“Loco” or “In Loco Parentis”?
Written by R. Scott Clark |
Tuesday, November 30, 2021
Our children do not belong to the state or to state-schools. They were baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They belong to God and they are entrusted to parents for nurture and admonition and that is an order that may not be subverted without the gravest consequences.
Christina Wyman has published an OpEd on NBCnews.com in which she argues that parents who insist on influencing the education of their children do not understand how education actually works. She observes that the latest crisis, focused on the schools in Loudon County, VA, is nothing new. “Parents,” she writes “have always tried to interfere with curricula…” Please note her choice of verb: “interfere.” It means “take part or intervene in an activity without invitation or necessity” (New Oxford American Dictionary). She argues that parents who think that they have a right to have a say in how their children are educated fail to understand how education works. “It’s sort of like entering a surgical unit thinking you can interfere with an operation simply because the patient is your child.” Education, she claims, is a “science,” something that can be done only by highly trained specialists. The author herself has an earned PhD in curricular studies. She observes that 36 states require teachers to earn a master’s degree. She concludes,
The future of our country and world are sitting in today’s K-12 classrooms, and those children will eventually become adults in a world requiring their empathy, passion, intelligence and engagement. Parental interference in school curricula is poised to accomplish the exact opposite. Shielding students from real-world issues and diverse perspectives will create bubbles that will render their children ill-prepared to navigate society, particularly when they are called upon to contribute and think critically.
That schools ought to be helping students face the real world and to think critically is just the thing but she begs the question by assuming that post-modern schools are doing those things.
Responses
First, we should rather doubt her self-serving analogy between a typical “college of education” within, e.g., a land-grant university and the medical school on the same campus. Teachers College is not medical school and teachers are not surgeons. The comparison is risible but that she had the gall to attempt it tells us much about the inflated sense of the profession that has developed in recent decades. Please do not misunderstand. Teachers do valuable work but teaching children to finger-paint and supervising nap time or the correct way to eat Graham Crackers (such were the rigors of Kindergarten in 1966) was hardly open-heart surgery. Even the most demanding High School physics course is no match for even an average pre-med organic chemistry course let alone a medical school program.
More basically Wyman misunderstands the order of nature here. Teachers and schools work for parents and not the reverse. By law school teachers and administrators are empowered to act in loco parentis (in place of the parent). The original authority, however, belongs to the parents. To review some basic biology, when a man and a woman love each other they marry and, in time, in the providence of God, they produce a child. The school did not produce or nurse the child. Indeed, a school does not even see the child until age 4 or 5. Parents temporarily loan their children to the school each day to the end that the child should learn to read, write, calculate, think well, and express himself well. The school’s authority is derived, secondary, and temporary. Your child’s teacher (master’s degree) is expensive hired help and clearly, judging by Wyman’s OpEd, they need to be reminded of their place.
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The United Methodist Reckoning
In following the developments over the past four years, one thing has been clear: The name United Methodist is not enough to hold together groups that no longer see one another as united. For a movement which once boasted of a church in every county in America, the splintering of this denomination is a time to mourn. Time to mourn the loss of biblical fidelity within the liberal strains of the movement. Time to mourn that conservatives must come out of the church rather than be party to the hypocrisy that says one thing about sexuality while ignoring flagrant violations.
There is no longer a First United Methodist Church in my hometown. The day after the vote taken to leave the denomination, the church pastor was outside scraping the flame from behind the cross logo painted on the glass doors and covering the church sign with a garbage bag. As of yet, there is no word on what the new name of the church will be.
The picture of black plastic covering church signs, logos scaped off, and contested debates about whether the church or denomination gets to keep the hymnals is one I imagine is fairly common across the country now. According to estimates, one-fourth of the churches within the United Methodist Church—the nation’s second largest Protestant body—have chosen to disaffiliate because the denomination has failed to be faithful to Christian teaching on sexuality and marriage.
The past four years have seen a flurry of attempts by Methodists to reckon with their own inconsistency on the topic of sexuality and biblical fidelity. The 2019 General Conference (the gathering of representatives from the United Methodist Church) passed the Traditional Plan, which would have affirmed the Book of Discipline’s statement that no “self-avowed practicing homosexual” could be ordained to the clergy and that homosexuality was incompatible with the Christian life. It also created a process for bringing charges against churches, individuals, and conferences that were breaking the rules. There was also a provision included that allowed churches to leave the denomination with their property, provided they did so by the end of 2023. Initially this would have allowed liberal denominations to leave, but following the announcement that some groups would refuse to enforce the Traditional Plan, it was conservatives who began to exit.
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The Gospel Gives Us Courage
Most of us have an internal compass that directs us in conversation. We move toward or away from topics that make the other person uncomfortable or irritated. But as Christians grow, the Holy Spirit begins to override this compass, helping us to honor God instead of making relational peace our only aim.
The gospel of Jesus Christ brings to us an abundance of gifts. When we believe, we have new life; we have the forgiveness of our sins; we are new people, made part of the body of Christ, the church.
But the blessings of the gospel keep on coming, some of which we may not realize until months or years later.
In particular, the gospel gives us courage.
Courage to Approach God
Believing the gospel involves confessing our sin, and once we begin to glimpse our sin, we realize a portion of its horror. In the presence of our holy God, and without a mediator, this sin would electroshock our hearts, leaving us quivering on the ground. We would only fear God’s judgment, knowing we don’t belong anywhere near him.
But the gospel tells us that we now “have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous” (1 John 2:1). He is “the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 2:2), meaning that he absorbed God’s wrath that we deserved.
This changes everything!
We now have confidence to go to God. We can “with confidence draw near to the throne of grace” for “help in time of need” (Heb 4:16). Paul tells us that in Christ “we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in him” (Eph 3:12) We have assurance that God hears us when we pray: “And this is the confidence that we have toward him, that if we ask anything according to his will he hears us” (1 John 5:14).
While we must not approach God with irreverence or presume upon him, we no longer come into his presence as one only flinching before a disciplinarian. We come to a holy God, but this holy God is our Father.
Courage to Admit Our Sin
If we understand that a fundamental part of us (our sin) is known fully by God, and if we grasp that he is devoted to us despite this knowledge, then our attitude toward our sin can change.
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Ten Words for a Broken Society (#2: No False Worship of the True God)
We must guard ourselves against false worship of the true God. We must guard ourselves the same way bank tellers guard themselves against counterfeit bills. Tellers expose themselves continually to genuine currency and thus are able easily to spot the “feel” and “look” of a counterfeit bill. Similarly, we must expose ourselves to God—as revealed in nature and Scripture—repeatedly until we are quick to spot counterfeit images of God. We study our Bible and listen to good Bible-teaching until we are full to the brim with truth about God.
Imagine if a woman’s husband found out that his wife routinely told her friends, “I like to see my husband as a 6’2” Antonio Banderas who lifts weights, whose perfect idea of date night is perusing the aisles at TJ Maxx, who drinks froufrou smoothies made out of strawberry, and who delights in talking about fashion trends and home furnishing ideas.”
If she kept saying that, her real husband, 5’6” Frank, who likes to work on his truck, wears Wrangler jeans, whose idea of the perfect date is to shoot deer together, and who drinks his coffee black, might get a little upset at being misrepresented so badly. He would have the right to ask her why she has to re-imagine him in order to love him.
In the same way, it’s an insult to God when we have to reshape him into something else in order for us to love him. That is God’s point when he issues the second commandment:
4 “You shall not make for yourself a carved image—any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; 5 you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting] the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me, 6 but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.
With this commandment, God is saying that we shouldn’t imagine him differently than he is, differently than he has revealed himself in nature and in Scripture.
To summarize the points of the first two commandments, therefore, the first commandment exhorts us to worship the true God, while the second commandment instructs us about how to worship the true God. In reverse, the first commandment commands us not to worship the wrong gods, while the second commandment tells us not worship the right God in the wrong way. As we are turning out backs to false gods, we must turn our face to the true God as he actually is.
That is the point being made about not making images of God.
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