Christian education and the search for morality - Christian school textbooks

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Sept, 1994 by Don Boys

Christian texts are accused of disparaging the "achievements of African-Americans and native Americans." Maybe critics of Christian schools would be pleased if Christian students were required to write an essay on "Why I Feel Guilty Being White," as some eighth-graders were recently. However, Christian educators won't do that since they don't believe in "collective guilt."

Maybe public school advocates would be pleased if the church schools would ape their public counterparts and teach Afrocentrism. They could teach, as some schools do, that the first humans were black, as were the first Europeans, the original Jews, Greeks, and Italians. Beethoven was black, as was Alexander Hamilton, Robert Browning, Saint Jerome, Cleopatra, etc. They could teach that the philosophical foundations of Western civilization were taken from black Africans, and further hatred and bigotry could be fostered by teaching from The Destruction of Black Civilization that "the white man is their [blacks] Bitter Enemy." Such nonsense is an insult to honest and principled blacks everywhere.

Critics of Christian school texts are not happy because they maintain these books are "far from friendly" toward Martin Luther King, Jr. Well, King was not "friendly" toward Bible Christians. He did not believe in the virgin birth or the physical resurrection of Christ. He plagiarized his Ph.D. thesis at Boston University, had sex with numerous women (as he admitted to Parade magazine), and accused America of being the "greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

While American soldiers were dying in the rice paddies of Asia, King told an audience at Riverside Church that Americans had poisoned the water supply of the South Vietnamese (without proof) and had tested new weapons on helpless South Vietnamese. He then accused America of probably killing a million children (again, with no proof) and praised Ho Chi Minh as the only true leader of the Vietnamese people. All that was too much even for the liberal Washington Post, which called his hand on his incredible charges.

Civil rights

Opponents don't like the treatment of the civil rights movement of the 1960s by school texts published by Bob Jones and Pensacola. Maybe they would prefer that Christian educators teach kids to follow the crowds, lemming-like, over the cliffs. There were some good results that came out of the civil rights movement. Blacks should not have been forced to ride in the back of a public bus or drink from a "colored" fountain, but when Congress was stampeded into forcing private businessmen to give up their right to choose their customers, the nation started down a very slippery slope.

Americans are told that it is not "Christian" to refuse to serve a customer whom you don't like. A person has a right to be stupid, a bad businessman, poor Christian, or bigot (as long as he does not physically harm the object of his bigotry). The problem with the 1964 Civil Rights Act was that it went too far, and now white people are being discriminated against! Principled individuals believe that all people should be treated like people, not as blacks, Jews, women, etc. It is incredible that anyone would argue with that position.