Southern Baptists Still Bashing Public Schools

Ethics Daily is reporting that at least ten Southern Baptist state conventions will be considering resolutions encouraging Baptists to pull their children out of public schools. This is an issue that will not go away, despite the maneuverings of the politically astute SBC leaders who would prefer to keep their goals secret.

Decades ago Fundamentalist Baptists derided our Baptist Seminaries and started their own Bible schools. After they placed their Bible school graduates in a lot of little churches, they organized a takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. Once they took control of the Convention, they fired tenured professors and replaced them with puppets who would parrot their pronouncements. Indoctrination replaced education.

A similar strategy by Fundamentalists to take over school boards and control public schools has been going on around the country for a quarter-century. Problematic is the decentralized nature of our public school systems. In places, Fundamentalists have been successful in gaining control of the schools. In places, they have failed. In places, their initial successes were reversed as a backlash rose against them.

Now, many Fundamentalists have decided that the public schools must be destroyed. They believe that will happen if enough evangelical Christians can be convinced to put their kids in private schools and/or home schools. They know that public schools have already been starved of the resources they need to do a good job. By reducing the number of students in public schools, and thereby further reducing funding for public schools which receive allocations based on the number of students they serve, they expect our public school systems to rapidly disintegrate and implode.

They intend to replace the public school system with their own private, religious schools and/or home schools -- financed by publicly funded vouchers. Once again, indoctrination will replace education.