Education Policy Brief Assignment

Education Policy, Home Schools, and Christian Schools

NOTES

Good morning. I'm Professor Cynthia Dunbar, School of Law and I want to talk to you a little bit about education, educational policy, and its connection with the civil government. I'm reminded of a quote by Augustine talks about when he looks back, he looks to the ancients to understand the distinctions between those things which would seem to be alike, which are really different. And the subtle difference that we've encountered today in our modern day. What I like to call socialized education policy is the compulsion at the hand of the civil government. The civil government is structured to be the sword tear of those who do evil. It is to promote good at the sanction evil. And instead has become an all-pervasive controlling entity that invades into every part of our lives. What areas that the Founding Fathers originally deemed would be separate and distinct from civil government control. One of the largest areas that they have gained control over, husband, education, educational policy, and trying to create a homogenous society. What I find interesting is that we have moved forward by the secular sacred ideology based upon Play-Doh of dualism and moved away from the Judeo Christian understanding of jurisdiction. And let me break that down for you. In layman's terminology, the Bible gives us a clear framework for where the civil government is to provide and have jurisdiction or authority. Any area that they go beyond authority is all authority is given by God, becomes raw tyrannical power. It's the viewpoint that gave the founders the insight to draw a very high barriers from the civil government going beyond into areas of our lives. They deemed inappropriate. It's the very basis for the establishment of the Bill of Rights saying that Congress shall make no laws. Because it was an understanding that the civil government only got to extend so far and that the remaining areas of jurisdiction where reserved to the states and the people, and specifically to those areas that the Bible talks about personal jurisdiction, familial jurisdiction, and ecclesiastical jurisdiction. And this may sound like big words, but basically what that means is those personal areas. The areas such as our religious liberties, where we get to worship God according to the dictates of our conscience. It's a very personal area that we have control over. The founders understood the civil government had absolutely no right to control or invade. The same thing with the millennial jurisdiction, which is simply the brights and the family. The area where the family is to control. The areas where the family is responsible before God. And when we look at that, those also protect our religious liberties. Because Madison, who was known as the father of our Constitution, is the fourth president. He basically detailed very clearly that religion is our duties owed to God. That means we have to understand jurisdictional from the Bible, what duties we owe as individuals, as families, as the corporate body of Christ. And all of those areas were deemed religious and therefore, they were outside the purview of the civil government control. We have now invaded into what we call dualism or the area of predominant secular worldview. And the bigger problem is that not only has society as a whole bought into the secular sacred divide, much of the body of Christ has bought into this ideology of secularism. What secularism does is it teaches that there's an area, a large area of our day of our life that is separate and distinct from religion or faith. And clearly this ideology is hostile to biblical worldview. The worldview that embraces the ideology and coercions. One verses 16 and 17, that all things were made by and through Christ and for His glory. So there can't be an area of our lives if we're going to adhere to a biblical worldview where it is separate and distinct from our faith. And yet that is the very ideology, the very premise they have built our modern day socialized education system upon. Let me break this down for you a little bit further. When we first started having public education as we know it today. And I actually don't even like to use the term public education because public education could be just community organized where parents and families come together and decide to establish an educational structure and delegate that authority. Biblically they have absolutely the right to do. And that was historically what we saw in our nation until the late 1800s. With a push with Horace Mann for what is now our modern day, compulsory, mandatory tax supported public, governmental education, or what I say for short, are socialized education system. So in that framework and the 1800s, they came forward with the, the premise that citizens could not be good citizens if they were not moral, that they in fact could not be moral if they were not religiously trained. And that they couldn't be trained in the teachings of the Bible if they were illiterate. This was the whole push back in the 1800s to try and get government to take over control and authority of the education system. Of course, we see how far we have come from that, that original premise. There was a bigger flaw in all of that of healing that authority over to the civil government. And we see that come forward in 1947. Some of the beginning cases dealing with our religious liberties, the no Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause. Many of them have come out of the socialized education system. And that is because this, there's an automatic tension that is going to be developed within a compulsory education system as to which type of ideology, worldview, and belief systems are going to be promulgated within the classroom. So in 1947, the landmark case of Eberson versus Board of Education, they were dealing with whether or not the government could take tax dollars and reimburse parents for their expenditures for transportation or getting their children to school. The holding itself was not egregious or to disconcerting. And so I think that kind of flew under the radar as to the impact of this case. But the dicta or the language that the judge is used in this case is very telling. Justice Jackson's descent talks about the absolute necessary presupposition that is made in order to develop the public education system as we knew it in 1947. And that is this, that there's a presumption that secular, worldly or temporal education can be separated from religious instruction or ideology. The understanding being that if in fact that premise or presupposition was not correct, then public education as a compulsory, mandatory, tax supported entity at the force of civil government authority, could not stand because it would be an affront to our First Amendment religious liberties. Of course, the justices gloss over that and assume that the presupposition is valid, that we can in fact separate out a pursuit of temporal or what they call worldly knowledge in order to later than determine what our religious beliefs or ideologies will be. Of course, this is again hostile to a true biblical worldview and does not align with our underlie Judeo-Christian tenets upon which our nation was founded. So what happened in ever since they presented the presumption clearly was never addressed. And we move forward into the 1960s with the angle case in the landmark case of Abington V-shaped. An Abington is the case where Madeline Murray O'Hare, of course, brought along with a companion case, a lawsuit to take prayer out of school. And a lot of people have talked about that historically as to the impact of education and its demise shortly thereafter. But what we see in that cases, there's also a discussion of the same principles the Jackson brought forward in his dissent in ever seen in 1947. And that is again, this, the presumption that we can separate out worldly wisdom, the pursuit of worldly wisdom from our religious beliefs and instruction and ideology. So what has happened is that parents signed over their authority, their responsibility before God, as Madison would say, our duties owed to God, being religious in nature. That they are responsible before God to train up a child in the way they should go. And instead of handing that over to the civil government to be what we would deem more of a Greek state. Parents Patriot ideology, that the government is now the parent responsible for ensuring the education of the children. Not only that, we move forward to more recent Supreme Court cases that started coming out in the seventies That started talking about the absolute need for a primary secular purpose. So what does that mean for educational policy? That everything that's presented has to have a primary secular purpose. Which again, if that is inherently by definition hostile to a Judeo-Christian belief, then everything that's presented within socialized education system now necessarily by the court. So neutrality standard has to be hostile to the Judeo-Christian tenets and beliefs. That all things are related to our faith and connected to our praise and worship of Jesus Christ. I kind of agree with Dennis Prager is assessment that when we start talking about secular or worldly wisdom, we're really talking about an oxymoron because the biblical viewpoint is that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And so for pursuing wisdom in the absence of the fear of the award, then we clearly are not pursuing wisdom. So now we're in a situation where we have force decades, bought into this faulty premise, faulty presupposition upon which socialized to socialized education is based of the secular sacred divide. And so everything that's presented within the classroom is now having to be presented with this mystical realm of neutrality. This we neither promote nor inhibit religion where we present, not proselytize, teach, and not indoctrinate, educate, not indoctrinate. This is dictated from Supreme Court cases. But the reality is that that's impossible. When I sat as an elected member of the Texas State Board of Education. And the reason that's relevant is because a lot of what's driving the educational policy is not only governmental policy, the private publishing companies who are going to be driven by the monies that they will make in order to sell, by selling their textbooks. Texas historically was the 800 pound gorilla in this policy establishment. Because basically if the publishers are looking at the jurisdictions that by the greatest number of books, that is Texas or California. California actually needs more books than Texas. But Texas ends up being the controlling force because we can actually pay for ours a lesson in economics and governmental solvency, but that's for another class. But anyway, we had a 15 member elected board that would be adopting what we know and those in education schools and understand what we call what we call the teeth, which would be the Texas Essential knowledge and skills. It's the framework of what every child is expected to know in order to gain proficiency, to be advanced. And in that development, what I saw very clearly was an every single issue that we were voting on as a governmental body. We were determining which viewpoints were acceptable. It's the heightened extreme version of viewpoint discrimination, which is a necessary evil of the government, determining what the majority opinion is going to establish for what is deemed right or wrong. Now, some people waste that will then take it out of the political system handed over to the experts. But that in and of itself is a very dangerous thing as we know, whenever we give over the principles of what is deemed right or wrong to those who are classified the experts, then we can homogenize the society towards a belief system based on simply those people that we are saying have the requisite knowledge, those beliefs and ideologies many times and that being hostile to opposing beliefs and principles. This is the very thing that our founding fathers were trying to avoid. When I was on the board, I ended up doing an interview with Norwegian international radio. And they were talking about the education policy being a political, being political in nature. And said, we don't do this here in Norway. We, it's foreign to us. We don't understand it. We have our appointed expert to determine all the policy of what the children will learn throughout their years of primary and secondary education. And I just explained to them, yes, I understand it's political and it can become very volatile at times. In America, we believe, to have a select group of people sitting in their ivory towers telling everyone what they have to believe is what leads to things like the Third Reich. Because you do see that when people come into control in a dictatorial type governmental setting, the quickest and fastest way to get there is to control the ideologies and beliefs prevalent within society. And that is why we had our first amendment, not only religious liberties, freedom of speech, and all of that was to allow for dissenting viewpoints without getting into problems of being tried for tyranny or seditious liable. So now what we have is a problem where we have governmental policy being directed that's mandated to be secular, which is automatically hostile, hostile. And let me break it down for you even to a greater extent. Even if a child is being taken to a school where the teachers are predominantly Christian and they're not going to be overtly saying anything within the classroom that would necessarily come across is confronting or combative to their faith. The problem is the very structure now, because the government has established it. And the standard of a primary secular purpose is that five days a week. Seven hours a day. Every single month for nine months out of the year, the students are being dropped off with the Understood, known or given that this is the part of your day that is secular or irrelevant for mere faith or your belief in God. It's only that part of your day where you're pursuing knowledge and wisdom, your career, and this large section of your life that has no correlation or connection to your faith? It's no, it's not surprising that we now have students going through that framework for 13 years of their life coming out, going on to college and all of a sudden questioning their whole basic understanding of their belief system, Bible, and God as they know him to be. Because that framework has been methodically attacked over the course of the years and it's a necessary thing. What's the government gets involved in the homogenizing and beliefs in order to not promote one religious ideology over another. We know in fact that this was not something that would be deemed healthy in terms of religious freedoms. When you think back to Jefferson's morning and admonition that to compel a man to furnish monies for opinions which he does not believe will be sinful and tyrannical. And that is what we have when we have a socialized public education system where the government is now at the force of the sword, commanding everyone to pay in there their dollars to make sure that the public system is funded, even if their beliefs are what are being taught there are contrary to their religious convictions. Now, where does that put us? Well, what are the solutions? How do we deal with this? Especially now when we have the federal government through the unconstitutional Department of Education coming at, what's going to be taught through Common Core Curriculum, which is about 85 percent of classroom instruction. Well, we need to have is we need to have a resurgence of parents taking back the authority and the responsibility to guide and direct the education of their children. And there's a whole debate as to what that should look like in terms of vouchers or parental rights. In terms of parental rights, school choice is the first mode and directive to help us make meaningful advancements within educational policy. If the parents will realize that their children's education ultimately is their responsibility and that they will make wise choices as to the delegation. If we can get tax exemptions through public policy. Where now it's not a tax voucher where the government's handing out money, where they still have the strings attached for regulation. But where it's an exemption if you're providing an alternative, which would be an alternative such as private education or homeschool in education, where the government is no longer having to pay for educating your children, but you're taking that responsibility on for your own. And thereby the government's giving you an exemption from having to pay into that normal socialized pool, then that is one thing that would make us have meaningful efforts towards reclaiming the authority of the parent to educate their child, and also hopefully begin to strip away monopoly that is now known as a socialized public education system.