Education

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Education is evangelization—always and forever...

In response to this post, one FB reader asked, "Can you elaborate on the transition in the middle of this article?"

I responded: Thanks for the question... I say the battle for freedom in raising our children is almost the only battle worth fighting because commanding our children to do righteousness and keep the way of the Lord is at least half of obedience to the Great Commission. We talk about evangelism and being missional and overseas missionaries and witnessing and such-like because it's much more glamorous than the hard work of fatherhood and motherhood. We can claim we're doing random acts of kindness and being unselfish when we give our time or money to foreign missions while giving our time or money to raising up a godly seed is said to be entirely selfish. 

But taking a wild guess, I'd say...


Lighthouse Christian Academy: a press release...

Here's the press release Lighthouse Christian Academy issued this morning in response to the Huffington Post's faith-shaming of Christians. 1 


The good father; Lighthouse Christian Academy and the education of our children...

Yesterday, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos appeared before a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee where she was hounded by Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.).

Rep. Clark trotted out the case of Lighthouse Christian Academy here in Bloomington 1 which states publicly on its website their Christian commitment to honoring God by teaching the sinfulness of "homosexual or bisexual activity or any form of sexual immorality (Romans 1:21-27; I Corinthians 6:9-20)" as well as the practicing of "alternate gender identity or any other identity or behavior that violates God’s ordained distinctions between the two sexes, male and female (Genesis 1:26-27; Deuteronomy 22:5)." 2

Knowing no one was going to defend God or this policy...


Pining for Christendom...

NYT's David Brooks is so very precious about buggery. My friend Mark Albrecht forwarded a link to Brooks's latest piece dissing Rod Dreher's exquisitely titled "The Benedict Option" while flattering Dreher for writing the most important book on religion in ten years. He points out twice in his three-minute read that he disagrees with Dreher's opposition to buggery.

Noted.

Noted again.

Dreher thinks the inspiration for his book's title is the sixth century founder of the Benedictine monastic order who wrote...


Education is always religious...

This just posted by son Joseph at the Christ Church Cincy blog:

When we see people harming themselves, we normally split into two groups. Some of us think they must be dumb. The rest of us think they simply haven't been educated enough. Whichever camp you fall into, you tend to think the same way about all self-destructive behavior. Quick, what does a drug addict need? What does a man need who has a miserable home-life because he works too much? What does the man who can't hold a job down because he's always drunk need? What do Africans who are sleeping around and getting AIDS need? If you are a liberal, you probably think they each need "education" of some sort. If you are a conservative, you probably think they each just need to stop it!

What liberals often overlook is this: Many people who have been well educated about the terrible consequences of certain behaviors still end up behaving in those ways. What conservatives overlook is how many of the people trapped in these situations really have tried to quit. And what both groups overlook is the fact that much of the time, those engaged in these behaviors actually want to continue doing them, knowing full well what the consequences are.

Let's take a closer look at education...


Is there a Christian ghetto in our future...

This is a talk given by ruling elder Ken Patrick at a conference held this past Saturday at his church, Trinity Presbyterian Church (PCA), in Ludlow, Kentucky. Titled "Maintaining a Christian Witness in an Increasingly Pagan Culture," the conference's other speakers were Trinity's pastor Chuck Hickey and an attorney from the Alliance Defending Freedom, Jeff Shafer. I attended the conference with my son, Joseph, and his fellow pastor Paul Belcher (both serving Christ Church in Cincinnati). Hope you find this talk as wise and helpful as Joseph, Paul, and I did.

* * *

Maintaining a Christian Witness in an Increasingly Pagan Culture

by Ken Patrick

Before we begin, let me talk about my qualifications to divine the future: I’m not a prophet; I don’t have a “word from the Lord” in the sense that I’m about to share any divinely sourced revelation with you; God didn’t appear to me in a dream.

What I’m going to share are simply observations on what may come to pass if current trends continue, and what I would do if I were in charge. If you find yourself disagreeing with what I say, hopefully you’ll stay until I’m finished. We’ll have a Q&A session where you can ask a question, and of course you can pigeon-hole me afterward.

So, to answer my own question right up front—is there a Christian ghetto in our future?—I think the most likely answer is “of course, yes” at least in an intellectual sense and perhaps in a real, physical way as well. I think it’s very possible that we’ll see both. Before I begin describing what these Christian “ghetto” scenarios might look like, let’s establish why many of us think...


Lessons from China: "the government must be the big brother..."

Beijing lawyer Zhang Kai was arrested August 25, 2015. Zhang had been giving legal counsel to churches in Wenzhou where pastors had been arrested for opposing a systematic campaign by government officials to relegate churches' crosses from the peaks of their roofs to interior courtyards and other places hidden from the public eye.

Here's the noteworthy quote from the World article:

Yang recalled officials explaining to him that the church and the government were competing for the role of “elder brother” in society: “There can only be one big brother. The government must be the big brother.”

This is precisely the issue in these United States, also. I have no desire to aid the White House campaign of Donald Trump by saying this, but the intolerant liberalism of the West is just as authoritarian as the intolerant Communism of China. The issues are different, but the dictatorial aspirations are the same. Washington's central committees will not stop... 


Rachel Miller's malice against Pastor Doug Wilson...

[Note added by TB on May 25, 2016: Here's how Rachel Miller's feminist supporters have just summarized Son Joseph's blog post below: "the Bayly Blog post that accused Rachel Miller of countless sins — albeit without evidence." Well, read on for the non-evidence.]

When Rachel Miller took over the Aquila Report, longtime readers noted a decline in the site's Biblical commitments. Ms. Miller pushed the edge of the doctrinal envelope in a number of places, yet it was possible to think it was simply her attempt to liven up the site.

But then there was sex. This is the place where Satan is focussing his attack on God's law today, and it became apparent that Ms. Miller's editorial leadership was most toxic here. She showed her feminism on the Aquila Report, but Ms. Miller kept the worst parts of her sexual rebellion for publication on her own website titled A Daughter of the Reformation.

Feminists who want to hold onto conservative Christian credentials claim they submit to their husbands at home, in private. Occasionally they trot their husbands out online to testify to their submissiveness at home. But in their online attacks on men, these women take no prisoners. You can see it on all the Reformed sites: women condemn pastors and elders without a hint of modesty or shame.

No one suffers from these attacks more than Pastor Doug Wilson. Some of their attacks are focussed on...


Trump, Russ Moore, and white Southern Baptists...

The Donald is a repulsive figure, personally. But don't blow off his supporters by supposing they vote for The Donald because of his three wives, his hair, or his seemingly conscienceless lying. There's something deeper going on here. The New Yorker gets it:

Trump also grasped what Republican élites are still struggling to fathom... The base of the Party, the middle-aged white working class, has suffered at least as much as any demographic group because of globalization, low-wage immigrant labor, and free trade. Trump sensed the rage that flared from this pain and made it the fuel of his campaign.

...When he vows to “make America great again,” he is talking about and to white America, especially the less well off. The ugliness of the pitch will drive some more moderate and perhaps more affluent Republicans to sit out the fall election...

Reformed believers are ground zero of the "more affluent" and we're not known for our sympathy for poor white trash.. They're not a popular cause among the elite. But look at Bernie Sanders:

The Democratic Party has a strange relationship with the white working class. Bernie Sanders speaks to and for it—not as being white but as being economically victimized. He kept his campaign alive last week, in Indiana, in large part by beating Clinton nearly two to one among whites without a college degree.

As I keep saying to friends and family, no matter how repulsive we find The Donald... 


To help those with dyslexia, take this test...

Taking a survey on SurveyMonkey to help Dyslexic Advantage with the diagnosis of dyslexics just now (those with and without dyslexia are needed), I had to smile at this question:

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Where is Governor Pence's Universal School Choice law...

Here's a National Review piece on Nevada's new Universal School Choice law just signed this week by Governor Brian Sandoval. This is our nation's first real strike against the universal monopoly over the education of our children the National Education Association has had through each state's public school system.

Why hasn't Governor Pence seeded to our Indiana legislature a similar act of simple justice? Why should Christians have to pay for the education of our children twice—first when we pay our real estate taxes, income taxes, and even sales taxes; then second, when we pay the tuition for the private schools we start and run in order to keep our children out of the hands of the products of Indiana University's School of Education (widely referred to here in Bloomington as the "School of Propaganda").

Here's an excerpt from NRO describing Nevada's new law...


Why IU students call the School of Education the School of Propaganda...

In seminary, the education classes were even worse than the preaching classes so I haven't been shocked over the past two decades to hear IU students talk about how awful classes are in the Indiana University School of Education. It's not been uncommon for them to refer to it as the "IU School of Propaganda." Don't get me started on education because my thoughts on Christian, home, and state schooling would be sure to stir up a hornet's nest.

Anyhow, here's an interesting article on the sort of chic-radical trash that stupid educators make required reading for students trying hard to become the next generation of stupid educators. The book is Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Brazilian Paulo Freire, and according to Sol Stern over at City Journal, Freire's book is mandatory reading in the New York Teaching Fellows program which "provides an alternate route to state certification for about 1,700 new teachers annually." Stern continues...

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Michael Farris misses the mark...

Homeschoolers can be a fractious bunch, so it's a wonder to behold how Homeschool Legal Defense Association's Michael Farris has been able to unify homeschoolers in supporting his work. For years now, he's spoken for homeschoolers as Tim Keller speaks for the Presbyterian Church in America and Bill Clinton speaks for the Democratic Party.

It's noteworthy, then, what Farris recently declared concerning manhood and womanhood in the wake of the fall of his fellow homeschool leaders, Doug Phillips and Bill Gothard. Posted to the HSLDA website, Farris starts by saying he doesn't intend to condemn Phillips and Gothard's sexual sins, but rather their teaching. It's a curious way to begin, but maybe his tack makes sense when you consider that Phillips and Gothard's teaching has been the same for many, many, years whereas their sexual sin is the new revelation hitting Farris now. You know, it takes him a while to decide what he thinks about things, so helped by the scandal surrounding their sexual sin, he's finally been able to come to an understanding concerning their teaching. You get my point?

Back around 1980, our Dad confronted Bill Gothard publicly in the pages of Eternity magazine. He wrote a column exposing Bill Gothard's teaching on authority and he took Gothard to task for his tolerance of sexual sin at Gothard's headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois. Which is to say Gothard's failures are very, very old. So why didn't Michael Farris condemn Bill Gothard for his bad teaching many years ago?

Because men who want...


UW-Madison's ninny-nannies...

Did you know "alma mater" means "nursing mother"? My own alma maters include tooo many schools, but I must mention University of Wisconsin (Madison).

It was UW-Madison that gifted Donna Shalala to President Clinton's cabinet where she served alongside It-Takes-a-Village Hillary Clinton and It-Takes-Tanks-and-Napalm Janet Reno. Before leaving for D.C., Shalala was UW-Madison's chancellor and, during her tenure there, she channelled her maternal instinct by passing a speech control policy so safe that English profs were left with three books still allowed on their reading lists: Pat the Bunny, Velveteen Rabbit, and Love You Forever. Under the heading "Unprotected Expressive Behavior Subject to Discipline," Shalala threatened verbal bullies and gesticulators thusly...

A faculty or academic staff member's expressive behavior in an instructional setting may be the basis for discipline if ...the behavior is commonly considered by persons of a particular gender, race, cultural background, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or handicap to be demeaning to members of that group, and ...the conduct makes the instructional setting hostile or intimidating, or demeaning to members of the group of average sensibilities.

Shalala declared her come-to-mommy-and-let-me-kiss-your-owie rules would be enforced in both "instructional" and "noninstructional settings." UW-Madison employees were left with precious few places to exercise the freedoms granted by our Bill of Rights. Since the adoption of Shalala's rules in the late eighties, Madison's speech police have been filing charges, collecting evidence and witnesses, holding trials, making pronouncements of guilt, carrying out censures, and implementing disciplinary actions. 

Still today UW-Madison profs are trying to repeal Shalala's schoolmarmish hate-speech rules, but it hardly matters since President Obama is busy remaking all of America into a "safe place." Speaking of which, UW-Madison is at it again. Earlier this year administrators and faculty adopted policies requiring profs to become even more sensitive. The new policy statement was introduced with...


Whose children are they: a modest proposal for Governor Pence...

Before he died twelve years ago, my brother Nathan was furious over the refusal of our United States Immigration and Naturalization Service to grant political asylum to Chinese couples who, if they returned to their homeland, would be forced to murder their unborn children. Those who have followed the one-child policy of China's Communist dictators implemented in 1978 know such horrors are commonplace. One friend of mine who's an academic at another university got a phone call from a former student in China whose wife had become pregnant. China's apparatchiks were going to murder their unborn child, so my friend arranged for the man to...


On children's preparation for manhood and womanhood...

Fascinating article on children's play forwarded by my daughter, Michal. There's almost nothing here that caused me to cringe or disagree. I'd simply like to point out that it may be better to think of much of children's play as simply little men and women practising for manhood and womanhood.


On the links with a Sabbath stick...

Son Joseph writes: Despite the interesting titles, I know I can't just dump four links on you, so I've included teaser quotes...

Last week Deadspin ran six sentences and a picture under the headline “Philip Rivers Is An Intense Weirdo.” The final two sentences about the San Diego Charger quarterback were blunt: "And he’s also about to have his seventh kid. There are going to be eight people with Rivers DNA running around this world."
Ah yes. How “intensely weird” it is for an NFL player to be having...

Homeschooling, church discipline, and the education of our children...

[NOTE: The man who, along with his wife, does an excellent job homeschooling  as I've observed for fifteen years called and said I'm largely wrong in what I've written here, so I stand half-corrected. Still, I'm not sure how I'd rewrite this given his criticisms so I'll leave the post up with this warning. Likely much of what I write here applies as much to Christian schooling and public schooling as home schooling, and the dangers I warn of are more a product of our times than a particular form of home schooling. That being said, no matter how you school your children, please listen to my concerns and take them to heart in the education of your precious children.]

Mary Lee and I put several of our children in public schools at various times, and we also homeschooled one son for three years. Most of our children's schooling, though, was done in Christian schools and this is the educational method we believe best for most parents and children—particularly boys who are becoming men. After years of watching homeschoolers in our churches and the broader Christian (and alternative) world, starting no later than Junior High School we think most boys do much better being taught by men than women. Especially their mothers. 

Even if the local Christian school option does not have male teachers, though, one of the reasons we have come to believe in Christian schooling's superiority to homeschooling is the lack of respect for authority we've seen to be endemic within homeschooling families....


Athanasius College begins classes this fall...

As I've written before, Clearnote Fellowship has founded Athanasius College and this coming fall our first students will start classes. The program and teachers are excellent and we invite inquiries from men and women who see the benefit of going through college or university in a community with a good Reformed church that has a vital ministry on the campus of Indiana University and deep integration of undergrad and grad students in our family life.

Central to the vision of Athanasius is cross-registration at Indiana University...


Why is there no ADHD in France...

Sons want structure and authority. They rebel against parents who don't provide them. And do I really have to say that by "structure and authority" I'm not talking about haranguing, berating, demeaning, or beating our sons? Abuse destroys structure and authority.