F.W. Gingrich, and F.W. Danker.”, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 609.

(2) – Ibid, 241.

“He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers.”  – Charles Peguy

This is one of the leading quotes in the latest edition of “The Continuing Collapse” over at Voddie Baucham’s blog. Please go read this well researched monthly feature on the state of education in America. Every parent needs to be informed of the direction and state of our schools and these gentlemen have done the leg work for you but have also clearly documented their sources for your own research so that you might be a Berean in your daily walk.  Read the full post

Kelly at Generation Cedar raises a good question originally posed in the Washington Post:

Is the Classroom Harming Boys and Society?

Need another reason to homeschool?

“…we’re not as concerned as we ought to be about the millions of young men who are floundering or lost.

But they’re there: The young men who are working in the lowest-level (and most dangerous) jobs instead of going to college. Who are sitting in prison instead of going to college. [My note: I would also add "instead of becoming entrepreneurs", understanding the great opportunities that await and are not limited to those with college degrees.] Who are staying out of the long-term marriage pool because they have little to offer to young women. Who are remaining adolescents, wasting years of their lives playing video games for hours a day, until they’re in their thirties, by which time the world has passed many of them by.

Root Problem

Whether in the prison system, in my university classes or in the schools where I help train teachers, I have noticed a systemic problem with how we teach and mentor boys that I call “industrial schooling,” and that I believe is a primary root of our sons’ falling behind in school, and quite often in life.

Two hundred years ago, realizing the necessity of schooling millions of kids, we took them off the farms and out of the marketplace and put them in large industrial-size classrooms (one teacher, 25 to 30 kids). For many kids, this system worked — and still works. But from the beginning, there were some for whom it wasn’t working very well. Initially, it was girls. It took more than 150 years to get parity for them.

Problem With Industrialized Schooling

Now we’re seeing what’s wrong with the system for millions of boys…Beginning in very early grades, the sit-still, read-your-book, raise-your-hand-quietly, don’t-learn-by-doing-but-by-taking-notes classroom is a worse fit for more boys than it is for most girls. This was always the case, but we couldn’t see it 100 years ago. We didn’t have the comparative element of girls at par in classrooms. We taught a lot of our boys and girls separately. We educated children with greater emphasis on certain basic educational principles that kept a lot of boys “in line” — competitive learning was one. And our families were deeply involved in a child’s education.

Read the Rest of the Post