Friday, May 25, 2018

Time to boycott public schools? A FREE offer from American Vision - by Dr. Joel McDurmon


In light of the tragedy of a school shooting in Houston, TX, on Friday, May 18, 2018, homeschool groups and leaders are reporting a spike in requests for information on home schooling. I have advocated the immediate withdrawal of Christians from public schools for my entire public career, and well before. The recent spike of interest is certainly welcome, and I would like to add that there are even greater reasons and further encouragement to homeschool than the recent tragedy.
I’d like to help you make this decision, and I’d like to help you get started homeschooling your children. That’s why I’ve prepared a free download for you, which I’ll share in just a second.
It is unfortunate that it takes a tragedy to spark our interest in what was once the commonsense, default position for Christians. This history is often left out of our American history lessons: with very few exceptions, there were no public schools in America until after 1830; and yet, we educated our children to the same standards of literacy as London or anywhere else. The early Christians who founded this nation home educated their children with the support of their churches and fellow believers and communities. They not only did so just fine, thank you very much, they did so in a way that quite frankly often exceeded the standards of today.
In fact, a list of famous homeschooled Americans would baffle the average American today. Yes, we today would probably cite Tim Tebow. Yay! Touchdown for homeschoolers, right?! Yes. But add to that notch on your belt these others: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, William Penn, Patrick Henry, Daniel Webster, John Jay, John Marshall, George Washington Carver, Booker T. Washington, Susan B. Anthony, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Eli Whitney, Orville and Wilbur Wright, and countless more. You get the picture.
And probably in most of these countless cases, the mother and father were not trained educators themselves. They did not have degrees in early childhood development, secondary education, or English lit. In short, it was people just like you who homeschooled the majority of America’s greatest leaders, heroes, and personalities. There is no reason you cannot do this successfully, too, and still have children who are active and engaged in social activities, sports, civic responsibility, and more, maybe even the next president or Supreme Court justice.
Did you know that in the late 1830, public schools were invented to replace the influence of the churches and Bible? Did you know they were created by socialist liberals to take the children of conservative Christians and turn them against the faith and into socialist liberals over time, and at the expense of the parents? It’s all true, unfortunately.
I’ll let you decide if they have succeeded or not. From my perspective, when the young men start dressing in trench coats wearing communist regalia and calling themselves “Marxist,” then march in a shoot up a school, I’d say the socialists have succeeded enough to end the whole experiment.
Yet too many today have no better answer than to blame the guns and the rights of law-abiding citizens. This time, however, it wasn’t the media’s favorite scapegoat, the AR-15 “assault weapon.” It was a simple old-fashioned shotgun and a .38-special revolver—two of the commonest guns there are. Are they going to move to ban these now? Are these really the problem?
I’d say the guns are not the problem. The schools are a big part of the problem. The only common denominator in every school shooting so far is that every single one was in a liberal-paradise “gun free zone.” But neither do I advocate making public schools into armed zones. Christian children need Christian education, and the best, safest, and most productive way of doing that is homeschooling.
The question, “Why would you send your child to be a sitting duck in a gun-free zone?” cannot be more bone-chilling in this day, but it should not be any more bone-chilling to the Christian parent than the question, “Why would you send your child to be a sitting duck in a Christ-free zone?” Yet Christians do both anyway, every day. Perhaps an even more difficult question to answer is, “What will it take to wake you up?”
For some, the answer to that question is, “A school shooting in your own back yard.” Even Rush Limbaugh got this one right. When a former Obama administration official, Arne Duncan, piped up saying we should boycott schools until we can tighten gun control laws, Limbaugh rightly retorted, “Hey, Mr. Duncan, you may not know this, but parents started doing that a long time ago. It’s called homeschooling. And more and more parents are boycotting the public school system each and every week in this country. These eggheads are so, so far behind things.”
I fully agree. We need to be better informed on these matters. It is not enough to do the right thing only finally in reaction to some tragedy. The truth is, we have avoiding doing the right thing for the right reasons for far too long. Every Christian ought to have their kids out of public schools immediately on principle. All that is required in most cases is a lifestyle change on our part, and perhaps a little initiative and encouragement. What are we waiting for?
For this reason, I have decided to give away, for free, an important and relevant part of one of my most popular books, Restoring American One County at a Time. Chapter 1, “On Education,” is now available as a FREE download. Please take advantage of this free offer. It will help you make one of the most important decisions for your children that you have ever made.
In this booklet, I discuss reasons to homeschool, the biblical and historical mandates behind it, some reasons secular progressives created public schools to begin with, the alternative secular religion they professed explicitly for this reason, and the later reasons public schools grew to be the norm—so much so that we don’t even question it anymore, to our tragic loss. We’re just immersed in a culture of government-run schooling and we don’t even realize why it’s not right. Finally, I discuss real, practical steps you can take to get involved in home educating your children, and I’ll lend you plenty of encouragement along the way.
Please take advantage of this free offer from American Vision. Visit our store for more resources on education and for home educators, and feel free to write, message, or email us any question or comments you may have. We’d love to help you restore Christian education one child, one family, one home at a time.