Our family watched the forum that Saddleback motivational speaker Rick Warren hosted with the presidential candidates last weekend. Warren said something that caught my interest at one point, as he was asking his questions:

“We’re 19th in the world in education, and yet we’re 1st in incarcerations.”

That statement reminded me, public school is about to start up again in our area. We don’t have any crops to harvest here in the middle of Anchorage, so we don’t take summers off from homeschooling. We go with a ten-weeks-on, two-weeks-off schedule year-round. That seems to offer us a lot more flexibility, and provides more learning time for our children.

What stood out to me about that statement from Rick Warren was the secular math equation that was hidden inside it:

Young person + Education = Moral adult

Here’s another version of it that we see all the time:

Incarcerated person + Education = Moral person who won’t go back to jail

The only problem is, neither one of those is a true equation. Education in and of itself does not create a moral being. Yet that is exactly what Warren and the rest of the non-Christians in our society believe about education. We continue spending phenomenal amounts of money on the public education system in America, and yet it’s not producing the result of their little math equation.

How is it possible that the Virginia Tech shooter could do what he did? He was taking high-level poetry and English classes! If the education equals salvation mantra were true, he would have no logical reason to kill dozens of his classmates. Likewise, providing criminals with an education so they can learn a trade, has little impact on recidivism rates.

One thing that the public schools are most assuredly not teaching children in America is a system of ethics that can be utilized to make them discern right from wrong, good from evil. In fact, they’re taught the opposite, that we must NOT judge between one thing and another. That would be judgmental, and that is something that our postmodern age cannot abide.

Something that is definitely not taught in the classroom, nor are public school students taught how to apply it, is the moral law contained in the inerrant, infallible, Holy Word of the Bible. The sum of human behavior, and ethics, and the how-to of how to love your neighbor, is available in the Ten Commandments. Yet that is the subject that is absolutely taboo in the classroom. Some public school teachers go so far as to call it child abuse when you teach your children about what’s in the Bible.

So as professing Christians cart their children off to the public schools this week, our prayer is that you will consider several things. One is the freedom that home schooling your children provides. Freedom from the state, freedom from the errors of the dogmatic scientific community which rules the education system, freedom to teach your children while using the Bible as your central text. Christ is, after all, the starting point for all knowledge.

We would also pray that you would think about this equation:

Young person + Education ≠ Salvation