Attention was recently brought to a biology assignment for ninth graders just outside of Detroit where the kids were given the task of trying to figure out the parentage of a child who was conceived in less than ideal circumstances.
“The 9th grade biology worksheet sent home with students this week featured questions about a mother trying to determine the identity of her baby’s father. Possible answers included: the cable guy, the mailman, the cab driver, the bartender and the guy at the club…. A parent sent the incomplete assignment back with the note: “We teach our children not to sleep around.”
http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2014/02/12/whos-the-daddy-homework-assignment-prompts-parent-complaint/
And the State wants to review MY curriculum to make sure my kids’ standards of learning are sufficient. What a joke. I suppose we should be happy they weren’t using the Punnett squares to try to figure out the probability of having a girl vs. a boy to decide whether or not to opt for a sex selection abortion, but I digress.
This is one way deviant behavior is normalized and reinforced by the culture. If kids accept premises like these just to get through this one assignment to get the grade, what does that do to their thought process and their spirituality? It teaches them that it’s okay to compromise their values for material gain. It’s a spiritual death by a thousand cuts. After they have vaulted over that line in the sand “just a little bit” hundreds of times, they will arrive at adulthood with a somewhat pliable concept of what it means to be a moral agent. How can we presume to expect them to be willing to give their lives for Christ if THIS has been what they have practiced their entire academic lives? How can we teach them moral relativism in the small things, and then expect that they will give up everything- their comfort, their status, their very lives for Christ?
News flash to the parents in the news story: Your kids are in public school. They are likely being taught 40-60 hours a week to disregard you as an authority figure in exchange for acceptance from their friends and the power that they gain from pleasing their teachers. Do you really think that the 15 hours a week you get with them (when they aren’t doing homework, hanging out with friends, texting friends, online, or participating in school related activities) and their Wednesday night youth group/mandatory Sunday morning is going to move the needle as far as your influence on their spiritual growth goes? When you spend a majority of your time swimming in the sewage, hopping out from time to time might get you clean momentarily, but it won’t keep you from swallowing and ingesting large amounts of garbage. It also normalizes the sewage to where you are more comfortable wallowing in the filth. You do your children a disservice if you think this is an effective model to raise Christian children.
I am not bashing parents who have no other option but to have their kids in public school due to economic hardship or logistical considerations that make homeschooling or Christian school impossible. I pray for you and all the good Christian teachers who have chosen a vocation that means they do spiritual battle of Sisyphian proportions every day to try to build a hedge around all of the kids they encounter. I am looking at you, parents who delude yourselves into believing it’s not that bad. It’s that bad and worse. Don’t expect to teach your kids that it’s okay to compromise your values if it means you get to go to school dances, participate in sports where you can share the same mascot as the Old Man did, or be a cheerleader like Mom was. Homeschool groups and Christian schools have replicated some of these things, but it would be different than what you grew up with, and you want your kid to be “normal”.
The trends that are normative today have a very dark trajectory. Statistically “normal” kids today are spending a vast majority of their waking hours away from their parents. They are accessing porn virtually by age ten, which will eventually give them an encyclopedic knowledge of sex that would make a 20th Century prostitute blush. They will have at least one sexually transmitted infection by the time they are in college. They have no problem cheating on homework. They won’t be interested in marriage or children, but if they are, the chance of them having one spouse that doesn’t have children with someone else is highly unlikely. They think they can be spiritual and moral without religion.
Those of us with “abnormal” children have kids that have the confidence and educational foundation to independently study topics “just because” that interest them in the way doctorate students attack their chosen field. Abnormal children have an acute sense of right and wrong, based on the education they receive 40-60 hours a week that infuses Christian principles seamlessly into every school lesson, instead of “baby Daddy” questions. Even if my kid picks up a less-than-desirable friend from one of his extracurricular activities (oh, you know the ones), they are only spending approximately 15 hours in the week around them at most, and are securely anchored with their majority time in the values of our faith and our home. These weirdos are given autonomy to spend extra hours in their day pursuing art, music, sports, or engineering, and that’s what they want to do. They spend huge amounts of time happily with people who are all ages (not just within nine months of their own birthday or grade), of varying ability, gender, financial strata, and social position. They also tend to volunteer hours of their time in their community, not out of compulsion, but desire. Their faith infuses all that they do.
We are taught in Matthew 7 that the narrow gate leads to paradise, and the wide path that is traveled by many (normal?) people leads to destruction. Don’t be afraid to allow your children (or yourself) to be abnormal, if it is to the glory of God. May my children always be weirdos!
Contumacia 