This is the first of a multi-part series. Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

Under the drifting alder leaves, children wait at the bus stop on the first day of school. They wiggle and prance around in their new clothes. Teens saunter along the road with backpacks flung on their shoulders as their thumbs dance on their phones. Hauling boxes and suitcases out of cars, incoming college freshmen scan the dorm directory to find their rooms.

It’s back-to-school season.

As a parent, you prepare your children for the new academic year by updating their wardrobe, gathering school supplies, and advising your 18 year old what to pack for his milestone move. You may give some behavior admonishments and coach them on making good choices. You encourage them to do their best and be kind to others.

Having checked off each item on your back-to-school list, you entrust your children to their schools and pray that this new year will be a success.

But are your children truly prepared to deal with everything that happens behind the school doors?

Conflict of Worldviews

Concerned Women for America CEO Penny Nance attended her son’s freshman orientation at Virginia Tech this fall and wasn’t prepared for the diversity lecture that awaited them. All the speakers introduced themselves with their preferred gender pronouns.

At one point, after dinner, they sent parents off to oblivious sleep while they lectured students on not making assumptions about each other’s gender or sexuality….
The school constantly defined and showcased identity group politics, but certainly not all identities. It’s apparently way cooler to be a minority trans woman with food allergies than simply to be an American college student. Interestingly, the university offered Halal food but no certified kosher meals. Religiously observant Jewish students, tough luck, but if you are vegan, you’re in business.

Penny Nance in her Op-Ed in The Federalist

Some may say that such things only happen at the university level. Well, gender identity is being introduced to kindergartners in some districts.

Most Christian parents send children to K-12 public schools for an education and perhaps to college for more. But what kind of instruction are they receiving in addition to the 3R’s or engineering? Our culture has shifted away from its Christian roots. Now political correctness dominates academia and overshadows each subject.

Are your children ready to defend their faith in this environment? I don’t just mean, Can they explain their faith to others? I mean, Can they recognize and confront cultural lies so they can maintain their own beliefs in the gospel? Have you trained your children to discern the truth from the false worldviews presented in the schools?

Dangers of False Prophets

This year, I’m reading through the entire Bible. Currently, I’m in the major prophets. Jeremiah spoke of how the false prophets of Judah led the people astray. The Israelites preferred the false prophecies of peace to Jeremiah’s declarations of punishment. Sadly, they refused to listen to God and repent of their sin. Because they broke their covenant with God, he withdrew his protection of Jerusalem and Judah. Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the city and took the survivors into exile.

Similarly, false prophets in our culture tickle people’s ears with Utopian promises and lead people away from the truth. Even children and young adults raised in the church are led astray by unbiblical worldviews. These other worldviews cause students to question their faith. When they can’t find satisfactory answers to their questions, which is unfortunately common, they walk away from their faith. The youth exodus from the church has been going on for decades.

To thwart this trend, parents must equip their children with a biblical worldview. This may mean you, too, need to learn what it means to have a biblical worldview. Then you can teach your children how to filter what the world teaches them through a biblical lens. Helping people develop a biblical worldview and exposing the false prophets is the primary goal of my blog. As Paul wrote in Colossians 2:8, we need to avoid being taken captive by worldly thinking.

But before I get into what a biblical worldview is, I want to discuss the goals and purpose of education. See next week’s post.