Our Schools are Killing our Children – Part I

1. The Takeover of our Schools

The Littleton, Colorado, school shooting affair has provided yet another place exposing the unraveling threads of our civilization.

The world has never been a “safe” place to live. At any point in history, there have been nearby threats to life and limb, and even more, to our spirits. There are persons abroad in any society who despise truth except as a tool for their own ends, who have no use for righteousness, and who are not lovers of souls other than their own. And they do very poorly even at loving themselves because their behavior is heading them pell-mell for self-destruction, the cosmic junk heap, hell.

Truth-righteousness-love is the three-strand plumbline by which God measures, and by which we must measure, our spiritual lives. Yet these three qualities are not of interest to a substantial (but often indeterminate) segment of the human population — which makes them enemies of God, and enemies of the common good. If you are not interested in truth, righteousness, and/or love, you are an enemy of the common good, of the Kingdom of Heaven, and of the King.

We have had in America, arguably, for a country this large, until recently the safest and therefore the freest place to live in the world at any time in human history. Safety and freedom go together. The less the safety (i.e. the more the sin), the more external control there must be on our behavior. Only a moral society can be a free society. Our founding fathers universally recognized that fact, and built our constitution on that principle.

A moral society is a self-governing society, a society which has a commonly accepted set of values by which it rules itself — independently of coercive interference by civil government.  In a free society, there is a clear distinction between society and civil government, the government being limited primarily to the role of protector, referee, and servant of society.

One of the most easily recognizable symbols of this relative freedom and safety in America has been our school system. Parents by the droves have sent their children off to school day by day, secure in the thought that their children were in safe hands.

For the first time in American history, that is no longer true. Beginning in the 1960’s, and then escalating in the 1970’s, parents began more and more taking their children out of our so-called “public” education system (which is now neither public nor education), and either home schooling them or sending them to independent schools. Something like 10% of American children receive home schooling today.

Their concerns were chiefly intellectual and spiritual. They saw that government-controlled schools were not in fact educating their children. Perhaps a few foresaw the violence to come. But the violence was inevitable — as if scripted into the school curriculum.

William Coulson (who with Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, engineered the entry of “non-directive” methods from therapy into education), along with Maslow, saw the disaster the team had created, and has since the 1970’s been telling people to stop using their non-directive techniques.

He visited a school in New York City shortly after a woman had been beaten and raped by a gang of teens who had gone “wilding” in Central Park. He told the teachers that they (using his own non-directive methods) were training their students to go wilding. They, of course, did not believe him. Non-directiveness teaches students to have no authority other than their own feelings. If it feels good to beat and rape, then that is sufficient justification. Whether or not intended by the teachers, that would inevitably be the effect. And so it has been.

About 1991, during a sermon in a church near Pittsburgh, I commented that “Our schools are killing our children…” I had outlined the nature of Outcomes Based Education and the mind-control methodology of our government-controlled schools, and the predictable violent results of non-directive education. Later, I thought my statement was a bit strong.

But it was not strong at all, it was too little and too late.

Eric Harris, co-assassin with Dylan Klebold at Littleton, had written: “My belief is that if I say something, it goes. I am the law…. Feel no remorse, no sense of shame.” Or as a song has it: “There is no right or wrong, only boring and fun.”

That is the culmination of the non-directive “self-esteem” training which we have been force-feeding our children for nearly three decades. Eric and his friend were simply putting into practice precisely what the Supreme Court had told us in Casey that every woman possesses — the right to self-determination subject to no outside control, the right to invent one’s own meaning of life (i.e. morality) including the right to kill her child at will.

There is a direct line from those Supreme Court abortion decisions of the last 50 years to student murders in our schools. Our schools are killing our children, and our courts are mandating the philosophy of life which justifies such horror.

What, then, pray tell, is the difference between what Klebold and Harris did and what the abortionist does? The abortionist gets paid. The boys just did it for fun. The boys were amateurs, the abortionist is a professional.

Eric Harris was not a bad student. As Coulson predicted, he learned very well. The problem was that he did not have sufficient moral backbone or sufficient reality contact to live above the teachings which he was absorbing. He did what he was told. Each of us in the human race has a spoiled brat within — which would like to believe just what Eric wrote. But most of us have sufficient control over the brat in us to hold it in check. The two boys said to the brat, “Go for the gusto!”

We can be very grateful that most of the students have enough backbone and reality contact to live above the philosophy of life to which they are being subjected in government-run schools.  They have enough common sense to mostly ignore it.  But not completely, only mostly.

2. Why Did They Done It?

Mrs. Katzenjammer (in the Katzenjammer Kids cartoon of the 1940’s) in exasperation used to ask that question of her rambunctious kids. We are asking it today of our murderous kids. Vy did they done it???  Mrs. K showed no obvious awareness of the fallen nature of her kids, nor do very many of today’s commentators and questioners. They do not know vy they done it. Attempts to psychologise on it are inane and empty.

A Washington Times weekly headline (4/26) notes that “Schools lack moral center: Experts”. Like we needed experts to tell us what government education has been mandating. The tragic fact is that many still do not get it. Apart from the law and grace of God, there is no way to understand vy they done it. Still less to do anything substantial about it.

The Washington Times of April 23 echoed a theme commonly heard after each of the recent school shootings:

Nothing in their lives seemed to indicate that their sons, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, would soon be responsible for the deadliest school shooting in U.S. history, say friends and neighbors.

And then in the 4/26 Times weekly edition:

Until their sons launched a bloody rampage on Columbine High School…, both the Harris and Klebold families appeared to be living their versions of the American dream.

Are we to believe that these “normal” parents, living their version of the “American Dream”, were unable to discern any trouble in their children? It turns out that Dylan Klebold had already been in trouble with the law, and that both boys were a part of the “Trench Coat Mafia”, a paramilitary “Gothic” group. Yet even in view of the many earlier teen-on-teen killings, these boys were not being closely enough watched, and there was great surprise when they engaged in such violence.

Why did they done it??? From God’s point of view, the question is moronic. He has told us vy we do such things. St. Paul repeated the warning yet again in Romans 1:18 ff. In three stages. We begin by subverting truth. Then we fall into worshipping the creation rather than the Creator. And thirdly, bereft of truth, and cast into a false dependency and obedience relationships (idolatry), we are inevitably ensnared into irrational, compulsive, addictive, …and lethal behaviors.

St. Paul thus gives a common sense analysis of the logic of being a creature — and hence a dependent being. If you are a dependent being, you had better find Someone dependable, on whom to rest the weight of your dependency. All other ground is sinking sand. Sin all begins with a choice which in some way subverts truth.

Eric himself was kind enough to tell us vy they done it — because they wanted to. We have trouble accepting the reality of freewill. We want to psychologise everything so we can control it. We do not want to deal with the fact that we choose to enter the covenant God is offering, or, as taught by our government, to be our own sovereign.

3. Discernment

But the American public cannot discern good science from the arrant nonsense paraded to justify homosexual behavior. The American public cannot discern that killing babies in the womb is evil.  Taking the life of another person without cause or due process is socially acceptable in America. That is appalling. The American public is persuaded that truth, especially moral and religious truth, is a relative matter.

So why should we expect citizens and parents with such an incapacitated mindset to discern perverted and violent behavior beneath the surface of their children’s psyches? We are today the people of whom Scripture speaks — eyes to see but cannot see, and ears to hear but cannot hear. We are spiritually blind and deaf.  And dumb.

Government-controlled schools have pounded into the heads of parents that they, the parents, are defective raisers of their own children, that they need the expertise of the experts, and that the experts have decreed — the children know best.

So only the bravest parents will risk public, and possibly legal, censure by peering too closely into the thinking and lifestyle of their offspring. Or by saying “no” and making it stick.

“Oh, that trenchcoat Mafia stuff… That was just a game. Why take it so seriously?” Like Dungeons and Dragons, which is no doubt “just a game” for many children, the trenchcoat Mafia was an evil game celebrating darkness. Games which celebrate darkness blur the line between good and evil, and thus provide cover under which stealth thoughts of murder and violence sneak under the radar of naive, unobserving, and spiritually blind parents. And so they have.

In the same weekly edition of the Washington Times, retired Army Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a former West Point psychology professor, says:

“Anywhere television appears, 15 years later, the murder rate doubles. …television is the single most pervasive influence in the lives of children in America. They spend more time watching TV than any other single act….”

Not in our house, they didn’t.

4. Why They Done It…

We have lost the capacity as a people to discern good from evil, and that fatal flaw has reached right into our civil law and our courts, into our schools and our churches, and right down into our child-raising. Although the reasons are quite evident, we really do not know vy they done it. To repeat what I have said many times before….

They done it because their culture and their parents have told them that self-centeredness is “IN”, and self-discipline and self-giving are “OUT”. That message was signed and sealed in 1962 (Engle v. Vitale) by our Supreme Court which told the God of the Universe that He could not talk to our children in government-controlled schools, nor the children to Him.

We have now for 37 years, by coercive force of law, taught our children that God (the only being who can obligate us to do anything at all) is irrelevant to growing up. Where is the surprise when they take our words to their logical conclusions?

Then in 1973 (Roe v. Wade), our treasonous Court declared that it was legal to trash the lives of our unborn children for any reason or no reason at all — so long as it made the mother feel good. And finally in the 1990’s (Casey), the Court admitted and proclaimed the very foundation of it all — that we each have an inalienable right to invent our own meaning of life, to define our own right and wrong, and that we are thus responsible to no one outside of ourselves.

The Court did not mean that, of course. We all understood that, although we are no longer under obligation to God, we do remain under the strictest obligation to the Court. They would be quiet incensed to hear that we thought otherwise. The Court has taken what God defines as sin and made it into the highest good. It has turned self-will and rebellion against God into the law of the land — and made itself into God.

If that is not an overthrow of our Constitutional order, what act of treason needs to be added to make it so? Some of us believe William Clinton to have sold America out to the Chinese Communists. But what is that along side of our Court selling America out to Satan?

In all my reading of history, I do not know of a single culture in which the parents allowed the teachers of their children to tell the children that they, the children, knew more than their parents. And where in the world has there been a culture in which school children thought it would be fun to mount lethal attacks on their classmates? And not only thought it, but did it?

And whose voices are being heard most vocally in Littleton to return to prayer? According to one report, the children!  Where are their parents? the clergy?  No doubt busy psychologising rather than repenting of their betrayal of God and of our children. Why are the parents leaving any of their children in government-run schools? If parents, fathers especially, will not begin to take charge again of their own lives and of their own families, our increasingly lethal and outlaw government will continue to do it for them — and produce more children made in their own outlaw image.

Our children are paying a terrible price for this betrayal and for our own cowardliness — and there is more to come.

The womb is today (yes, literally and statistically) the most dangerous place in the world for a child to be. Nearly one third of the population in the womb will die a brutal death at the request of the mother. The world, the flesh, and the devil, using the Court and the education system, with the mealy-mouthed compliance of the legislatures and churches, have turned American public schools into perhaps the second most dangerous place for a child to be.

5. Silencing the Dream

Were Eric and Dylan and their families part of the mainstream American dream? It depends on which dream you think is the “American” one.

If you choose the American dream of the first colonists of the early 1600’s, or the American dream of the founding fathers two centuries later, one has to conclude that Eric and Dylan were enemies of that dream, and that their parents were at best woefully ignorant, if not enemies, of it.

The (yes, imperfect and incomplete) dream of the first and founding Americans was of truth, righteousness, and love, and of a constitutional order in which public discussion of the basic religious issues of life would be guaranteed. It was of a culture which understood itself to be both personally and corporately responsible before God. It was of a government which knew itself to be under a law higher than itself, under the law and grace of God.

But the American dream of today is that every person ought to be allowed to live as he wishes, that self-will and self-definition are the highest values. So, God, take note. You may have created us, but You have no business directing us.  We are “non-directive” now.  So butt out.

The understanding and faith and values upon which America was founded, and upon which it became the greatest, safest, and most free nation on earth were subverted through our Government School System (the Church of Secular Materialism), and through the abysmal ignorance, cowardice, and appallingly poor strategy of those who should have been defending the ramparts of America’s Godly heritage — our politicians and clergy.

Christians were so divided among themselves, and so incapable of responding to burgeoning secular forces that we gradually gave up the fight, secluding ourselves within our church walls, finally leaving the public space to the anti-Christ forces of non-directive education.

“Non-directive” was aimed not at parents but at God. God was successfully silenced (as it were) in the public arena by silencing those whom God had called to be His witnesses. (See I Kings 18, Isaiah 40-50, Acts 1, and Rev. 12:11) That silencing could never have happened had not civil government taken control of our children — along with our own sheep-like compliance and cooperation.

The legitimate American Dream is the Godly dream, not the dream of self-centeredness unleashed to seek its own final demise. We will not recover and secure that dream until civil government is removed from all education.