The Crackpots Are Still Hard At It

One of my first posts was Crackpots Against Public Education which responded to an article by Dr. Bruce Shortt, who is a leader of a group called "Exodus Mandate" that encourages parents to pull their kids out of public schools. Well, they are still at it. Yesterday, USA Today ran an article about that organization and the movement they are pushing.

Public schools take a lot of criticism, but a growing, loosely organized
movement is now moving from harsh words to action — with parents taking their
own children out of public schools and exhorting other families to do the
same. Led mainly by evangelical Christians, the movement depicts public
education as hostile to religious faith and claims to be behind a surge in the
number of students being schooled at home.

"The courts say no creationism, no prayer in public schools," said Roger
Moran, a Winfield, Mo., businessman and member of the Southern Baptist
Convention executive committee. "Humanism and evolution can be taught, but
everything I believe is disallowed."
The father of nine homeschooled children, Moran co-sponsored a resolution at the Southern Baptists' annual meeting in June that urged the denomination to endorse a public school pullout. It failed, as did a similar proposal before the conservative Presbyterian Church in America for members to shift their children into homeschooling or private Christian schools. Still, the movement is very much alive, led by such groups as Exodus Mandate and the Alliance for Separation of School and State.

Another leader of this movement, Rev. James D. Kennedy had this to say:

"The infusion of an atheistic, amoral, evolutionary, socialistic,
one-world, anti-American system of education in our public schools has indeed
become such that if it had been done by an enemy, it would be considered an act
of war."

Kennedy and his followers believe that God is not allowed in public school, and I find no anti-public education position more offensive than that one. I dealt with that in an earlier post, so I won't beat that dead horse again here.

The USA article indicated that the views of this group are a tad extreme, but they didn't make it clear just how extreme they really are. In Dr. Bruce Shortt's article, he says that public education is actually part of a plot to indoctrinate children to communism. If that's what we've been trying to do, then people like KDeRosa are right--we really are doing a poor job.