Stop Letting the Devil into School
By Travis K. McSherley

We are gradually, but effectively, squeezing God out of the public school systems.  Someone recently even told me of a case where a little girl's holiday gifts were confiscated by her school because she signed her name with a small cross.  Prayer is becoming an unacceptable practice, supposedly to protect the religious freedom of other kids.  But it seems that even the individual, silent prayers of young believers are being discouraged.  Teaching God's Creation has long since been abandoned for the irrational and ridiculous theories of macroevolution.

But by trying to remove God from schools, the devil may be making his way into them.  One does not have to look past the daily news to find the evil one's influence in halls of learning.  Sex and pregnancy, drugs, violence, invading the hearts and minds of our children.  Many of them should be too young to even have heard of such things.  Last month, three different school shootings appeared in national headlines.  Teenagers, students, kids, toting guns into class intent on ending the lives of classmates.  Who else but the devil could push someone to this?

The world may not be a fun place for adults, but why must kids fall into these kinds of problems?  Too many children lose all innocence before they are even out of grade school.  And we obviously can't just throw all the blame on the devil for these horrific events.  After all, we're the ones that opened school doors to him.  Broken homes take away positive role models from children's lives.  They not only lose the influences of loving parents, but they also may be forced to watch as their parents' relationship falls apart; and they may even be the target of the anger in the home.

Arresting the parents for the children's actions is not a valid response, however.  Arguably, bad parenting may be responsible for some of a child's poor attitude and decision-making.  But locking mom and dad up is hardly the answer, unless they are truly guilty of neglect or abuse.  If we allow children to grow up thinking that their parents are to blame for every mistake they make, how can we possibly expect them to take responsibility for their actions later?  Blameshifting never solves our problems.

We seem also very quick to blame the media and video games.  Agreed, movies, television, and video games have gotten out of hand in a lot of ways.  Unfortunately, they don't necessarily show a much different picture than we try to paint anyway.  While media may offer visual aids to highlight the problems in society, our liberal attitudes about sex and drugs and violence may have finally caught up with us.  True, movies may show an off-balanced view that premarital sex is "normal," but what have the rest of us done to counteract that view?  I've been on several college campuses over the past couple years, and sex is often not valued much more than a trophy or a weekend activity.  I know there are exceptions, but too many people are more interested in "scoring" than finding true love and happiness. 

Granted, Hollywood definitely needs to work on its subtlety a bit (read: a lot).  Using guns and gratuitous violence to solve problems does provide a poor example of anger management.  Many movies should not be seen by kids, or adults for that matter (I won't list examples).  But again, why is no one telling kids the right way to handle life's troubles?  Why are they only receiving this lopsided, fantasy world of morals?

Face it, our value system is shot.  And now, even school cannot provide a safe haven for kids to go.  We have made the terrible mistake of allowing school violence to continue and grow to a nationwide fear.  Fear can only lead to more violence.  If we cannot put confidence back in kids and parents, I fear school shootings will continue to get more out of control.  Schools and the government pass rules to make it harder for guns to enter schools: metal detectors, no-backpack rules, and so on.  But turning schools into prisons isn't going to stop the anger and the hate.  And removing all traces of God from school days, graduations, football games, isn't going to improve things.

So, who's to blame for the terrible state of many of our young ones?  Parents are to blame.  Teachers are to blame.  The kids are to blame.  Government is to blame.  Media is to blame.  The devil is to blame.  There's plenty of blame to go around.  The solutions are much more difficult to find.  But there is hope in that just as the years before and the years to come, THIS is the year of our Lord.