Since creation, the family has been the basic social unit, the basic building block of society. A solid home, knit together in love, where each one cares for the others and where the core beliefs of the parents are passed on to the children, is a major problem for Satan and the realm of darkness. Thus, the war against the family has been going on since the garden of Eden. In a nutshell, that is the essential characteristic of what is wrong with the world. This article is intended to help us recognize how and where that war is being waged today.

If the family is the basic social unit, the individual is the basic political unit. Satan’s plan is to divide people until each one stand alone and trusts no one else. It is much easier to manipulate people to his ends when they stand alone. In order to do that, he has to destroy the cohesion of the family. The primary means he has used for the past 150 years is the public school system.

I realize that statement will shock many people. The anti-family nature of the public schools has been covered with such fine ideals that we can hardly believe the subversive intent of those schools. So let’s take a quick look at the philosophy guiding public education.

We can start with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1728) who believed that a child could only be free if he was taught nothing, but allowed to discover truth by his own investigations. That has led in our day to what is called discovery learning and what a recent French writer, François-Xavier Bellamy, has called a disinherited generation, cut off from all the moral and social values of the past.

The first schools in North America were established by local communities, reflected the values of the families in those communities and were eminently successful in teaching literacy and other tools of learning. Then provincial and state governments stepped in and took over the schools, establishing systems of universal public education. For many years these schools remained under the management of local school boards and continued to provide sound basic education. But enlightened people with a utopian vision soon began to make their influence felt.

If we look at the roots of the public education system, it becomes evident that education was always secondary to the intention of undermining the influence of the family. The first step to this end was to convince parents that they were unfit to teach their children, that job was best left to the professionals, the teachers. Then they gradually began to change the curriculum so that parents did not understand how to teach anything the way it was taught in school.

I started school in 1948 and already the schools had abandoned phonics as the essential tool for learning to read. The result has been a dramatic drop in literacy. Seventy years earlier almost everyone would learn to read and write. Now it is said that a third of children catch on to the letter sound connection almost immediately, another third will struggle for some time but eventually catch on, and the remaining third will be labelled as learning disabled. The reality is that they have not been taught. I was fortunate to have a mother who saw what was happening and taught me to read by phonics long before I started school.

The next step was the new math, which befuddled parents and children alike. The reality is that the public school system is much more concerned with indoctrination than in basic learning skills. The consolidation of local school boards into larger and larger school districts is another tool to distance parents from the education of their children. Here is one quote to open our eyes to what is going on: “In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and raise them communally” – Dr. Mary Jo Bane, Assistant Professor of Education, Wellesley College, 1990.

When I went to school, teachers had already begun to take over some of the functions of mothers, checking to see if we had washed behind our ears and cleaned our fingernails. That seemed quite innocent and benevolent, but it was the very thin edge of the wedge. Today children are openly taught that homosexuality is a good thing and that they can freely change their gender identity if they so wish, and their parents don’t have to know about it. This is an open and brutal attack on the family.

This is not a political issue, politicians are powerless to change a world view or mindset that has seeped down from the ivory towers of universities to the elementary school and even kindergarten. Most of the media is also on board with the anti-family agenda. A 1990 book from the Brookings Institution said: “existing [educational] institutions cannot solve the problem, because they are the problem.” What then can be done?

Christian parents must remove their children from the public schools, but must not retreat from the battle and leave the field wide open for the powers of darkness. This is a spiritual war, not a political war. Our evangelistic outreach should include an emphasis on the importance of the family. Anything that Christians can do to give courage to other families to continue the battle to maintain the integrity of their home is a blow to the advancing forces that are seeking to destroy those homes.