Is the educational tide turning?

OPINION:

For the last 30 years, E. Ray Moore has been persuading Christian parents to get their children out of government schools and into homeschooling or private education.

“I was swimming upstream for years, but I’m now swimming with the tide,” he told me recently while preparing for an educational summit in Lynchburg, Virginia. “I can’t keep up with it. There is too much going on.”

What began as a trickle when Mr. Moore, a retired lieutenant colonel and chaplain in the Army Reserve, founded Frontline Ministries in 1994 and later Exodus Mandate (exodusmandate.org), is becoming a fast-moving current.

There’s little doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic supercharged the movement. Parents saw online what the public schools were dishing up and didn’t like it.

Homeschooling began soaring, and not just among Christians. Before the pandemic, about 2.6 million children were being homeschooled. Now, it’s around 4 million and climbing. At the same time, about 12 million children are being educated in private schools.

“Pastors are waking up and realizing how important this is,” Mr. Moore said, citing pastor Gary Hamrick’s Cornerstone Chapel in Leesburg, Virginia, which opened Cornerstone Christian Academy with more than 550 students last year.

Mr. Hamrick had seen what the Loudoun County, Virginia, schools were doing to promote the LGBTQ agenda and critical race theory, along with the suspension of a Christian teacher who objected to using false pronouns. Loudoun County became ground zero in a national parental revolt against “woke” education.

According to Education Week, about 84% of the nation’s children attend public schools, including charter schools. The other 16% are privately educated.

“If this reaches 25 to 30 percent, the government schools could implode,” Mr. Moore said. “Parents are seeing the difference in their children, and the government schools are not getting any better. In fact, those schools are more determined than ever to turn children into social justice warriors instead of well-educated, morally sound and responsible young adults.”

The recent upsurge away from public schools has been fueled by steadily falling academic scores and the imposition of the transgender agenda.

In Bow, New Hampshire, two fathers of Bow High School students were ordered to stay away from their daughters’ soccer games because the dads showed up at a Sept. 17 game wearing pink “XX” armbands. This was during a match in which a biological male played on the opposing girls’ team.

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu signed a law in July banning biological boys from competing in girls’ athletics in grades five through 12. A federal judge, however, issued a temporary restraining order against enforcing the law.

In California, the First Liberty Institute filed a lawsuit on Sept. 10 against the Encinitas Union School District over its mandatory instruction in gender ideology. In May, a fifth grade teacher read aloud the book “My Shadow Is Pink,” about a boy with a pink shadow that the author tells readers is “your innermost you.”

As The Washington Times’ Valerie Richardson reports, “The book designated by the publisher for ages 3-7 concludes with the boy deciding to wear a dress in school, after which his father also puts on a dress.”

In July, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 1955, which prohibits school officials from telling parents about changes in their child’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Many parents are livid.

On Sept. 3, the Huntington Beach, California, City Council passed an ordinance establishing itself as a “Parents’ Right to Know” city. This allows the city attorney to challenge AB 1955.

Meanwhile, secular schools nationwide are keeping kids in the dark about Christianity and the Bible’s seminal role in America’s founding. The system is set up to promote atheism or, in some cases, alternative religions in violation of the First Amendment’s establishment clause.

In Mountain View, California, the school district paid a new age “healer” more than $350,000 over three years to facilitate “spiritual development and awakening.” She uses “sacred geometry to do chakra clearing and alignment and to perform energy healing on the spiritual, physical and emotional levels,” according to her website.

A testimony says that after “the healing sessions,” a client “realized I had formed the wrong belief of the Divine as a child, and I could spontaneously let it go!”

This kind of “transformation” would bring smiles to John Dewey, the early 20th-century humanist widely credited as the founder of American public education. He said the idea that government schools should expunge Christianity is a “dying myth” and a “delusion.”

“Dewey’s new social order rejected moral absolutes and focused on creating a new collective morality to replace biblical morality,” Tim Goeglein writes in his new book, “Stumbling Toward Utopia” (Fidelis Publishing).

Mr. Moore, who was the founding chairman of the Christian Education Initiative (christedu.org), says it’s essential to expose public education’s insanity, failings and ideological intent, but that’s only half the battle.

“You’ve got to spend the other half of the time building something,” he said.

“All we need are 25 percent of evangelical pastors standing up, and they’ll cause a tidal wave. This is a storm. This is the revival we’ve been looking for.”

• Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times. His website is roberthknight.com.