By Patrick Meagher

Farmers sent their children back to school this month. More and more farmers each year simply send the kids to the kitchen table to be home schooled. They don’t necessarily want to home school. But these parents don’t trust the system with their children. They’re worried about bullying and bad behaviour of brats whose parents don’t parent. They also worry about atheistic socialism, moral relativism and anything-goes sex education seeping into young minds, delivered by an ideologically driven system. The irony is that home schooling parents are often told that if their kids don’t go to school they won’t learn how to socialize. The exact opposite is often true. If your well-behaved kids are forced to hang around bad apples, who do you think is going to influence whom?

Many parents who sent their children back to the classroom are also anguished about bad behaviour and moral indoctrination. And so are some of the teachers. It does not occur everyday and it’s not pounded into the students. It’s subtle and insidious. It’s a comment here, a remark there. Parents have good reason to worry. It is no longer uncommon for 12-year-olds in a rural Ontario school to be taught that it is okay to experiment with sex with either gender. Any teacher who came up with that outrage 30 years ago would have found angry parents banging on her front door before night fall. Schools are also teaching forms of positivism, which argues that if you can’t see it it might not be true. This undermines all belief in God and favours atheism, which is simply today’s opium of the people, a hope that there will be no afterlife consequences for self-centredness.

Canada is slipping into chaos – we can see it by looking at the classrooms — because we have no meaningful philosophy of life anymore. We have given up on sacrifice and the common good and are following the path of least resistance. Society is downright hostile to God. Christians can believe what they like but some of what they believe, if spoken in public, can get them hauled before a human rights commission. That makes the Bible a ‘human rights’ violation. The old adage, made famous by Hillary Clinton, that it takes a village to raise a child is no longer true. The village is a disastrous social experiment.

There are many good schools and many good teachers. They deserve our praises often and our support always. But there are also bad schools, many badly behaved children (they have their parents to thank for that raw deal in life) and many propagandizing teachers. It doesn’t help that schools cater to parents who use the system as daycare.

As parents – my wife is expecting our sixth child – my wife and I have collected strategies to deal with today’s world without having to circle the wagons. Here are a few things parents can do.