“Christians” Failing In The Classroom

jamin | August 20, 2012 | 0 Comments

Future Louisiana schoolchildren will not be able to read this cap.

Louisiana has decided to give vouchers to parents so they can decide where to send their children for school. The hope is that public schools, with their standards for education, will be routed in order to prop up private education, thus doing away with the Department of Education unless the school teaches Islam. (There is a horrible quote there at the bottom of that story, by the way.)

I understand that public schools have problems and they get worse the further South and West you go, but I don’t think this is the way to go about it. If you want a successful public school you need money, community involvement, parent involvement, limited class sizes (no more than 25 students per class, tops) and dedicated teachers – what the best-performing public schools have. Private schools are not always cracked up to what they should be. There are a lot of them that don’t adhere to any type of standards for teaching or learning. There are some schools that do nothing more than put kids in cubicles to watch movies all day. What kind of learning is that? That’s day care with video. Also, what would private businesses know about educating children? They’ll probably put them to work earlier than is legally required or conduct a live experiment on the brain through these children.

On top of that the private schools get to purchase textbooks from publishers that celebrate the development and history of the Ku Klux Klan as a political force for good, because God forbid we call White people to the carpet for their roles in messing up American history. No, we can’t have that in the South. We can only celebrate and laud White people. *epic eye roll*

Everyone has dirt.

I was educated in nothing but private schools (they were pretty cheap as private schools go: $300/month). When my parents noted that my first private school was not up to any real standards, they enrolled me in the school where I stayed until high school graduation. That was a good school for education. We had several students transfer to public schools where they became A students. Our education prepared us very well for collegiate work. Term papers? We wrote one research paper per Spring for English class in conjunction with another class (Bible or History). We had Speech and Composition classes before graduating, and my college freshman Calculus class was an utter waste of time because it was a repeat of what I had just finished in 12th grade. I easily aced all my tests.

Now, I feel that my school was very conservatively Christian and low-key racist, but I appreciate the education and am thankful for it. I remember some teachers fondly and others (teachers and students) I am glad to never have to see again on this side of glory. However, what’s proposed in Louisiana is a good setting for a future horror story. It’s like there are forces at play to try to dumb down future Americans to make them susceptible pawns in something sinister. Either that or I need to stop watching so much sci-fi.

I understand why Christians feel threatened by evolution, the stunning rise of public Atheism (yet again), and the black eye Christians are getting due to other Christians who have forgotten to live their lives in love, and those who are so far-gone politically they are nothing more than caricatures of themselves. The way to remedy this isn’t by making public education weaker with no adequate replacement for it. That is failure all around. The Bible says to study it to show yourself approved (2 Timothy 2:15). The Bible also wants you to be wise (“In all your getting, intelligence” – Proverbs 4:7b). How can you know how to study and get intelligence without having standards that help shape your mind to be intelligent?

Louisiana is on its way to replacing Washington, DC, as the dumbest state in the nation, scholastically.