But evil men and impostors will grow worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived. II Timothy 3:13 NKJV
“So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilisations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, laboured with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over — a weary, battered old brontosaurus – and became extinct,” Malcolm Muggeridge, (1985).
In a recent print newsletter, Dannah Gresh quotes a SCOTUS decision from 1979:
“The statist notion that governmental power should supersede parental authority in all cases because some parents abuse and neglect children is repugnant to American tradition.”
That the US Supreme Court felt the need to make such a statement in 1979 means that we’ve been having a custody battle of sorts over our own children at least since then.
Gresh comments: “What we are witnessing in our culture is the rise of an ideology, a mindset that actually believes teachers and other agents of the state can make better decisions for your child than you can.”
I remember a parent-conference teacher in the early 1990s when I was the parent. The teacher had required students, including my daughter, to write an essay discussing the most difficult situation they had faced.
When I asked this teacher how my daughter answered this question, she refused to tell me. That was between her and my daughter.
My minor child.
The teacher had attempted to search my child’s heart, and told me I had no right to know what she’d found.
My daughter later told me she dramatized a minor challenge. In other words, she gave the teacher an answer to satisfy the requirement, without giving up heart and soul in the process.
The nosy assignment failed to measure learning unless the purpose was to teach students to equivocate.
But there must have been a trend.
Across the street at the junior high, one of my sons felt compelled to answer a similar question because a grade was on the line. When I took my complaint to the top of the administration, that teacher apologized. No doubt she had not yet achieved tenure.
I instructed my children then as I do my own students now: You are never required to tell more than you are comfortable telling.
All schools should provide the same refuge. Parents should not be out of the loop.
For many years, some in the institution of education have felt entitled to take over the role of parent. For some years, many parents have abdicated their authority. Such coins are always two-sided.
We in the West have done all to ourselves, as Muggeridge predicted we would.
Last week, the Biden Administration appealed to the US Supreme Court to strike down state laws banning gender transition surgeries for minor children.
One federal US court has already ruled that parents may not challenge schools’ transgender policies.
In Canada, citizens no longer have to ask for assisted suicide. Medical professionals are now supposed to offer death to a wider audience of subjects. Our northern neighbor has expanded Medical Aid in Dying so much that they now face a “crisis”–a lack of “willing” doctors to provide the “service.”
There’s a push to expand the “right” to MAID to “mature minors,” those under 18.
Also last week, the United Kingdom ordered that yet another child should die from withdrawn care. Over her parents’ objections, the UK court denied Indi Gregory the chance to travel to Italy, a nation friendlier to a foreigner in need than England is to its own citizens.
Tara Isabella Burton: “Ultimately, however, [a similar, earlier] case was about who gets to decide what the best interest of a child really is. When the view of the state and the view of a child’s parents are at odds, who gets to have the final say?”
In England, the answer to that question has reared its horned head multiple times, always under the government’s premise that the “best interests” of the child must be death.
God gave parents a mandate to raise children in the way they should go. He told us to care for the weak.
Schools and government are secondary institutions to the family. Schools exist to edify. Government exists to protect. Neither is here to overrule, tear apart, destroy, or murder.
We will all, parents, educators, medical personnel, judges, stand before a sovereign Judge who will remember the harm done to the little ones entrusted to us.
Kyrie eleison. Lord, have mercy.
Photo Credit: Pexels
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