Money or Liberty?

Posted in Statist and Professional Trends

The Dominion of 9 September 1996 declared. “Forty-two percent of schools in Mangere and Otara, NZ, are performing very poorly and need extra help, an Education Review Office report says. The report recommends substantial incentives to help principals and boards attract and retain highly qualified and experienced teachers.” It is always interesting to notice how they treat problems among themselves and then with us. For problems they admit they have, the solution is to throw more money at it. If they reckon we have a problem, they do not suggest the same solution, but instead that we place our children in their institutions.

Primary and Secondary education in NZ will receive $2.35 billion in ’96-97 for the 680,000 students of that age. That is $3,455 each. And what good will it be doing for them? The illiteracy rates, crime rates, bullying, drug use, gang recruitment, condom instruction, and sexual experimentation among school children does not go down as they pour in more money …. it all goes up! These seem to be the inevitable effects of state funded compulsory education here in the west.

Please, please, never flag when it comes to defending our responsibility before God to home educate our own children in the way our consciences see fit. Let me quote the founder of Westminster Theological Seminary, Professor J. Gresham Machen:

If liberty is not maintained with regard to education, there is no use trying to maintain it in any other sphere. If you give the bureaucrats the children you might just as well give them everything else.

From Keystone Magazine
March 1997 , Vol. III No.2
P O Box 9064
Palmerston North
Phone: (06) 357-4399
Fax: (06) 357-4389
email: craig@hef.org.nz