I read an interesting article by J. Michael Smith, President of the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), on the Association’s website that describes the situation with our schools becoming “full-service” very well. It said the following:

“Alex Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh at the time of America’s birth, wrote a warning to America in 1787. He observed that the average age of the world’s greatest civilizations was about 200 years, during which they inevitably progressed through the following sequence:
From bondage to faith,
from faith to courage,
from courage to liberty,
from liberty to abundance,
from abundance to complacency,
from complacency to apathy,
from apathy to dependence, and
from dependence back to bondage.”

When the HSLDA began in 1983, homeschooling was illegal in most states, but after a long struggle it is now legal in all states. However, in the beginning some parents risked everything, including losing their own children, to take complete responsibility for their education by removing them from public schools.

In last week’s article, I suggested that one way to defeat the “full-service” school system is for Christians to take their children out of the public school system in favor of home schooling or Christian schools.

Like the homeschooling movement, there is some risk involved should churches begin to open private Christian schools on a massive scale.

It is not at all far-fetched that this could happen. Just last summer the Southern Baptists considered the issue of asking all of their membership to pull their children out of the public schools and to either home school them or place them in Christian schools. Part of the reason that it did not pass is that there just aren’t enough Christian schools to absorb millions of children.

This should have been a wake-up call to the liberals who are pushing the full-school movement, but apparently it has had little or no affect. For the most part, the public schools are still moving forward into the “full-service” program.

However, if all of our churches would make a concerted effort to supply those schools, I think that most Christian parents (and many who aren’t Christian) would be willing to pay the additional costs in order to get their children back into a safe and real learning environment. The resulting mass exodus from our public schools would have a devastating affect on public school operations, which would result in one of two situations.

The first one would be that even the threat of the loss of federal funds would be enough to cause school boards to reject the “full-service” concept. The other one would be that private Christian schools would eventually be made illegal in order to protect public schools.

The ultimate question for Christians is for them to decide what is best for their children, to send them to place where they are emotionally, spiritually, and physically safer, where they will get a great education free of socialistic indoctrination, or to send them to public schools which are evolving into socialist institutions.

Some argue that removing our children from public schools would also remove what little Christian influence there is left. However, in my opinion, few children or teen-agers are equipped to serve as missionaries in this kind of environment.

If Christians exerted their considerable influence on the schools to force them to abandon their destructive social programs, we might just reclaim them. But if we do not care, if we place our own needs above those of our children’s, if we sacrifice our children’s education to liberal institutions, we have little hope for recovering our public schools.

I should clarify that I am not anti-public schools. I am a product of public schools, and my mother attended first through eighth grade in a one-room country schoolhouse, where she got an education that in many respects was better than my own. I would like to see the public school system restored to be a real educational system.

So where are we in Alex Tyler’s chronology? We’ve gone from complacency to apathy over the past 40 years, and we are now going from apathy to dependency. What follows that, none of us wants.