Homeschool News & Views

issue 66, April 12, 2008

from Homeschool Helpers

in association with Pass It On Ministries

by Dan L. White

Listen to this article.

There is a culture war going on, and young people are at the center of that spiritual battle. I have often said that kids are damaged more by the public school culture than they are by public school classes.

This week some girl cheerleaders beat another girl unconscious. They gave her a concussion, damaged the vision in one eye, and caused permanent loss of hearing in one ear.

A sheriff in Florida said that six girls ganged up on a classmate, slammed her head into a wall and beat on her for 30 minutes. The girl never fought back at all, even though the cheerleaders urged her to. The attackers recorded the beating on video, so they could upload it to the internet for other young people to enjoy. This beating was supposed to be revenge for some postings the victim had made on the internet.

After the attackers were arrested, the video was uploaded on the net and was broadcast on TV all week. I hope you didn’t watch it.

Law enforcement officials said the most shocking thing was not the beating, but the fact that the attackers showed no remorse at all. An official said, “When we had them arrested and in detention, they were laughing and joking, “Guess we’re not going to the beach on this spring break.” And one girl asked, “Am I going to be released in time to go to cheerleading practice tomorrow?”

The victim’s father was interviewed on network TV. He was asked why he thought such a thing had happened. He immediately replied that the problem was that God had been taken out of the schools.

That father was very correct, but he was still primarily to blame for what happened to his daughter. The schools are guilty, but ultimately the responsibility for the well being of children rests with their parents. The parents can’t really blame the schools, because it is the parents who decide to put their kids into those Godless schools -- like this man -- fully knowing they are Godless.

Apparently that father does believe in God. Obviously he has given some consideration to the court decisions that radically changed the public schools. He chose, however, to place his daughter in a culture that he disapproved. Now his daughter has suffered permanent damage, both physically and mentally.

All kids who go to the public schools suffer damage, compared to what they could be if they were given a Christ based education. The public school culture wears them down. Most are not physically beaten as this girl was, but all are beaten down by that same type of peer pressure.

So now public school cheerleaders have become street fighters. I will indulge myself here and recall my favorite cheerleader when I was in high school. Her name was Mary Jane, we called her Janie, she had bright blue eyes, freckles, and wavy dark hair. Her favorite cheer was “Hey, you all, get that ball!” and as far as I know she never beat anybody up.

Just so we don’t think that this beating incident was a total exception, at about the same time in Florida a 14 year old girl was beaten up -- at school -- by two older girls. This attack took place in a school cafeteria, and about 75 kids enjoyed watching the action. None of the spectators tried to step in to stop the attack. That’s part of peer pressure training – don’t ever stand up to stop evil or to help somebody or they’ll get you.

Actually, the crowd of students cheered the attackers on. A couple of school employees managed to wrestle through the pack of students and stop the attack.

Christian parents say they send their kids to the public schools to be a Christian witness, to be salt and light. That leads to this question: of those 75 kids watching the 14 year old girl get clobbered by two older girls, were any of them from Christian homes? Surely there were. It is almost statistically impossible for that not to be the case.

For those kids from so-called Christian parents – where was their witness during this beating? Where did the salt and light go?

The light went out and the salt went down the drain. That’s the way it usually is. The evangelization takes place the other way.

The 14 year old girl was punched several times in the face and was taken away in a wheelchair. The attacking older girls said they beat her up because they thought she had informed the police about an underage drinking party they were at, which is also part of the school culture. The 14 year old had not done that, but the beating couldn’t be undone. Maybe the older girls said they were sorry?

How can young people be expected to flourish in such a culture? At most they just try to survive.

Let’s look at an example of another educational culture.

One summer a homeschool dad assigned his 16 year old twin sons a reading program which included a range of subjects from physics to globalization to biographies. His sons were growing up, wanted to serve God and others, and didn’t know exactly how.

As they read about things people had done, the twins concluded that teens today have low expectations. They decided that their service to God and others would be to tell teens to rebel against those low expectations.

I will add that low expectations are part and parcel of the factory school system with its mob mentality peer pressure. Just like with the fight in that high school cafeteria, anybody who sticks his head up will get knocked down. Everybody expects everybody to do nothing good.

These homeschool boys, grads now, are Alex and Brent Harris, brothers of Josh Harris, who wrote the well known book, I Kissed Dating Goodbye. Alex and Brent call their ministry the Rebelution, urging teens to go beyond the low standards which are expected of them today. They have a web site and have written a book titled Do Hard Things.

They maintain that the teen years should be the launching pad of life. In former times, teens did shoulder much responsibility in their families. My dad went to work full time cutting timber off the West Virginia mountains when he was 15, to help feed the rest of the family. The great irony is that although he only finished eighth grade, he learned more than most of today’s high school graduates. Plus he learned responsibility and how to give to others.

Today the educational system has removed teens from real life, while they “get an education” in the inefficient factory school system. The Harris brothers say that the teen years are now viewed as a vacation from responsibility. Teens turned from being contributors to society to being only consumers.

I think that’s a profound point. The reality is that teens today are expected to hang out, dress weird, be cool and get into trouble. I mean, that’s what we automatically expect teens to do. All around the country we have Project Graduation, to keep teens from killing themselves as they celebrate finishing their education. Instead of learning responsibility, they learn irresponsibility. That is what has come from the factory school culture.

In one school culture we have teens rebelling against everything good, where even girls are now street fighters. In the other school culture we have teens rebelling against the low standards of today, so they can better serve God and others. That is the contrast between the public school culture and the Christian homeschool culture, between the street fighting cheerleaders and the Rebelution. Quite a contrast, isn’t it?