As a mother, grandparent, former high school teacher, and school administrator, I have been and continue to be deeply burdened for our children and how they are being indoctrinated and groomed in our schools.
Our students are the future leaders of the nation and the nations of the earth. Their worldview (Christian, ungodly, or otherwise) determines the future of the world as we know it.
Abraham Lincoln said: “The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.”
Noah Webster, the originator of the classic Merriam-Webster Dictionary and “the Father of American Scholarship and Education,” said: “The education of youth should be watched with the most scrupulous attention... [For it] lays the foundations on which both law and gospel rest for success.”
What would Abraham Lincoln and Noah Webster think, I wonder, if they were to show up in America today?
Here in 2023, our education system and its children are under spiritual, moral, and intellectual assault like never before. As Christian parents, grandparents, educators, and concerned citizens, we have a duty to protect our children and fight for their wellbeing.
BridgeBuilders has been mobilizing school prayer in Arizona and nationwide for more than twenty-five years. Our new book, Reclaim a Generation: 21 Days of Prayer for Schools (Volume 2) is being used by individuals, churches, and prayer groups in all 50 states. While researching the book, I interviewed teachers, students, principals, and school board members. I can tell you that Christian educators need our prayers. Principals tell us there are things happening in their schools that are clearly demonic, and they say educators are not prepared to handle this.
Schools are molding kids' minds, morals, values, views on sexuality, and worldviews. Our public school system is promoting humanism, Marxism, communism, and atheism. While this has been going on behind the scenes in our schools, the COVID-19 pandemic, which had children distance-learning from home, brought shocking revelations to the spotlight. Parents discovered that instead of being taught the basics — reading, writing, and arithmetic — their kids are being fed lessons on highly divisive topics of questionable academic benefit. All the while, less than one-half of graduating seniors can proficiently read or even complete math problems.
Students are being socially promoted without mastering the subject matter. Graduates are unprepared for their next step in life. Other serious issues in our schools are bullying, mental health, and the shortage of teachers, counselors, and support staff. There is the problem of home life— kids without dads or moms, latchkey kids, kids living in poverty, those suffering child abuse. [See sources listed at the end of this article.]
Encouraging gender confusion in children and promoting transgender ideology all the way to the extreme measure of mutilating their own bodies is shocking, and it breaks my heart. Those pushing this evil agenda no longer hide it. It is right out in the open—the plan to sterilize our children and prevent them from ever marrying and having children. Make no mistake, the purpose is to dismantle the family and stop the procreation of children according to God’s original design. The target in this culture war is the family, and the bullseye is our children. Drag Queen Story Hour and transition closets in schools were bad enough, but now students are fully transitioning to becoming a member of the opposite sex through radical surgeries and hormone therapy—sadly, often at the guidance of their teachers and counselors and with the backing of principals, school superintendents, and school boards. In such cases, parents are the last to know, as many schools have policies, written or spoken, that parents must not be told.
A parental rights movement is now well underway; protest marches, such as the one that took place in Los Angeles recently, are being organized. Parents and grandparents are showing up at school board meetings and are running for office. Coalitions of moms, parents, and grandparents are forming. Thank God for some churches that are encouraging and supporting candidates with a biblical worldview to run for school boards. And while these are powerful, and seeing results, they are not enough. Governmental roadblocks hinder and delay progress by concerned parents and citizens. Because of powerful teachers’ unions, the hospitals and the pharmaceutical industry, the media, corporate America, and liberal politicians, a public relations agenda to normalize the transgender lifestyle is moving forward at an alarming pace.
In order to understand what is happening in our schools, we must look beyond the education sphere. It is impossible to understand what is happening in our classrooms without looking at the nationwide web of institutions pushing and funding this agenda. Satan has an agenda to use every sphere of influence to kill, steal, and destroy our children. Take children’s hospitals, for example. People are becoming aware that dozens of children’s hospitals and hundreds of independent clinics across the U.S. (and many more worldwide) practice so-called “gender medicine” on young children and teenagers. (In addition, many healthcare professionals have climbed on board with the transgender ideology.)
It has become a multi-billion-dollar business. These procedures often cause permanent disfiguration, mutilation, castration, and lifelong medical and mental health problems. It is all experimental. And it dismantles and destroys God’s original design for the family.
You may have heard how a Vanderbilt administrator was caught promoting transgender surgeries as being profitable for their medical center. However, just last month, Vanderbilt suspended gender-altering surgeries at its medical center amid outrage over claims the hospital ‘chemically castrates’ minors for financial gain. An outcry from the public worked. Recently, several states have introduced legislation to ban this gruesome practice. Such bans are fiercely fought by the LGBT lobby, the hospital industry, corporate America, and the mainstream media. They say this is “gender-affirming medical care” and must be allowed. They attack those who oppose these procedures as bigots. The epicenter of this has been Boston Children’s Hospital. Opening in 2007 under Dr. Norman Spack, it was the pioneer “gender clinic” in the United States. Boston Children’s Hospital has grown incredibly since then and its practices have been imitated in children’s hospitals across the U.S.
The so-called “gender-affirming” medical treatments and surgeries that are happening at Boston Children’s Hospital include:
-Transitioning counseling
-Puberty-blocking drugs and cross-sex hormones for boys and girls
-Double mastectomies on girls and “chest reconstruction” for boys
-Creating new fake genitals for both boys and girls
-“Gender-affirming hysterectomies”
-Vocal cord Adam's apple surgery on males to sound like females
One video is entitled: “Surgical Transition: Who Is Eligible?” The answer: a 15-year-old girl can have her breasts removed if she’s sure she “feels like” a male. The video has a psychologist saying that children sometimes know they’re transgender from the time they are born. Thus, the Boston Children’s Hospital Gender Clinic begins seeing young children when they are between two and three years old to 9 years old. They coach parents that they must “support” the child’s transgender feelings, claiming (falsely) that, otherwise, the child will become depressed and suicidal. The most terrifying part of this report is the clinical, matter-of-fact way these doctors approach this “medical care.” It’s madness – and even demonic—it’s part of the culture of death.
These seeds of confusion are often first planted in our children’s minds at school. Books such as Jacob’s New Dress in Kindergarten indoctrinate our kids at an early age. Obscene books of men having sex with men and women with women have been found in school libraries.
The approval process for getting obscene books removed from school libraries most often goes like this:
One superintendent told a group of concerned parents that the school board had an “approved process” that their objections must go through. For each book, a separate form must be filled out and submitted to the superintendent. This basically requires a “book report” on each book. It’s a very common tactic across the country by school officials. They purposefully make parents jump through bureaucratic hoops and try to wear them down right away. Then they would use another bureaucratic process to squash their efforts using legalese and jargon.
Once their reports were submitted, the superintendent told them he would appoint a committee. The committee would review the material and make a determination on whether it “meets the parameters of our school board policy or the selection of library material”. Then the committee would determine whether it is “appropriate for the middle school library” and submit a written report. What came next was a lesson for all of us on how disconnected from reality many school officials are. The superintendent appointed the following committee to review the submission on Sex is a Funny Word:
Jamison H. (Committee Chairman)
He is the librarian (who dresses as a woman) at the high school.
Michelle A.
She is the reading teacher who helped promote these books.
Michelle D.
She is the head of the English Department and very supportive of the books.
Michael K.
He is a school board member. In school board meetings, he has been the most openly hostile against parents.
Stacey M.
She is the principal of the middle school, who originally brushed off the parents' concerns.
Jacob O.
At that time, he was a school board member and is now a state representative. He is openly homosexual.
Not surprisingly, there was no parent on this committee.
This “committee” was clearly stacked for the outcome they wanted. The committee submitted their decision. It was just what you would expect. Their unanimous verdict: “The content is age-appropriate for middle school students and should be freely available.” The committee said this book constitutes materials “that address basic sexuality education concepts relevant to the information needs of 11 to 13-year-olds.” Among the controversial books parents are protesting is The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a 1999 novel that explicitly describes minors engaging in sex and a teenager being raped.
Elliott, whose daughter is a fourth grader in the district, asked officials to remove the book, which was in the district’s three high school libraries. The district denied Elliott’s request. A letter from McKinney ISD Deputy Superintendent Melinda DeFelice said the book “meets the selection criteria” in the board’s policy on instructional resources. “Therefore, the book will continue to circulate without restriction,” DeFelice wrote, adding Elliott can appeal the district’s decision.
In the Old Testament, we read about the roles of watchmen—who stood on the walls of cities to sound the alarm about impending enemy attacks—and gatekeepers, who stood at the outer entrance of homes and either admitted or turned away any strangers or visitors who might approach the dwelling while the family was sleeping.
God told Isaiah, “Go, set a watchman; let him announce what he sees. When he sees riders, horsemen in pairs, riders on donkeys, riders on camels, let him listen diligently, very diligently” (Isa. 21:6–7, ESV).
This is a role that we all can take on as watchmen and gatekeepers over our schools and homes, to “listen diligently, very diligently.” We need to be alert to what is going on in our classrooms and school districts so we can be well-informed and pray specific targeted prayers, and:
• We need to know what curriculum is being taught in our local schools and who is on the textbook committees making the decisions.
• We need to know what books are on the library shelves.
• We need to know which speakers are coming in to address our children.
• We need to know what is on the agenda at our local school board meetings—and to attend those meetings.
• We need to know what legislation is being proposed and passed in our governments regarding schools.
We also can fulfill the roles of watchmen and gatekeepers both in the natural and the spiritual realms:
• We can close spiritual doors to the enemy through our prayers.
• We can pray for protection around our children’s lives and schools.
• We can pray for revelation and exposure of the enemy’s hidden schemes and deceptions (see Luke 12:2–3) and subversive efforts to separate children from the influence of their parents.
Webster’s words—“The education of youth should be watched with the most scrupulous attention”—should speak to us today. It is absolutely the responsibility of the older generation to guard over the spiritual and moral condition of the younger.
Are you willing to be a watchman? Are you willing to be on the alert, informed, and actively engaged in sounding the alarm and resisting the enemy’s attacks? Are you willing to be one who “stands in the gap”?
Let’s start by asking forgiveness—as parents, grandparents, teachers, coaches, church and community leaders—for abandoning our posts on the wall and failing to be the gatekeepers over our children and our school systems.
Sources:
[2] https://www.parentsrightsined.org/drag-queen-ed.html. Accessed 27 February 2022.
[4] https://nationalfile.com/k-3-sel-curriculum-in-delaware-county-includes-jacobs-new-dress/.
[5] Amy Contrada, "Pioneers in Child Mutilation: Boston Children's Hospital's Leading Role in Pediatric 'Gender Medicine,'" MassResistance Special Report, April 2023.
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