"Who's Your Daddy?"

The New Hampshire Supreme Court's ruling against parents brings to mind, "Whose idea was it to have the state be a higher authority than a child's parents? And the answer is Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who composed The Communist Manifesto. They despised both capitalism and the family unit. They believed the state was a higher authority than parents. Below is one of their famous statements (the spelling is theirs):

The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.

According to them, children belong, basically, to the state—not to the family. Home affiliations simply constitute bourgeois claptrap, a lot of sentimental malarkey that keeps the state from succeeding as it should. The state should be in charge of education so that it can teach students what they want them to learn.

Does this happen in America? With decisions like the one on New Hampshire, we are well on our way. Textbooks which used to be objective are now biased—even in private schools. One used recently in a private school devoted several pages to the Carter administration and one to that of Reagan.

So what was life like under Carter? Unemployment was in double digits; mortgage rates rose higher than 16%, and the inflation rate was once about 20%. It was 10% in 1980 and fell to 4% by 1988. The other numbers came down, also. In addition, Reagan's polices led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, which occurred shortly after he left office. So, why does a history book devote so much space to Carter and so little to Reagan? Political bias is the answer. With textbooks like these, students are more likely to be indoctrinated than taught.

The former governor of Virginia, Terry McCauliffe, revealed his Communist leanings when he said, "I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach." No wonder so many students are now being home schooled. And this option needs to continue to be exercised. The philosophy of teaching once meant preparing students academically for whatever career they might choose—to teach basic skills such as reading, composition, mathematics, science (actual science—not evolution theory), history, and a choice of foreign languages. What's being taught today—that boys can become girls and girls can transition into men?

Christians need to defend the family unit, sound academics, and their right to oversee their children's education. If that means home schooling, so be it. If done well, it is by far the best option.