Strangely in the Stranger's Land
by R.C. Sproul Jr.

How do you tell the difference between fact and opinion? I wasn't looking for an answer to that question, but I found it while examining my niece's textbook for junior high English. I was informed that opinions use words like "should" or "ought". I was tempted to write the textbook authors and let them know that we know their idea here is opinion because it is not fact. The fact is that there are all kinds of facts which contain the words should or ought. God, who doesn't deal in opinions, wrote ten such statements at Mt. Sinai. You can tell my niece was at a Christian school. Had it been a government school you can bet they would have concluded that there are no facts, only opinions, and that's a fact.

The great majority of evangelical parents (eighty percent in 1989) are of the opinion that it's fine to send their children to government schools. After all, facts are facts, and 2+2= 4 for pagan and believer alike. Most seem to believe the schools are neutral on matters of opinion (like say, God's existence, God's significance, God's creation, God's law) but that we mostly agree on matters of fact, the things that really matter, like that in 1492 Columbus (that racist scourge of noble savages and tool of the military-industrial complex) sailed the ocean blue (which is now brown because of Exxon and will soon be vapor for the ozone hole). Sure we cringe when we hear about condom distribution, and new age learning techniques, but our school is a good one, lots of believing teachers, such parents reason.

The problem is two-fold. The first is that government schools aren't teaching facts, they teach that there are no facts. By banishing He who is the truth from the classroom they have no foundation of truth, and celebrate the "unbearable lightness of being." Like all who stumble over the Rock they have, in Francis Schaeffer's words, "Both feet planted firmly in mid-air."

More importantly, they are not "our" schools. I call them government schools not to be cute, but to unmask the lie. A public phone is one anyone can use. A public beach is one open to the public. "Public" schools, however, are government centers for training children in the dogma of the state, financed by money stolen from the citizens, usually rents paid on government property. (If you think you actually own your property try not paying the "rent" of property taxes. Or try to put up a building on your property. The landlord will show up in no time equipped with handcuffs for you and an auctioneer's gavel for "your" land.)

Their agenda, or rather their credenda, the beliefs that they want passed on to your children are rarely on the surface. Doug Wilson writes in Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, "It is a mistake to assume that the unbiblical nature of the curriculum must be overt before Christians oppose it. If we come to understand that a man's life is unified in his theology, whatever that theology is, then we will not be surprised to see that what he affirms in one area surfaces in another. (C.S.) Lewis describes the power of the textbook writers, which, 'depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is doing his English prep and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they have put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all."

All of life is theological. And the school system of Babylon inculcates in children the theology of Babylon, however Babel like it might be. We cannot cry to the Lord, "How can we sing your song in this strange land?" when we have voluntarily moved there. To be sure there are hard cases, places with no Christian schools, and real financial hardships. But of the eighty percent of evangelicals with children at Leviathan P. S. #666, only a very small percentage are in such dire straits. And hard cases make for bad law. Most either don't care that their children are handed over to Moloch, or refuse to see it. Most will do anything to ensure that no one sees little Johnny or Susie as strange. Some actually send their children out to the training ground for missionaries of the state as "missionaries of the gospel." Most such children end up boiled in a pot while the pagans dance in preparation of the feast. Strange indeed.