Children of the Rainbow

Engaging with culture wisely is something that requires training. So the issue is not whether we want soldiers who are ready to engage with culture, but whether our army is going to provide those soldiers with training in boot camp.

As some of you may have noticed, this last weekend I put up a post that went kind of nuts. I am talking about Tolle, Leg It, in which I encouraged Christian parents to take this particular rainbow moment as an appropriate time to remove their kids from the government schools, select a tall object on the horizon, and head for it in all due haste.

My point garnered a lot of attention and sparked quite a bit of debate. There are 488 comments there now, and the post gathered up 5.4K Facebook likes. John Piper did his bit by tweeting a quote from the post, and I can tell you via the wonder of Google Analytics that 17,639 people showed up the day after it was posted to gawk at it — and on a weekend too.

So maybe we should talk about this topic a bit more. Before going any further, let me extend my thanks to everyone who showed up to discuss it, particularly to those who differed with me. I will not be able to manage a detailed response to everyone, obviously, but I would like to say just a few things here. For those who want to follow up in detail, there is plenty of material available. In that post I put up links to four books. The best introduction to the subject I have is Why Christian Kids Need a Christian Education. The book that interacts the most with standard arguments for keeping our kids in the government schools is Excused Absence. The other two books represent the same basic outlook, but in the context of arguing for classical Christian eduction.

Well, then. One objection was that I posted this view under the category “Engaging With Culture” while I was ironically calling for disengagement from culture. Now is not the time to disengage, the response goes — now is the time when the government schools need salt and light, now more than ever.

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Source: Children of the Rainbow | Douglas Wilson | Blog & Mablog