From Skeptic to Advocate

I've been debating with myself on what to write over the past week or so. I have multiple angles on how to approach the cultural battle we are in the midst of right now, but this idea has been coming to the forefront of my mind since I took the plunge into leading a homeschool class every Thursday.

Just over a year ago, I would have considered myself a homeschool skeptic. My eyes have been opened. The biggest eye opener has been my friends(not just one family, either) and their dedication to homeschooling. My pastor and his siblings were homeschooled. My friends, the Bontrager Family, have all been homeschooled and several other close friends I've met over the past year were also homeschooled. They are the reason for the break through on this subject for me.

Over the past 14 months, I've been heavily involved with politics(who, me?) and I've had a chance to interact with people from all walks and ways of life. The singular element that I've seen that makes the difference in a young person's life is the way they have been cared for and educated by their parents. Looking back on my education, public school did a decent job of teaching me to do math and to write and read. What it didn't do was prepare me for life after school. What it didn't do was instill in me values I now hold dear. What it didn't do was give me a grounding in the Bible. I've had to do all of these things on my own, and sometimes, I failed miserably. I don't blame my parents because homeschooling really wasn't even a thing people did when I was a child in Nebraska. In some states, it was illegal. In many states, it is still frowned upon. Luckily, here in Iowa, many people celebrate homeschoolers. 

Here's where I'm going with this. The Bible says this in Proverbs 22:6 Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.  The more a parent can instill the ways a child should go from an early age, the less likely our society is to be filled with people like we have now, so uninformed/misinformed/ignorant(sometimes willfully so), they can't make decent decisions in areas of great importance. Nobody knows a child better than that child's own parents. Each child can be brought along at a pace suited for that specific child. Most public schools teach to the mushy middle. The kids who could excel are held back and the kids who need a lot of personal help are left behind. This is hurting so many children.

Not to discount everything else I've said above, but the main reason I see to take your kids out of public school is this; public schools teach things that are harmful to children. Secular humanism is now the default religion of the government school. Students are taught that the only absolute is that there is no absolute truth. Everything is gray. Nothing really matters except for how something makes them feel. This is killing our nation.   

Most public school kids, even with highly involved parents, will be fed a steady diet of secular thought and no respect will be given to a child's spiritual well being or to that same child's parents' wishes to have them brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Public school is incompatible with raising godly children. Do some godly Christian people make it out of public schools, yes. Is this the norm, most definitely not. In a study, released last year, the Pew Research Center found that 25% of people born after 1980 have no belief in God. This number is more than double the amount for any previous generation. It is no coincidence that public schools have been consistently moving toward outright hostility to those who believe in Biblical truth. 

The biggest over reach from the progressives running our government run indoctrination education systems has to be the new catch all for all things progressive and anti God: Common Core. The phrase is nebulous but it really just means a whole curriculum centered on making little progressive automatons, suitable for work in factories and service jobs. After much research, I found a piece that sums it up succinctly. 

  It’s easy to see Common Core appeals to those anal-retentive types who cannot function unless U.S. education has some sort of all-encompassing organizing principle.

But there’s more. Common Core supporters will admit that several states had better curriculum requirements than Common Core. Then they typically say it’s still better for those states to have lowered their expectations to Common Core’s level, because that way we have more curricular unity. That’s what the Fordham Institute’s Mike Petrilli told Indiana legislators when he came to our state to explain why, even though Fordham graded Indiana’s former curriculum requirements higher than Common Core, Indiana should remain a step below its previous level. One main reason was that we’d be able to use all the curriculum and lesson plans other teachers in other states were tailoring (to lower academic expectations, natch). Yay, we get to be worse than we were, but it’s okay, because now we’re the same as everyone else!

Tech companies are uber excited about Common Core because it facilitates a nationwide market for their products. Basically every other education vendor feels the same way, except those who already had nationwide markets because they accessed pockets of the population not subject to mind-numbing state regulations such as home and private schools. But the diversity of the unregulated private market far, far outstrips that of the Common Core market. There are, you know, actual niches, and education styles, and varying philosophies, rather than a flood of companies all trying to package the same product differently. The variety is one of substance, not just branding. In other words, it’s true diversity, not fake diversity.

What would you rather have: Fake freedom, where others choose your end goal and end product, but lets you decide some things about how to achieve someone else’s vision for education, which by the way has to be the same for everyone everywhere; or genuine freedom, where you both pick your goals and how to achieve them, and you’re the one responsible for the results? Whoops, that’s a trick question, moms and dads. In education, no one can pick the latter, because our overlords have already picked for us. Common Core or the door, baby.

The even greater impact for future generations is this; homeschoolers grow up with a healthy skepticism of government and a greater reliance on family and the Church. We must start to push back at big government. I see homeschooling as the primary way to remove government influence from the life of the American family. We must remove government from as many aspects of daily life as possible. When government doesn't matter, they stop being able to control us. When government doesn't matter, people will actually take care of their neighbor. When government doesn't matter, businesses will flourish.When government doesn't matter, the United States of America will be made great again(to borrow a misused phrase). Government must never be the solution. People must provide that solution or be prepared to fight a tyrannical government at a later date.

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Baltimore Burns

Baltimore is burning. Police are being targeted by gangs. Small and large businesses are being looted and burned. A major American city is being torn apart and it seems like the leadership of that city doesn't care. Baltimore's mayor shouldn't be running a hot dog stand, let alone the largest city in the state of Maryland. Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, on Sunday said, we "intended to give those who wished to destroy space to do that". Watching tonight, as Fox News' reporter Leland Vittert reported from the streets of Baltimore, I was taken aback at the abject disregard for other people that was shown by the so-called protesters. Some people he interviewed were rational and just upset with what they saw as an unjust death at the hands of police. I can understand that. What I don't understand are the thugs destroying family businesses in their own communities. 

Baltimore's problem isn't an issue of white leaders oppressing a black minority in the city of Baltimore. Baltimore is a majority black city. The whole of the elected city government is black. A majority of the police force is black. What this looks like to me is a failure of years of leftist policy with regards to society and family. It also looks to me like a failure of the education system. Some of the young people interviewed had a hard time speaking full sentences in coherent English. Baltimore has been led by leftist politicians for 48 years. The welfare state is highly also entrenched in the poor inner city of Baltimore, much like other large cities. Baltimore has also been suspected of fudging their crime stats for years, as an article in the Baltimore Spectator from 2009 shows. Many murders are shown as deaths of unspecified origins rather than suspected homicides. All of this adds up to a city run by Democrats just like any other large American city. Why do people that feel so strongly downtrodden in these cities keep electing the same types of politicians? Expecting things to change while electing the same types of leaders is the definition of insanity. 

Baltimore is a microcosm of the country as a whole. Successful parts are made to pay the price for the lack of initiative in other parts. The whole "you didn't build that" of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren. After watching high schools kids organizing part of this thuggery, I'm becoming more convinced that progressive education system is also perpetuating this feeling of victim hood and fomenting the unrest. Rather than teaching reading, writing, English and math, school children are fed a continuous diet of social justice propaganda. Children are now taught to be "Social Justice Warriors" and not to be individuals. Achievement is now seen as being "better" than the others. Sameness is now celebrated in schools. No doubt, in leftist Maryland, this is a bigger problem than in a state like Nebraska, where the common core was not adopted. We must start to turn this problem into a solution by taking back education from the leftist progressive cabal that is responsible for destroying the minds of this generation of children. 

In the meantime, encourage our leaders by making sure they know what you think. You can send a Tweet to the mayor of Baltimore and let her know what you think. Maryland governor, Larry Hogan needs to hear from you too. Let your local leaders and police know what you think. Finally, let the head of the regime in Washington, DC(38 whole miles from Baltimore) know what you think.

You can reach me on Twitter. twitter.com/bigredmatt1011