Brainwashing our Kids

Are your children being brainwashed? I hope you understand that there are faceless entities working hard to influence your children towards their worldview, while undermining the worldview that you or your church are trying to model.

While schools have been part of American culture from our earliest days, compulsory education is a fairly new concept. It was during the Progressive Era that Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson pushed hard to take children out of the home where they worked alongside their parents (receiving both book knowledge and job knowledge), and putting them into government run schools. While the idea seems natural to those of us who grew up going to school, the "progressive" idea was really quite sneaky. Wilson, a noted racist, tipped his hand when he said, "Our problem is not merely to help the students to adjust themselves to world life...[but] to make them as unlike their fathers as we can."

Wilson was a Protestant (admittedly not the member we pride ourselves on), and he feared that the immigrant children, who were largely Catholic, would be bad for the country. Along with Roosevelt, Wilson understood that a forced public school would be the perfect place to take children away from their parents and brainwash them according to their Protestant, Manifest Destiny ways. The more students were at school instead of with "their fathers," the more their world views could be shaped by the government.

(This is not an anti-public school post. I'm thankful for the teachers, administrators, and others who work hard to give kids a good education.)

We live in a different era, but there are still entities that wish to influence your kids to be unlike their fathers and mothers. It could be that professor that prides himself on outwitting his unprepared freshman, or the TV station that strategically selects their programming and advertising to influence your children, or the shows that slip in, "billions of years ago" into every episode. We cannot be so naive as to think these influences don't matter. They do.

That's why as parents (or grandparents or other relatives) we must realize that it is our job to decide who or what influences our children. It is our responsibility first and foremost, not the school's or church's, to raise them right. No one loves them more than you, and God gave them to you, so please make the most of every opportunity to guard their young minds.