Certain myths about public education are pervasive in American culture at large, as well as within the church.  It’s important that we’re honest about the realities of our society, so decisions are made in an informed manner, not out of emotion or habit.  In the interest of that kind of honesty, let’s talk about seven of these public school myths.

MYTH: Education is neutral.

The education is neutral. It’s just math and reading.

FALSE.

It’s math and reading…and plenty of worldview training about gender roles, sexuality, the relative value of human life, views of God and spiritual practice, etc.

Moreover, even math and reading are not “just” math and reading.  Worldview impacts — and is potentially impacted by — every area of life.  When kids are learnng to read, they’re reading something.  When they study science, they’re either learning how creation declares the glory of God, or they’re learning to avoid giving God the glory due Him.  When they study history, they’re either learning about God as the great Author of history, or they’re learning that everything is chance and/or that man is god.

Even math either honors or dishonors God by how it’s taught.  Johannes Kepler said, “the chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony which has been imposed on it by God and which He revealed to us in the language of mathematics…”  And yet much of modern education seeks to deny absolute truth — any absolute truth — emphasizing an “all roads” approach over right answers.  Some go so far as to insist that 2+2=4 is racist.

Education is not neutral.

MYTH:  The curriculum and administration don’t matter, because the teachers are Christians.

It doesn’t matter what the curriculum is or who’s ultimately in charge, because the teachers are Christians.

FALSE.

Most teachers, having come through the system themselves (and being loyal to it) do not hold a biblical worldview.  Barna Group found that “nearly half of the nation’s public educators are practicing Christians—people who attend church at least monthly and say their faith is very important in their life.” (Source) But they also found that “only 17 percent of Christians who consider their faith important and attend church regularly actually have a biblical worldview.” (Source)  (It’s important to note that their definition of a biblical worldview is essentially only the bare basics of historic Christianity.)

The presence of the few remaining teachers who do think biblically is minimally comforting, since you don’t get to hand-pick your teachers.

Even if you do have the blessing of getting the “most Christian” teachers available, their hands are tied.  Public school teachers are limited, to one extent or another, in what they are required to teach and what they are permitted to teach.  The school doesn’t work for the teachers; the teachers work for the school.

MYTH: If we disagree with something, we can just opt out.

We can just opt out of anything we disagree with.

FALSE.

First of all, you can’t just opt out of half the curriculum. As has been previously established, the full curriculum pervasively represents a worldview.  Your child will either be in that school, trained in that worldview, or not.

Second, whether or not the school will allow you to opt out of the occasional more strongly-concerning assignment is entirely up to them (with push for there to be even less leeway).  There is some legal precedent for the idea that, by choosing to place your child under their authority, you have given them full authority — it’s all or nothing; either the student is in or he’s out.

Essentially, by putting your children in their schools you’ve abdicated the right to have a say in what they’re taught.

MYTH: Academically, it’s best for students to be taught by trained teachers.

It’s better academically for students to be taught by trained teachers.

FALSE.

Statistics have demonstrated that homeschoolers (as a group) are academically stronger, regardless of their parents’ education levels, than public schoolers (as a group). (This is not an indictment of school teachers. Any sane teacher would agree that s/he can’t inherently do a better job with a group of 30-40 students than someone with the freedom to give plenty of one-on-one attention.)  Teacher certification is clearly not a key factor for students’ academic success.

And although we’re conditioned to default to the assumption that government schools are providing a strong academic education, the evidence indicates otherwise.  Roughly 40% of the American (adult) public is illiterate or functionally illiterate, and graduating public school seniors are about as numerate.

Trained teachers or not, what we’re doing isn’t working (if the goal is academic achievement).

MYTH: There’s no meaningful difference between public schools now and a few hundred years ago.

There’s no real difference between public schools now and public schools a couple hundred years ago.

FALSE.

Several hundred years ago we had truly “public” schools — that is, schools that were organized and overseen by the public.  These community schools were fully funded, operated, and overseen within the communities they served, leaving the decision-making authority in the hands of those most affected by the decisions made.

Today we have government schools.  These are owned and operated by the government, with our tax dollars.  Local governments have some degree of input, including largely token input by the parents who elect school board members, but much of the oversight is of a larger “top-down” variety.  State governments create laws that govern some elements of education.

The federal government controls still more by holding tax dollars hostage pending compliance.  This control increased greatly in 1965, 1971, and again in 2001, with various expansions to federal power in the arena of education.

Public education today is far different in governance even from the schools of the 1950s, let alone those of Colonial America.

Moreover, if schools are influenced by the communities that surround them, then it must be noted that communities of today do not hold the same values and worldview as communities of the past.  In some particulars, this is a good thing, but, for Christians, this is an overall loss when we consider how little of America today holds a biblical worldview.

MYTH: Public schools are valuable for eliminating the racial disparity in education.

Public school is important, because it allows equal access to education so black and white achievement can be equal.

FALSE.

While this might be true in theory, it isn’t true in reality.  The absence of school choice eliminates competition, which allows poorly-functioning schools to remain functioning poorly because there are few consequences (to the school).  Students are stuck by virtue of their geography — and as anyone in a lower-income area knows, funding is not equally distributed.

The net result is that there’s still a significant racial gap.  According to Thernstrom & Thernstrom:

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the nation’s report card on what American students attending elementary and secondary schools know. Those tests show that African-American students, on average, are alarmingly far behind whites in math, science, reading, and writing. For instance, black students at the end of their high school career are almost four years behind white students in reading; the gap is comparable in other subjects.

The near-universal role of public schooling doesn’t seem to have done us any favors here.

MYTH: The schools just need more funding.

Schools just aren’t getting enough funding. If we just put more money into education, we’d do better.

FALSE.

Well, we can probably safely assume so.  I guess no one really knows for certain what an alternate reality would look like.  But there’s little to indicate that (beyond a certain point), more money correlates to better outcomes.

The United States already “spends more on education than most developed countries yet…US students are lagging far behind their peers in other nations, with US fifteen-year-olds ranking thirty-eighth out of seventy-one countries in math and twenty-fourth in science.” (Kerry McDonald, Unschooled)

Education funding has steadily increased over the past several decades, with no corresponding increase in overall achievement.  In fact, the percentage of Americans that reach the highest levels of literacy has decreased.

And increased education funding doesn’t necessarily mean increased instruction funding; much of school funding goes to administrative costs and other things, such as millions of dollars worth of bus fuel.

There is obviously a certain threshold that has to be met to enable instruction to continue — teachers need to be paid, for instance — but paying to do more of what already doesn’t work doesn’t make it work.  We need to do different, not more. 

Other Concerns

The myths mentioned above reflect the most common assumptions voiced.  But apart from the fact that schools arguably indoctrinate effectively but educate poorly, don’t effectively address racial discrepancies, cost a lot for relatively little return, and displace parents as the primary overseers of their children’s education and how they spend their time, there are other potential concerns.

Abuse is a major concern.  In fact, one of the most common reasons parents cite for removing their children from public schools is physical safety.  Both bullying and abuse — at the hands of faculty and staff or other students — are considerably more common concerns than people would like to admit.  And unfortunately, most schools don’t address these issues well when they happen.

Mental health is another concern.  Children are given almost no autonomy in a public school setting.  Forced to seek permission even for basic bodily functions such as trips to the restroom, scarf down food in a rush at predetermined times, proceed at whatever pace is best for the “herd,” etc., the environment is inherently highly controlling.  Few adults would tolerate such an environment for themselves, outside of the military or prison.

Such absence of control is well-established to be massively stressful, leading to a phenomenon called “learned helplessness.”  Not only is this detrimental to the mental health of students as individuals; it’s detrimental to our society, which now has a heavy representation of adults operating by learned helplessness.

Although slightly broader than “public school,” per se, the governmental concept of school in America is unjust.  Forced to attend under compulsion (under threat of legal action), children then have fundamental Constitutional rights stripped from them when they do.  Dress codes interfere with free speech.  The right to privacy is undermined.  The right bear arms for protection (or, being children, to having someone bear arms on their behalf) is refused.  The right to free exercise of religion may be impeded by scheduling and curriculum.  Elements of due process are lacking when offenses occur.  Some of these may be minor in practice (e.g. no one really needs to wear a t-shirt with a given slogan on it), but the principle is a significant one.

School By the Numbers (infographic)