By John Parcher
Christian News, May 14, 2000
Now our children are supposed to be the latest oppressed minority in dire need of liberation.
Since the ‘60s, children along with women are considered to be victims of patriarchy and an “ideology of control.”
Popular authors like John Holt, and famous like Hillary Clinton, say the government should free children from the “captivity” of parents and schools.
Today’s child development experts and family life counselors agree: Parents are to be bystanders in the lives of their children.
It’s the old philosophy of Jean Rousseau, widely hailed as a pioneer in the areas of human rights and child development.
Rousseau said the children are inherently good, and society is evil.
This explains why only 7 percent of education professors think teachers should impact knowledge, while 92 percent believe “students should learn on their own.”
This is also a whole lot easier than teaching English grammar, square roots and the location of Montana on a map.
And you see traces of this theory in the phony curriculum offerings, such as, “discovery learning” and “thinking strategies.”
Moses would probably be cited today for a “hate crime because he said “the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.”
And charges of child abuse filed against the one who said: “He that spareth the rod hateth his son, but he that loveth him chasteneth him.”
“Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it”?!?
Such an attempt to mold the character of a child, or transmit values, is considered a misuse of power by the strong against the weak.
Most sane people know the difference between a spanking and a beating; between discipline and child abuse.
Rousseau, by the way, drew income from one woman and his connections from another.
That, while living unmarried with “a dull and unattractive servant girl” who bore him five children.
Then he crept through the streets of Paris by night to abandon his offspring, one by one, on the doorsteps of a foundling hospital.
If that qualifies a man as a “pioneer” in child development, well, you can have it.
Give me any day the humbling, and yet ennobling and inspiring teachings of the Bible.
Those in the Wisconsin Synod know that district presidents rarely, if ever, fail to run for reelection and rarely, if ever, receive a call. Janke was just called out of the district almost at the same time he decided not to run for reelection (Johnson's Creek, WI). Two highly improbable events. Hmm?
March 9, 2008 9:59 PM