RESPONSIBILITY FOR CHILDREN

In the average American family a large portion of the waking hours of the child is spent in a public, state-supported and controlled school. In fact the child may have ridden to that school on a public school bus, been taught by teachers licensed and paid by the state and eaten a lunch or drunk milk provided in part from public funds. It is generally accepted that it is the task of the government to require and to provide for the education of the children. It is becoming increasingly popular to consider it the work of the state also to provide for the physical care and nourishment of the school children. Even children in Africa study under American teachers provided through our taxpayer’s money, and benefit from the provision of American milk for their lunches. They are being taught through our official propoganda that it is the work of the state to aid all children.

Some Amish parents in Iowa considered it to be their duty to educate their own children in their own school in accordance with their own ideas of the importance of the Christian religion as the foundation of that education. They learned recently after much persecution, imprisonment and fines that their children were not really their own but the property of the state. Since their schools did not meet the educational reauirements of the state, they were put under coercion to educate their children in accordance with the ideals and standards of the secular state.

Those, like the Amish in Iowa, who prefer to educate their children according to their own standards and ideals, disregarding government regulations, are a small minority and their resistance to the police power of the state makes the headlines. Many others are content to permit the secular state, which forbids prayer and Bible reading and excludes God from its teaching, to educate their children. While this education excludes God and Christianity from its teaching, it is nevertheless a religious education. The religion which it has substituted for Christianity, however, is often the secular religion of Humanism which replaces God by man.

An increasing number of people, recognizing the secular nature of the religion taught in the public schools, have sought to establish private Christian schools for the education of their children. Some of these people of various religious faiths, Roman Catholic, Protestant, and others, have banded together in an organization to seek federal government aid for their private and church-related schools. They consider it the right of the state to require and to support education but not its right to restrict that support to state schools. A conservative Protestant magazine pleads for state aid to church-related schools. This paper reports that 40 professors of an outstanding Christian colloge have joined this movement to “gain a fair share of taxes for all independent school children.” These sincere people fail to recognize that government subsidy means government control which is almost certain to extend also to the control of the content of the education. How can a Christian school teach the need of limited government as originally provided by our Constitution, oppose the secularism of public education, and at the same time lobby for state funds to finance its education? There can be little true educational freedom under state support and the consequent control.

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