Why My Children Will Not Be Missionaries to the Public School
Guest Post with Double Duty Teacher
Once upon a time, in a not-too-far-away land, I spent lots of time in a public school classroom. My mom would push my youngest siblings in the stroller as she walked me the couple blocks to school every weekday morning. My seven-year-old self would dive right into that classroom, surrounded by chattering classmates and adventurous books.
In my mind, this is what I picture my own children would now experience should I decide to send them to public school. I would say that assumption is true for most of us — the school experience we had 20 to 30 years ago would be what our own children and grandchildren would experience today…
…Right?
Not at all.
And here’s how I know:
Any roots of Christianity and the biblical worldview are in decay in today’s Western culture.
Decay.
After my (mostly) public school experience growing up (there were a few homeschooled years there in the middle), I still spend lots of time in a public school classroom as a teacher. Now with over 15 years of teaching and learning in this environment, I am a witness to the damage done by our outsourcing our children’s education to these public institutions for over 150 years.
Current “best practice” public school practices of 2023 include:
Pass students on from one grade level to the next with no expectations of reading or math levels.
Allow teachers to talk openly about their personal beliefs, as long as those beliefs line up with Critical Race Theory, promote the LGBTQ community, and belittle conservative ideas about how to improve society.
Hang up bulletin boards that promote the above mentioned ideas.
Create “safe spaces” where gender and sexual ideology is explicitly taught . Students are able to hide their gender preferences from their parents.
Yes, these are happening. Yes, right in front of me. I’m a witness to the decay.
And the damage of each is revolutionary to our society. Passing students on from grade to grade with no expectation of reading level and math ability is creating young people who think they’ll just get paid for showing up to a job someday. Teachers and bulletin boards promoting today’s ideologies creates an endless peer pressure to believe the same thing. Students are encouraged to hide their newfound identities from their parents.
A bulletin board went up about a year ago with a big beautiful rainbow that blatantly promoted words such as “gay”, “lesbian”, and “bisexual”. These are not child appropriate words. In fact, as I was puzzling over how I would respond to any student’s question (“Teacher, what does bisexual mean?”), I asked my principal how I should respond.
Her advice?
“Tell them to go ask their parents.”
So… these words were being actively displayed in an elementary hallway and yet our own principal recognized that we the teachers should not be giving children the answers?
Now flashback to my own schooling days. As a high schooler, I did see my purpose as a missionary. It’s been a long time phrase that has rolled off our collective tongue to say that our children are missionaries in our neighborhood school. I firmly believe it used to be an appropriate outreach, especially considering that our culture still shared many norms with the biblical worldview.
But that is no longer the case.
Our culture no longer shares many (if any) cultural norms with the biblical worldview.
Our culture has now for decades slowly chipped away at any hint of Christianity in the public sphere with phrases like “follow your own heart”, “live your truth”, and “happiness is the truth”. This cultural marinade is no place for a child to try to evangelize their classmates and teacher.
Here’s the bottom line: Before a qualified missionary moves to the mission field, they have had a range of Bible training, cultural training, and language training. All that training causes lots of reflection and growth before they embark on the mission journey. The idea that our children are qualified at age 5 to walk into today’s public school environment as a missionary is really, really naïve.
My precious 5 year old cannot adequately wrap his mind around the cultural arguments that he is about to encounter when his kindergarten teacher reads a book aloud to the class about choosing their gender. While we have introduced the comparison of the world’s way versus God’s way, our 5 year old does not yet understand these concepts at a mature level.
This is where we as adults must exercise our discernment and refuse to throw our children to the wolves.
There is a huge difference between a mature adult and an immature child. A mature adult with a biblical worldview stepping into a nonbiblical atmosphere equipped to be a lantern, shining the light of truth in a variety of ways. An immature, innocent child steps into this same nonbiblical atmosphere and acts more as a sponge, absorbing the cacophony of ideas and beliefs being promoted.
Let me say that again.
As a mature adult, I can step into the public school environment and share the light of truth, but we live in times where to toss our innocent and impressionable children into a marinade of nonbiblical worldviews ultimately does not set them up for the opportunity to develop a biblical worldview.
And this, my friends, is why my children will not be missionaries to our neighborhood public school.
Until next time,
Double Duty Teacher is a public school teacher by day and a homeschool mama by night. She regularly exercises her biblical worldview muscles through extensive reading and Twitter conversations (https://twitter.com/double_teacher). You can follow her blog at www.doubledutyteaching.substack.com.