"Our Universities Are in Trouble"
The Rev. Dr. Peter Scaer, in a public Facebook post dated March 5, wrote:
“Our Universities Are In Trouble.
Secular and Christian. But that should come as no surprise, because it’s not just a matter of college. Our schools are pushing Social Emotional Learning from kindergarten on. Mindfulness is key, and it’s a starting point. Through mindfulness, the child’s brain is emptied for rewiring. Make no mistake, schools want to educate “the whole child,” and that means rewiring children’s brains to reject the things we hold dear, including basic piety towards God and family, father and mother.
As minds are emptied via a westernized version of what is essentially eastern religion, children are then indoctrinated into a kind of group think, into which an us vs. them paradigm is promoted. At this point, you get early indoctrination into the mentality of White Fragility, equity, and the rainbow pride. Children are rewarded for being on the right side of the open minded, which is the social justice ideology. Our children are wired to think “socially” and that mean social and restorative justice. That is, there is no such thing as an individual’s sin, but it is simply a matter of such identity markers as race and gender.
By the time our kids get to college, they are now mostly already lost, at least if they have gone to the public schools. We know that even within our own system, the Diversity, Inclusivity, and Equity mantra is promoted. What to do? Homeschooling makes sense. But, if we want to save our Lutheran schools, and truly equip our kids, we need to have the very best Lutheran and Christian schools of education that are aware of this indoctrination, and are ready and eager to fight against this progressive ideology.
All of this is to say, we have a lot of work to do. And it’s not enough to clear the barrel of a few bad apples. This stuff goes to the common core, and we had better get up to speed on it all. Just sprinkling bible passages on this poisonous worldview is not even close to enough. As I have said, this ideology, found in CRT, the Rainbow Pride, Intersectionality, and introduced at the elementary school level in Common Core and Social Emotional Learning is indeed the most dangerous religion of our day, and it’s a worldview that aims to take our children and their hapless parents away from Christ. And, we had better see, it’s working.”
It’s interesting, because looking back on my own mostly-public education, I see it clearly. When I was in kindergarten (1969-70), there was a new “educational” TV show called Sesame Street that we were encouraged to watch. When I was in first grade, my parents bought me two sets of encyclopedias, one was the standard Funk and Wagnall’s, and the other was a set of science encyclopedias - the latter came with a floppy vinyl record to play on the record player. It was a “science” lesson that began with the story of Abraham (and this is the first that I had ever heard of him, by the way). The record told the story of Genesis 22. Only it went like this: In ancient times, mankind was superstitious and believed in God to explain things like bad weather. Abraham went to sacrifice his son to the angry God. But Abraham refused. Instead he said, “Bring me a goat! Bring me a young goat!” And that was mankind’s first step away from superstition to science. I listed to that record again and again. It was only years later that I read Genesis 22.
Also in first grade, the Pledge of Allegiance ritual went away.
When I was in the third or fourth grade, our teacher read us a series of short stories, one each day. They featured a girl and a boy competing with each other in various situations, like in the classroom or on the baseball diamond. Every story had the same ending: the girl always triumphed over the boy. After a couple of these, I remember mocking the third story and telling the teacher out loud: “We all know that the girl is going to win.”
My parents were befuddled at the new curriculum. They would ask me, “What is Social Studies?” They thought it strange that we didn’t have History or Civics classes. And my dad bypassed the “new math” that we were being taught and taught me how to do standard multiplication instead of the convoluted methodology that we were getting in school.
In my first year at a large state university (1981-82), our Sociology class featured full-blown Critical Race Theory, Gender Identity, and the promotion of promiscuous and deviant sexuality. My classmates, to a man, rolled their eyes and laughed at it. We may well have been the last generation of healthy cynics with a full-blown you-know-what detector. Our professor was a young woman who called herself a Marxist, and this was still before the fall of the USSR, when there were still Soviet dissidents languishing in prisons, and Christians had to meet together in secret. She assigned us to see a lecture by “Kwame Ture” (real name Stokely Carmichael) which not only trashed capitalism and western civilization, but also openly assailed white people. The crowd was so worked up, that I had to find a way to exit the hall in fear that I would be attacked.
I’m sure many others from my age range can remember when the transition from education to indoctrination kicked into full gear.
I have heard from many of my colleagues and others that there have been similar experiences at our Concordias even decades ago. Antichristian professors openly berated Christian students and Christian doctrine. Sexual deviancy in violation of the Sixth Commandment was being promoted in the classroom. Meanwhile, parents thought their kids were getting a Christian education and environment.
All of this is to say that this “wokeness” is really nothing new. This was not just sprung on CUW. We owe a debt of gratitude to the Rev. Dr. Gregory Schulz for blowing the whistle to let the church - the owners of the institution - know what is going on. Past administrations have compromised with the world, put on blinders, and allowed a Luciferian worldview to have its way in our church schools. And the groundwork was laid a long time ago in a blitzkrieg against our Christian worldview.
Grace Beane commented on Dr. Scaer’s Facebook post:
“I just learned about SEL this week and that it is the larger agenda behind CRT. You might be interested in this long, 9 part article about it. Here is the link to the introduction. https://www.coreysdigs.com/.../alert-2030-psychological.../”
Once again, here is that link.
Note: Dr. Scaer didn’t ask this to be published in Gottesblog. My quoting of him is not intended to indicate that he endorses Gottesdienst. I’m simply quoting what he wrote publicly, and believe it to be an important observation.