Todd Graves writes at Real Clear Education that parents are pretty unhappy with their public schools while many parents who send their children to Christian or Catholic schools tend to be happier with their choice.
He writes:
“Among last year’s other lessons, none may be more important than this: Our taxpayer-funded education establishment cares more about adults than children.
Consider the evidence: public school union bosses pressured officials to close schools and keep them shuttered beyond what medical authorities recommended. In spite of the obvious harm to children of school closures, unions throughout the country lobbed threats and issued demands. In Chicago, the union went so far as to sue the Mayor to keep schools closed; in San Francisco, the city had to sue its school board.
A public education system that failed to do right by our children has kept union bosses empowered and politicians cowed. Thankfully, our country offers an alternative—one that proved its mettle this past year. In a recent survey of public school and Christian school parents, the Herzog Foundation found that parents of children who attended a Christian school were vastly more satisfied with their school experience.
Christian parents reported their schools were open even as nearby public options closed. While only 8 percent of public school parents could report that their schools never closed, a quarter of Christian school parents did.
The survey found that during the pandemic, Christian school parents found it easier to manage their child’s time, communicate with teachers, manage their child’s assignments, and were better able to keep up their child’s morale than the parents of children in public schools. As a result, while just over half of public school parents reported being satisfied with their child’s education in 2020, fully 80 percent of Christian school parents were.
As the country gears up for another possible series of lockdowns in response to the delta variant, it is worthwhile for parents on the fence about Christian education to give it a second look. The data is unmistakable: In a panicked, trying year, Christian school parents and their children fared far better than their public school counterparts.
The data offers us hope on several fronts. Parents across the country are expressing growing anxiety about the teaching of “critical race theory” in classrooms. In this survey, 70 percent of all parents do not believe their school should teach that “white people are inherently privileged and Black people and others are oppressed.”
Moreover, 80 percent of all parents do not think that their school should teach that achieving racial justice requires discriminating against white people. In other words, while America’s parents may disagree on a great deal, they are united in the belief that many of the central tenets of critical race theory should not be in the classroom—whether that classroom is funded privately or publicly.”
Back to me: I’ve often wondered why so many parents raise their children into the faith only to send them to schools and colleges whose focus is undermining their children’s faith for the low low price of all your life’s savings.
I just don’t get it. There are many schools that I’ve made very clear to my children are off the table. Their was one private Catholic high school near us that our pastor joked that he would lay himself down in the driveway to prevent us from driving our children there. (He was joking but not joking.) Educating our children is a huge responsibility. What our children learn becomes the prism through which they view the world. We should be careful about what is being put into their head.
I’ve often heard it said that Christians will win the culture war simply by having more children. That is a lie. Christians may have more children but as long as we send our children to anti-Christian institutions we are simply enrolling them into the army of the woke.
Educating our children is an obligation we should take seriously. The souls of our children depend on it.
HT TheoPolitics
