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A Christian Exodus from Public Schools?

The secular culture so powerful that it often neutralizes the distinctive faith of students
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A reader sends in this Cal Thomas column saying that the day is coming, and in some places is here, when orthodox Christians will have to Benedict-Option their children out of public schools to protect them from propagandizing and the Joy of Caitlyn Thought. Excerpts:

My high school colors were green and white. At graduation the boys wore green robes and the girls wore white. No one considered the girls inferior because of the color of their robes.

Today, we live in different times. My alma mater, Walter Johnson High School in Montgomery County, Md., is one of several schools to have decided that their commencement ceremony this year will feature single-color robes to respect transgender students and those who do not identify as either male or female. In the age of Caitlyn Jenner, any effort to classify the sexes is becoming increasingly difficult, if not downright impossible.

The Washington Post reports “student advocates” have been campaigning for this, claiming the use of one color for boys and another for girls does not allow for the full panoply of “gender identity” increasingly on display in the marketplace of the bizarre.

More:

Washington, D.C., radio talk show host Chris Plante spoke about this on his program recently. Callers told stories of what their children have experienced in Montgomery County public schools. One man said his eighth-grader was shocked to hear from a male classmate that he is now identifying as a female. His son didn’t know how to respond. The caller said he didn’t know what to do.

Plante, who is from a Catholic background, said, “Send him to Catholic school if you can afford it.” How can anyone not afford it when the secular authorities appear to be brainwashing the next generation into believing that any choice is valid and should be universally accepted, and that anything one might say in opposition to these new sensibilities is labeled sexist or racist?

Catholic, evangelical and other private schools — even home-schooling — are the best educational options for families who adhere to traditional values.

Whole thing here. Someone told me not long ago that Fairfax County public schools are teaching “gender fluidity” is normal and right. I thought this must surely be some kind of crazy right-wing rumor, so I looked it up. Sure enough, it’s true. Comments La Mitrailleuse:

If the residents of Fairfax want to beguile their children with having boys and girls piss next to each other, then that’s their prerogative. I am, if anything, a proponent of local governance. Some school board officials note that compliance with Title IX – the civil rights bill outlawing discrimination nationwide, including gender identity – guarantees federal dollars for schools. If they don’t comply, they don’t get the dinero. Yet the $42 million the Fairfax school system receives from D.C. is only 1.7% of its annual budget. Fiscal arguments matter, but not this one.

The real reason behind the push to de-gender bathrooms is deeper than nickels and dimes. This is about changing cultural perceptions. The aim isn’t ending bullying of gay or transgendered students. That would be a respectable goal. Instead, the warriors for LGBTTQ…whatever….are interested in changing our very conception of truth in existence. This really is a war for our minds (paging Alex Jones!).

Orwell, intentionally or unintentionally, taught us that language and history matter when it comes to shaping the future. That’s why transgender supporters put so much focus on pronouns. If our liberal gender-defiers can vanquish sexual distinctions from our vocabulary, then we can kiss the traditional binary goodbye. Everything about the human person will be malleable. And when everything is alterable and fluid, then there is no grounding for understanding our place in the world.

This brings to mind a 2007 essay on homeschooling, written by Sally Thomas and published in First Things. Here’s how it begins:

By withdrawing from the larger culture, homeschoolers aid and abet the culture’s failings—or so, at least, the charge goes. Christians have a responsibility to be not “of the world,” but, we are told, they also have a responsibility to be “in the world.” And therefore it’s our duty to send our children to public school. After all, Jesus calls us to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world, and how can we possibly be those things if we stay at home all day?

According to this logic, we are called not only to witness, via our children, to a diverse population of people but also somehow to salvage public education itself, as if this would right everything that’s out of whack in our society. To decline to do so is, in this view, both personally selfish and culturally destructive.

Though at this stage in my life I have a hard time understanding why I should feel a greater sense of responsibility to a government institution than I do to my children, I must confess that it has not always been so. Our oldest daughter spent four years in an English working-class neighborhood school, where she was conspicuous not only for being American but also for having parents who were actually married to each other and actually both the parents of all children in our home. Aside from the Bangladeshi Muslims who comprised roughly a third of the school population, ours was the only family with any discernable religious orientation whatsoever.

As such, we did feel responsible for the well-being of that school. The education on offer wasn’t brilliant—“random topics” seemed to be the general theme of the National Curriculum as taught at this particular school—but, as we told ourselves, it was OK. We could supplement at home. And meanwhile our daughter was receiving a valuable cultural education, right?

This is what we told ourselves even in the face of, for instance, the sex-education program we encountered in Year Four, the English equivalent of third grade. We were the only parents who asked to preview the materials; when we discovered, among other things, that they included an animated video sequence of teddy bears having fairly graphic sex, we exercised our right to opt out, and took the children to the British Museum that day instead, for cultural education on a different level, for once.

Random topics we could deal with. Animated teddy bears boinking we could avoid, at least in the short run. I suppose we could have gone on indefinitely telling ourselves that all this was OK—not great, but OK—if our daughter had been happy and thriving. But she wasn’t. Over time, most of her close friends moved to other primary schools with better test scores. The remaining school population was, as the English say, rougher. The overall atmosphere became rougher.

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The idea of sending a child daily into a hostile environment—if not actively hostile, as in bullying, then certainly philosophically hostile—expecting him not only to withstand assaults on everything his parents have told him is true but also to transform the entire system by his presence, seems sadly misguided to me. There may be many valid arguments for sending a child to school, but that one doesn’t wash.

In the Sermon on the Mount, in addition to the salt-and-light business, Jesus also tells the multitude, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” A child’s greatest treasure, to my mind, is his childhood itself. He has only one, and it’s over quickly enough. If we as parents invest that treasure in sex education that makes us cringe, history we know to be a lie, and busy work we recognize as meaningless, we should perhaps not be too surprised if at the end of the day these things, and not the things which are above, have claimed our children’s hearts.

If this sounds hyperbolic, consider the responses of students in an evangelical college here, in a class taught by one of my husband’s friends, who decided to poll the students on their views of Christian sexual morality. He was taken aback, to put it mildly, to discover that the sole moral conviction held by an overwhelming majority was that it was wrong for Christians to judge other people’s behaviors. “Sex is just a bodily function anyway,” one student said. Bear in mind that these students were self-described Christians, from Christian homes, who had chosen their college for its Christian environment. Somehow, in all their years of formation, they seemed to have missed the fairly crucial lesson that Christianity establishes clear guidelines regarding sex. That Christians should regard those guidelines as neither repressive nor even negotiable was right off the radar.

If, as a correspondent of mine has suggested, Christians are impotent in engaging with secular culture, perhaps the problem is not that too many of us have withdrawn from it but that too many have surrendered our cultural distinctiveness. If we urge our children to integrate into the secular mainstream, and it turns out instead that the secular mainstream is integrated into them, then what we end up with is, well, what we largely have: a generation that believes that Christianity is only about not being judgmental.

I strongly urge you to read the whole thing. I would not say that Catholic or other Christian schools are necessarily any better. Remember what the New Jersey Catholic school tried to do to Patricia Jannuzzi? It all depends on the particular school and its ethos. Point is, orthodox Christian parents who have resisted the urge to homeschool or to put their kids into religious schools had better start rethinking the viability of that strategy right now. As Mitrailleuse says, “Fairfax is just the beginning.”

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