Welcome to Out of the Question, a podcast that looks behind some common questions and uncovers the question behind the question while providing real solutions for biblical world and life view. Your co-hosts are Andrea Schwartz, a teacher and mentor, and Pastor Charles Roberts. In between segments of this podcast, it is not unusual for Charles and me to exchange book suggestions with each other and or share links with examples, pro and con, of things we might like to discuss on air. Recently, he sent a number of links from a well-known female Bible teacher debating a Christian professor on the subject of public schools and their suitability for Christian families. Now, this debate took place over a year ago, and the purpose of our discussion is not to rehash all that was discussed, but what we're going to do is what we always hope to do, get behind the questions raised in order to uncover a biblical world and life perspective. But if we didn't give you a summary of the discussion that took place, then you'd have a hard time understanding exactly what are they talking about. So since Charles is the one who initiated this topic for discussion, I will let him give a brief summary. Yeah, thanks, Andrea. I never heard of this particular female teacher. but apparently she's pretty well known among women in evangelical circles who have ladies' Bible studies and things of that nature. The way I became aware of her and the issue was there's a guy with a regular video show on Rumble and a few other avenues for social media and videos. He mentioned, and this man is a very dedicated Christian, and he knows the problems with government schools and that sort of thing, but he mentioned that this woman had had this discussion and was influential in some of these circles. This particular author writes for the Gospel Coalition. which is another organization that is highly suspect in many ways in my opinion. It's sort of more of the broadly, slightly lean to the left, woke evangelical perspective on things. So anyway, I dug up this interview that the videocaster had mentioned, and as you described, it was a Gospel Coalition video. It's up on their website. It's a year old, and she was having this debate, dialogue more is a better word, between herself and this man who was a professor, I think, at some Baptist seminary or other. They're both Baptist in their background. And he homeschooled, he and his wife, and so he took sort of a slightly opposite, and I do mean slightly, perspective from her. And her perspective was, if I'm not being too summary in my assessment, that It's okay for Christians to have their kids in public schools as long as they're getting a good Christian education at home and in the church. I'm not putting my kids in public school to be missionaries, quote-unquote. She specifically addressed that issue, but that there are larger social contexts and issues concerned, the sorts of things that we've heard many times about homeschooling and its supposed limitations. As my wife and I both listened to this, we were just both shaking our heads and thinking, she really doesn't have a theological foundation of understanding this particular issue, and maybe not much else. I mean, if your starting point is that this is a neutral field, meaning government education in the public schools, then this is where you're going to end up. So I mentioned it to you, and you watched some or all of the discussion and the debate. And since then, I have done some research and tried to find a little bit about this particular woman's background. Not a lot out there that I can find, other than she's very popular and has written many women's Bible study books and that kind of thing, and has a regular column with the Gospel Coalition. That's a good summary. And again, some people say, well, why aren't you saying her name? You'll find her if you look. But she is not the purpose of this discussion. The question that we're going to discuss today is, on the subject of education, should we agree to disagree? That, should we agree to disagree, is something that we can hear in terms of politics, in terms of economics, in terms of historical perspectives, or we can even say in terms of baptism or the Lord's Supper. But really, when we ask this question, is it okay for us to say, all right, if you're doing it and you've asked God and you feel right about it, and I'm doing something different and I've asked God, then I guess what we're left with is agreeing to disagree. But Charles, none of the things I mentioned are esoteric subjects, really. You can't just relegate something to the abstract and not admit that it touches down in terms of everyday life. Yeah, and I think it would be helpful to retrace some steps that at least I have followed in previous podcasts, because we are talking about the issue of Christians and government education and the government schools. It's easy, perhaps now, in the year of our Lord, 2024, to dismiss somebody like this person and others, the common phrase today is woke or left-wing or whatever you want to call it, view about Christian children in government schools or the other big social issues that are bandied about constantly today. But this issue goes much further back in our history than 2024 or even 1999. And I've mentioned before, and this is what I mean by retracing the steps, and you and I have talked about this, that when we were in school, remind me, did you go to public school or just parochial school? I went to parochial school for 13 years. So I don't know how it was in New York, but I've mentioned before in the government schools that I attended from first through the 12th grade, especially in the first to the ninth grade, because that was all one campus, and it was a neighborhood public school. We had prayer or Bible reading over the public address system led by the principal or somebody else almost every day. When we had school assemblies, there was prayer. So it was easy to have that veneer. that this is okay, I mean, this is how it can work. But before I go any further, if I may do so, I want to share an observation that Dr. Rastuni made on that particular issue way back in the early 1960s, and this is from one of his great works in the early days of his writing called Intellectual Schizophrenia. And he has a chapter called The Kingdom of God and the School. And in this chapter, he says this. This is particularly true of basic education, which addresses itself to the mind of the child. Such education, as it has prevailed in much of the past history of education in the United States, has presupposed a predominantly rural country with no more radical divisions in the community than between Baptist and Presbyterian. The curriculum showed the impact of Christian concepts, and the Bible read each day was also the basic presupposition of all present. In other words, everybody in the school. He says such a background for basic education no longer exists. It functions in isolation in terms of the training and development of the mind of the child and with the presupposition that the liberation of man is basically an intellectual affair and that socially knowledge is power. This is an essentially religious position and its sequences are a hastening of atomization. and rootlessness. So he was pointing out the problem even back then, and that's the time frame in which I'm referring to when I was in government schools. So he gets at, in this book and the messianic character of American education, that education of a child is unavoidably a religious endeavor. But if you come from a theological perspective, as I would say a large part of the evangelical Protestant world in this country has and still does, that the issue of biblical faith and religion is something that takes place either just within your own heart or within the walls of your local church, and that outside of that, everything is more or less neutral. See, well, of course I'm going to have the public schools educate my child. They're the professionals. They know what to do. And, you know, if I need to have them say the Lord's Prayer every night before they go to bed, I can take care of whatever may happen there. And Dr. Rustuni pointed out in what I just read, there may have been a safe assumption about that at a certain point. But even, he says, in the 1960s, I think this book was published in 1961, that no longer exists. And I don't think he, well, I shouldn't say he couldn't have imagined, but I think even he would be stunned at what we see going on today in government schools. I would agree, but there's another thing that happened in the 50s and early 60s in terms of education, and that was the invitation of people who you didn't know into your house via your television. Oh, yes. anyone who wasn't getting educated in a statist school was being educated by a statist media. And there are people who will say that this is all new, that the media or Hollywood is biased. No, it is not. There's just so much that can air during the day, and someone is making that decision as to what gets on the air. So we've had a full-orbed education with young people, with older people maybe who had never gone to school, certainly with immigrants who come into the country, and the move away from people being affiliated with a church, which when you and I were growing up, it wasn't, do you go to church? It was, which church do you go to? So this matters because if you only look at it from 10 feet off the ground, it's easy to miss the blimps view or the higher-up view of saying, how did this all take place? Well, and I think that some folks, they don't ask that kind of question. Or if they do, they're going to say, well, this all took place because of that particular politician or that particular guy. They're not looking at it from a full-orbed, to quote a phrase, perspective. Now, you and I, we grew up at a time when we were still using the borrowed capital of those who had gone before us in faith in this country. So there was a little bit of that afterglow still there. Most people had a general agreement with the moral code of the Ten Commandments and generally, you know, like the old saying, you could have left your home and gone to church and left your front door unlocked and nobody would have stolen anything. because of that moral restraint. But those days are gone, and I think maybe it would be helpful for some of our listeners to think about this from the standpoint of something like a religious cult. You know, you have a background in something like that, and if you can speak to it, I don't know, but you know, one of the things is when you join a competing religion or philosophical movement, And let's just keep it in the realm of, say, I'm using the term broadly, religious cult. One of the challenges that they have is enculturating you into their worldview and into their world. And that means you must look at the world differently. You must think differently. Maybe you have to dress differently. Maybe you have to eat differently. But everything changes. You know, I can compare this to something from a philosophical standpoint, where I remember going through a phase in my younger days of being interested in agnosticism and atheism, and Bertrand Russell was one of my great heroes, so to speak. You know, because he argued you could question the existence of God and still be moral, although he personally was not all that moral, if you knew anything about him. But it was another philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, who came along and said, oh, no, no, no. If you're going to throw out the worldview that created that moral system, like the Ten Commandments, you can't still hold on to it and tell people they shouldn't kill each other, or they shouldn't commit adultery, because that's based on the moral code that you've just torpedoed. You've got to start from the ground up. So we find that there are other competing religions and worldviews that want you to move away from biblical faith and biblical Christianity. And so they are going to do some housecleaning. They're going to vacuum out anything that's left of that worldview, if there was anything there to begin with, and give you something totally different. And that's been the function of the government school system from day one. And that's been the function of the media, as you've just pointed out. And sadly, it's also the modus operandi of many churches. In other words, we'll tell you what to think. Please don't, as just one of the people in the congregation, come up and say, but what about this? What does the Bible say about that? So ultimately, to answer or begin to answer, should we agree to disagree, behind that question is, Who is the voice of authority in your life with which you will agree or disagree? And it's a big question because most people, if you ask them, would say, the Bible, God's inerrant, infallible word. And then when you start talking about specific things in the Bible, either they say, that's not true now, that was for then, or they assign a poetic or metaphorical meaning to it, which it might also additionally have. But if it said, one of Goliath's sons had six fingers and six toes on each foot, well, we wouldn't say, well, that was just a metaphor for the fact that he was very strong and he had this extra finger or this extra toe. We would say, first and foremost, that's what the Bible says he has. So if we're going to draw a picture of him, he'd have six fingers and six toes on each foot or hand. But then we could extract and say, OK, was there something more being said? But we would be recognizing the Bible as God's voice of authority. And that has sadly gone the way of, well, how do I interpret it? How do you interpret it? I remember many, many years ago, I mean decades ago, hearing along dead southern comedian i won't call his name into relevant but he was telling this joke about these two guys who who had met up somewhere and one of them was a very devout muslim and the other one wasn't and so the guy who was not the muslim said you know i'm really interested in this long what you tell me a little about it yes it i'll be glad to talk to you about my my islamic faith and so the i said well let's uh... let's go get a drink and talk it over and the guy so wait a minute muslims don't drink And the guy said, well, forget it. I'm just going to be a Christian then. I mean, you could read between there, drunkenness. I don't want to get on the subject of alcohol. But the point is, you had somebody who represented a particular religious faith, who had certain beliefs that were extremely important, and all of it was related to the central core of the belief system. I mean, think of it this way. Suppose that somebody who's a Christian, in some sense, decided to go into an area where there were absolutely no churches anywhere, but there was a significant population. And they went into that area and started a church. And the basic orientation of the church was, you can believe anything you want. You can do anything you want. Why don't you come to church here? Now, that may sound like, well, that probably could get a lot of people. But when you think about it, Not really. I mean, why would anybody want to go to a church that really doesn't have any kind of a message, any kind of framework, anything that requires anything of them? And you and I both can remember back in the days, and our listeners will forgive us if we sound like a couple of boomers, okay? We can remember the days in the sixties where everything was about freedom. I want to break out of this straight-jacketed society that my parents instituted. Kids need to be free. I mean, how many people we knew who went off and i mentioned this before i'm not trying to get on a one note here but i mean you people who were you know hippies and and they'd love the freedom and the dope and everything and the next thing you know that they've joined some super strict religious group where they got to shave their heads and dress a certain way totally opposite of what they said they wanted to do because as god designed us We gravitate toward law and toward obedience. And we are going to find that somewhere inevitably. And it's either going to be God's obedience and God's law or Satan's. And it shouldn't be such a hard sell in the church. But today it is. If you say to a person, where are your children being educated? And the person says, oh, they go to the local public school. If you criticize that and say, why would you do that? Does the Bible allow you to do that? It would be considered impolite. overly negative, that you're not supposed to judge other people. You don't know everything about why it is they do what they do. Yet on the flip side, when over the years I told people I homeschooled, they always wanted to know, do they let you do that? And I always ask them, who's the they that we're talking about? God's word says, my children were given to me, so this is what I'm doing. But they persisted in wanting to know who gave me permission. And it's still the case. I know people in various churches who homeschool, but they only sort of homeschool because they're registered with the local public charter school who gives them a regular requirement to meet with an educational specialist to evaluate what they're doing. It makes me laugh because in many churches, we will sing hymns that the church's one foundation is Jesus Christ. And we sing all these hymns promising allegiance to God, and then people go out and they give their allegiance someplace else. And I got to thinking, Is this blasphemy? Are we taking God's name in vain when we sing these hymns to him? You are my only hope. My faith alone rests on you. And then we leave the confines of the building and live like our hope really is in other things. You know, I think our position on these matters is sort of like growing into maturity. It's been this way for me. I don't know about you, maybe the same thing, where our progress and growth in faith and knowledge, it's ever-increasing clarity and understanding about, oh, this is really what it's all about. And you reach that point, and this is a good area to talk about it, where, wait a minute, you mean the Bible actually has something to say to me about where and how my children are educated? And a host of other things, but that's really a big one. Over the years, in the early days when my wife and I were homeschooling our children, I would occasionally run into other homeschoolers. Now, when we lived in New York, there's a statewide Christian homeschool organization that most of us belong to, but there were others that weren't affiliated with that. And I would occasionally run into people who were homeschooling their kids and were very dedicated to it, but not for Christian reasons. And when you ask those people, well, I just don't like all the drugs and the weirdness, and this is going back 20 years, you know, not now. So again, they had a foundation of recognizing there were certain symptoms and certain aspects to government school education that they may not have articulated this way, but it came from the groundwork of what was the worldview of the education and the drugs and the sex and all the rest of it, the delinquency or whatever, those are some of the symptoms. But they just wanted to deal with the symptoms. And then on another level, a similar thing are private Christian schools. We have a number of them here, and they may have had them in California, other parts of the country back in the day. But here in the South, there were many private schools, and some of them claiming to be Christian, that were started because they did not want to participate in any way with racial integration. And so they would form these private schools where they could control who the students were coming in. Now, I'm not passing judgment on that one way or the other. I'm just simply saying that's what they did. But the point is, Some of those schools that I'm aware of like that are still around today, and there's one in particular I can think of that is huge. It's still considered a private school, and it has the word Christian in its name, but when you look at the curriculum, it's almost identical to the government school system. And I've discovered that with people who have said, we've decided to homeschool, and there'll be a variety of reasons, but as you said, there isn't the core idea of, by doing this, I'm obeying God. If I do something else, I'm not obeying God. And one of the things this woman said, and it was so either naive or purposely distracting, when she and this other man were talking about They chose to homeschool, the professor did, and she decided that, no, they had a good school, so her kids were going to go to this good school, and she realized that not everybody had good schools in their area. But I thought of the rich young ruler saying to Jesus, I've done good things, and Jesus saying, well, how do you define good? So I would have liked to ask her, how do you define good? But then she made this statement. that and the outrageous price of sending your kid to a Christian school and her attitude was like they were price gouging. never mentioning that everybody's being stolen from in their property taxes to fund the government schools. So it's an illusion to say it's free to send your children to public school. No, it's just everybody's bearing a burden. And those people who start Christian schools or work to have their children be part of it are bearing an extra burden. They're actually paying twice. whether it's twice in terms of tuition to go to the Christian school, or twice in terms of the mom stays home and is educating the children, so there's the loss of income for her if she were out in the world, but then she buys curriculum. And the interesting part about all this is that I think the enemies of God, who are very much in favor of state education, realized if you can't beat them, join them. And so what do they do? They woo families who are gonna homeschool with, you know what? Sign up with our school and we'll give you $2,000, $3,000 worth of funds that you can go out and buy things. Well, why would they do that? Well, they would do that because if they're getting $9,000 a year for every student, I think that's what it costs in California, $9,000 per year that the state school gets, they're willing to give up a third so that they can still get two thirds. But they still have their hand on that family. They've just recognized that two thirds is better than zero. Yeah. Another way that they work that angle is through sports. A good friend of mine, a member of a church I pastored in another state, he was the headmaster of a Christian school that understands these issues and understands them very well like you and I are talking about, and they didn't participate in any of those things. people who would come to that school to enroll their children and as soon as they found out there was no soccer team, a baseball team or something like that, but they didn't play the other schools, the other private schools or public schools in the area, forget it. I mean, my son wants to major and become a soccer star or a baseball star or whatever it may be. So that's another way is, okay, well, you know, you've got a school of 600 kids and we know it's a Christian school and we see you've got a pretty good sports team, but you can't play the other teams in the school district unless you sign on with X, Y, or Z. That's another inroad that they make. And it's surprising how many either parents or even otherwise well-oriented private Christian schools and even some homeschoolers will be swayed by that because of the persuasive power of the children who may want to do it or something like that. Again, the point I was making earlier about the fact that if the church goes in the area and says you can believe what you want, the other side of that is in terms of the mission that we have been given by Christ our King, you don't accomplish world-conquering faith by just simply laying back and being like everybody else. The people who accomplish things in life, and they're going to do it either for good or for evil, they are motivated because they believe they have the absolute truth and it demands everything from you. Let me just stop here and ask you a question that crossed my mind, if you care to answer it. But when you and your husband were involved with the semi-religious group that you were in before you became a Christian, Did they have requirements in terms of how you raised your children? Well, this particular group basically said if you were part of their staff, your children lived apart from you and were educated apart from you because they had you so busy doing the work that they wanted you to do. So it wasn't conducive for family life. And I'm not sure that they didn't get their model, that probably they were more extreme, but that's currently what our society does. To just backtrack a little bit, another thing when you talked about sports, The public school allure is sports. A lot of people wouldn't go apart from it. But there's an interesting thing, at least where I live. The club teams, the teams that actually may get an athlete noticed, aren't allowed to operate during the school year season of that particular sport. So there's such a hold on it that they really block out any other opportunities. And so they're not just blocking out the opportunities of homeschoolers or other Christian schools to compete. They've basically codified it that you can't have both going at the same time. and you might get severely punished as an entity if you violate that. So they pretty much figured out what keeps people coming. Also, there's this idea of STEM now, that if a school can offer STEM, and the idea that the Christian school or the family can't, science, technology, engineering, and math. They've just made it something that, let's think about how much we've been betrayed in the last 5-10 years with STEM people who have told us what we should insert into our body and whether or not we should wear masks, etc. So this whole thing, what are you agreeing to? Just may seem like I'm taking the path of least resistance. I've heard people from other countries saying, yes, my English isn't very good, so my children will never learn English if they don't go to a school, a public school. Well, I tell them they'll learn English, but there may be some words they learn that you don't want them to know. Well, I think that's a dead giveaway, a dead given that that will happen for sure. You know, you mentioned the structure of your prior religious affiliation. I mean, and that's essentially, though, what the government schools do. And I've said this in previous podcasts when we've talked about this subject. I'm going to say it again. It occurred to me just a few years ago that as I range back over the course of my life, my fondest memories growing up as a teenager and younger, were the people that I got to know in the public schools that I went to. It really wasn't around family life. Now you can say, well, what's wrong with that? I don't know. You wouldn't say that, but that's the case for most people, I think. Well, what's wrong with it is that that's not the biblical model. That's not what God has ordained for his people. And I don't mean specifically Christians, but everybody who comes under the authority of his word, we are to march according to this rule and this standard. If we don't, then we get the other thing, which is what we have now. So you start talking about this to some people and they get a little bit agitated, like, well, wait a minute. Do you mean you take the Bible that literally? That's usually one of their pet terms. No, what we do is we take the Bible as the absolute truth about everything, because that's what God Almighty says it is. And you know the old saying, I used to see it maybe in some old cowboy westerns, mister, this town isn't big enough for the both of us. That's another way of saying there can only be one sovereign. Sovereignty by definition eliminates any and everything else that's not sovereign. There's only one. And in terms of education in particular, I think this woman that we were talking about at the beginning, I don't think she really understood that. And if she did, she rejected it because she wouldn't be saying the things that she was saying. Let me just say also one more thing about this in that during the time that I have been a pastor, I have had churches where I had homeschoolers in the church, kids who went to Christian schools who were members of the church, and I had parents who were involved in the local government school system. Now, as a pastor, I was pastor to all those people, and not all of us are on the same place on the highway toward becoming more and more dedicated Christians in growth and sanctification. So some of that has to be taken into consideration. But if you aspire to be a Bible teacher, as this woman has done and does, and you're going to go publicly and say things like this, there's a serious problem. And so this is not an area where you can say, oh, well, she's still learning her ways. Or maybe she will learn better. But when you're actively promoting things that deny the absolute authority of God's law word, then you're in a very seriously dangerous place. So I did go to her website and she'll affirm things like the Nicene Creed and she'll give a statement of faith. But if I had to make a realistic assessment of why state school or state education was a good choice, is it allowed her to continue or establish a career as a Bible teacher and working out curriculum, etc. And I do think the plight of modern motherhood is that if you say that my role is to be the wife of this man and the mother to these children, that basically it means, oh, you don't do much. But that's because we've lost the value, purpose, and necessity of the woman of the house. I mean, if Adam was really okay on his own, God could have cloned him. and had lots of different Adams, but that's not how God chose to do it. God gave Adam one to help him, but not help him like, please go get my shoes. I want a cup of coffee or whatever to help him because he was going to need help. And so many women I know who love their children but also have outside work, maybe because of necessity or debt or however you want to look at it, always, almost always are stressed out because when they come home, motherhood hasn't gone away. Being a wife hasn't gone away. And so now they have divided attention and nine times out of 10, Charles, they feel like they're not doing any of it right. They don't even say, I'm doing this part right. They're overwhelmed. You ask them, how was your week? Oh, I was so busy. I was so stressed out. I'm waiting for things to calm down. Well, a person who is in charge of something shouldn't walk around stressed all the time. Jesus tells us to bear his burden because it's lighter. And Paul tells us to be anxious for nothing. Yet we've established it's okay for the woman to come from work and still have to be mom. Now, if in fact, you look at mom with everything that it contains as your major and most important responsibility, you'll be no more surprised with bad behaving children than as a manager or a CEO of a corporation with bad behaving employees. But we've lost the sense that motherhood is why God, among the reasons, God gave Eve to Adam. Not the only thing, but that's the only way more people happen. And her perspective is such that balances out. So Adam wasn't complete without her. And yet we've asked women To kind of like, what is it you do? Oh, I'm a nurse. I'm an accountant. I'm an interior designer. Very few want to say I'm a wife and mother because they expect the scorn. Yeah, and to stay with that early Genesis model, the echoing question of Satan brings down through the millennia. Did God really say this? The state is always there to echo that question. And as Dr. Rastuni constantly pointed out, the movement of humanism, the movement of man as the measure of all things and the definer of what is true and false, right or wrong, it inevitably leads to state tyranny and state-claiming authority over everything, including how your children will be educated and also including telling you what a family is and what a mom is or a dad is. And so if you hook into that system, if you've been brainwashed or hoodwinked into that system, you're going to wind up doing the kind of thing. And if you're trying to also maintain a biblical balance, let me put that in there, you're going to wind up with that sort of exhaustive, you know, wilted, worn out sort of approach because the state ultimately wants you not to do anything biblical in the least. We'll educate your children. We'll teach your children. We'll even help them figure out if they're male or female. It is a total word from the state, just like God's word is a total word. So I think that again, people need to really, if they claim to be Christians, they need to come to grips with this. What is honestly and clearly my absolute authority over everything in life? Because the worldview of the Bible, the philosophy of the Bible, is not that God is partially sovereign over here, and then he parcels out the rest of it to a neutral ground where everybody can decide for themselves. That may be the case in somebody's religion, but it's not the case of the Bible. Look, anybody can put up a website and say, this is my statement of belief. And oh, yeah, I'll throw in the Nicene Creed and even the Chalcedonian Creed. But, you know, you and I both know about denominational churches that still maintain those things, and they can barely be called Christian, but they claim that they have those creeds. And if you want any evidence of the fact that our society in general, when we take a look at statist education, the expectation that people will then go on to college, which further separates them, think of all the designations we have. We have soccer moms as a political demographic to appeal to. We have millennials, Gen Zs. I don't even know half the categorizations, but they're not like members of a family. Family doesn't come into it unless you want to take the word family and divorce it from its true meaning and make a family mean everything, in which case a family means nothing. So we've been fractured, and I think one of the greatest challenges that I face as I'm interacting with other believers who do not have a covenantal, theonomic perspective on how they should live is helping them let go of things that they've clung to because they thought they should cling to. And so for moms especially, I know a lot of the families I deal with have six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, some 12 children. And other people were like, I would do that if, but we can only afford to. Well, think about that. In terms of God saying, be fruitful and multiply, yeah, the Bible says only if your current economic system allows for it. So we've lost the idea, and I think this is in general when we talk about the law of God, that the law of God, when the Bible talks about it as a delight, It's not like try to figure out what a delight would be and okay, I'll try to make it that way. No, when you do what God says, you're blessed and then you experience delight. If you're not experiencing delight right now in your day-to-day life, it's because you're not obeying God. When you obey God down to the nitty gritty and to ask yourself the question, I've never thought about education and obedience. I've never thought of diet and obedience. I've never thought of debt and obedience. When you start looking at God's law, which he says in the Psalms is senior to his name, then you get serious and suddenly it might be, oh wow, I've been doing this all wrong. But as the scripture tells us in the book of Malachi, start obeying and you will not be able to outrun God's blessings. Absolutely right, and I'd like to wind up my part of this by quoting again from Dr. Rastuni's book, Intellectual Schizophrenia, in the latter part of that book in a chapter called The End of an Age. He said this, the state school is radically involved in the contemporary culture, both as a product thereof and its champion. Again, he wrote this in the early 1960s. He said, despite of adverse trends, it will survive as long as the culture survives and no longer. Statist education will remain for all the vehemence of the attacks on it and it will increase in its reliance on and subservience to state as long as the contemporary culture remains. But with the collapse of that culture, the education of that culture will rapidly wither away. One thing that Mark Rustuni has talked about in his recent writings is that we are, echoing what his father said there, we are at the end of an age. We're watching the collapse of humanism. And it's not a pleasant thing to deal with. But one area where this presents itself as an opportunity for those who understand the full-orb nature of biblical faith is the educational project that the Lord has given us in teaching our children to be obedient to his word. Yes. Most people who are listening will probably remember, if they listen recent to when we make it, maybe 10 years from now, it won't mean anything, that in a recent debate between two candidates There was the accusation that in a certain town where certain immigrants had gone and had been transported into, they didn't go there naturally, they were bused in by some bureaucrat or bureaucratic agency, and that the big issue was people's pets were being eaten. Now it tells you something about our culture. When the other things attendant with that weren't highlighted as much, Dogs and cats obviously got to people. But one of the things, as I pursued it a little further, is that in this one town of about 60,000 people, 20,000 of these people were ushered in. And now the school system, the public school system, is overwhelmed. because they don't have the resources to deal with people who don't speak English and all the other cultural things that came with this group. But guess what they probably are getting? They're probably getting the per capita amount of money allocated for students. So maybe, just maybe, the whole immigrant or the open doors thing isn't because we care for the poor and distraught. Maybe we have to prop up this state school system that's failing because people have left it. Number one, there aren't as many people now, Charles, as with the boomers, because prior to the boomers, children weren't being murdered on a mass scale. So we have now all the missing people to be a tax base, all the missing people to be in the schools. And so somebody's idea that says, well, we got to keep the state school system running. So how are we going to do it? Well, let's just bring in more people. And that's something that didn't get a lot of attention. So now I would ask people who say, and as this woman said, my school is good. Okay, so how much time on the three R's you're going to be spent when half the people in the class don't understand what's going on, and now a teacher has to be attending to them. What happens with your children? So these things have tentacles that go out. You destroy the family, you destroy the confidence of mothers that they're the most important people in their child's life, especially the early years. Convince them that they can pass that off to someone else and that their real value will be in the workplace. That's part of the reason why so many are so miserable. Indeed, yes, and I'm guessing this particular individual that we're talking about The schools where her children are enrolled would not be dealing with any of the kind of things that you're talking about from this other state. Not only that, if I'm not mistaken, most of her children are graduated and gone from that system. So she was talking in such a way and probably making people feel better about their decision. And that goes back to, is what we're supposed to practice a polite Christianity or an honest Christianity? If our goal is to edify our brothers and sisters, don't we need to tell them the truth? God may not be pleased with your choices. I think we do, yes. And I just want to say again, I would recommend Dr. Rastuni's books, the book Intellectual Schizophrenia and the Messianic Character of American Education. Now, maybe one of your books too, Andrea, that you've written might speak to some of these issues. Well, I wrote two books initially on homeschooling, but then the next two books were specifically dealing with the family and the importance of the family and the role of the mother in the family. And so you go to calcedonstore.com and you'll find them, but they're not so much a how to do this or how to do that. It's developing a biblical mindset that you should ask yourself, how should I be thinking about these things? We have to get people to understand, Christians to understand, what is the real framework from which you're operating on this or any other topic. Yeah. And sometimes you're going to discover, like I did, and maybe you did, my goodness, I'm doing this incorrectly from what the Bible says. But as I mentioned before, a little bit of obedience goes a long way. And then the next opportunity for obedience comes up and you look at it. And so maybe the first is education for your children. Maybe the next is we got to get ourselves out of debt without sacrificing our children in terms of their upbringing. And then slowly but surely looking at it, has God created Adam and Eve to do something? We only focus on the fact that they got kicked out. Well, our redemption has us do the stuff God wanted Adam and Eve to do. Yes. Hopefully we've given some food for thought. Out of the Question podcast at gmail.com is how you reach us. And Charles, talk to you next time. Thanks, Andrea. Thanks for listening to Out of the Question. For more information on this and other topics, please visit calcedon.edu.