The Enemy Gets It. Do You?

..the battle for mankind’s future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizer of a new faith; a religion of humanity…utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever subject they teach.

The Humanist Magazine – Jan/Feb 1983 Issue

That was 1983. Have Christian leaders and pastors caught up yet? Do they get the power of educating the next generation? They have the pulpit once a week, and even then they send the children out to help the adults enjoy the service more provide ‘age-appropriate’ learning. The humanists are preaching to their children every day in school, and the mentally unstable and degenerates are preaching to them in their spare time on social media. What chance do you think they have? We need to develop a Christian counter-culture. That’s more than just church on Sunday. It means starting our own schools and training institutes and choosing for our children to engage in more useful activities that build up their faith. Get your kids out of government schools. Get them off social media. Get them into theologically robust study and train them up in worldview. Spend time with them developing the relationship you will need to steer them through this chaos and get them to adulthood unscathed and ready for taking back this culture for Christ.

Child Sacrifice in NZ

Last year, politicians from all political persuasions voted for the Abortion Legislation Act 2020 which decriminalised abortion. 94 voted for decriminalisation and only 23 voted against it. You can see the roll of shame here. It includes all of NZ First (that bastion of conservatism), all of the Greens, as well as Act (David Seymour was at that stage their only MP), as well as 42 out of Labour’s 46 MPs and 33 out of National’s 52 MPs.

Voice for Life has recently written on the case of a baby being born in a New Zealand hospital after an unsuccessful late-term abortion. The baby was then “left gasping without medical assistance for two hours before dying.” Why was the baby aborted? The mother had “financial and housing issues”. And how many people in NZ want to adopt and cannot? Unfortunately, it sounds as if this is not even a one-off, as the healthcare student who passed this information on said that this sort of situation is not uncommon and that “in these situations, the baby is just left to die.”

Why is this not in the mainstream media? Why is there not outrage over this? Because the secular New Zealand elite does not care. They want to hide their blood-stained hands. Despite Ardern’s constant mothering and telling us to “be kind”, we are dealing with callous leaders, who having being warned about the possibility of this very thing happening, refused National MP Simon O’Connor’s Supplementary Order Paper that would have made it a legal requirement to provide appropriate medical care and treatment to a child born alive in the event of an unsuccessful abortion.

But Christ is king. He rules the earth, and these politicians who have shaken their fists at his law must repent or suffer his wrath. Already they are under his curse of judgment. Hands that shed innocent blood are one of the seven things the Lord hates according to Proverbs 6:17. Our God is the protector of the innocent and those behind this law and these actions will not go unpunished. All those involved in this depravity must kiss the Son in repentance or be prepared to be part of his footstall.

Yet even more is going on here. The secularist worships the material world rather than the Creator. These people have no hope. They destroy their offspring for the sake of their economic prosperity and convenience, just like the ancient Canaanites sacrificed their children to Molech. In this despicable evil lie the seeds of their own destruction. While they snuff out their future, we who worship Christ and look forward to his reign on this earth will be fruitful and multiply. We will inherit the earth.

In the meantime as we look forward to this day, let us stand up for the rights of the innocent. Go here to sign Voice for Life’s petition to repeal Labour’s Abortion Legislation Act.

An Invitation to Your Mission

One of the issues I have thought through a lot in recent years is the place of a man in the church and the kingdom. Too often, for lots of men, the church seems ‘ho-hum’ and irrelevant. One of the reasons for this is that the role of men in the world is often denigrated. I’ve heard too many sermons that suggest serving Christ could mean dropping more of your vocational work to help in institutional church ministry. Other sermons critique wealth and suggest saving is not trusting God despite God calling men to provide for their families. I’ve seen videos of men at church valuing their role as a doctor only because it means they can fund ‘ministry’ in other parts of the world. Often sermons use examples of people in ‘full time Christian ministry’ (a phrase I find frustrating) as positive examples of Christian sacrifice. Rarely, if ever, are the laity and their ordinary lives looked upon as examples of godliness in Christ’s kingdom.

The problem with all of this is that it ignores core truths about masculinity in Scripture. While I am aware of some of the key issues with Wild at Heart by John Eldredge, there is a certain amount of truth in his diagnosis. One of his core arguments is that men are made for adventure and battles and a beauty. I might not put it in exactly those terms, but I do think Scripture teaches us that Adam was made for dominion. He was to go out into God’s earth and take dominion. He was designed to image God as he took what God had made and in an analogous way to God, fill up emptiness and give it shape.

Here’s how Eldridge puts it. Most men think they are simply here on earth to kill time – and it’s killing them. But the truth is precisely the opposite. The secret longing of your heart, whether it’s to build a boat and sail it, to write a symphony and play it, to plant a field and care for it – those are the things you were made to do. That’s what you’re here for. We are designed for dominion, and in Christ we are called to work to extend Christ’s lordship to the areas of his world that we touch. But too often we feel denigrated and tarred as ‘worldly’ for wanting to do these things. What we need to hear is the call that Christ lays upon every man to get out there and subdue his sphere of influence for Christ. This is the way you as a man are Christ’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do good works. We need to be encouraged to wage war in this world – not with worldly weapons, but to take every thought captive as we seek to demolish the strongholds of Christ’s enemies in the arenas we have been called. That’s a lot more encouraging than to hear that most of our lives are irrelevant except for the times we are at church helping out.

The Necessity of Patriarchy

We train boys to be men. If you believe that the Church, the nation, and what is left of Western culture and civilization can be revived or rebuilt without the leadership of men, I suggest that you take an honest look at what happens when men retreat from the public square. You do not get rule by women. You get anarchy – social chaos that requires the vast machinery of state control to manage, control that enters into a host-parasite relationship with the chaos itself, much to the destruction of true liberty and the flourishing of communities…

If you do not raise men to be fathers – not just progenitors of children, but fathers in the full sense implied by a phrase like “city fathers” – they will not therefore become compliant and gentle mothers. They will either drag out their days in ennui and desperation or go very bad, very fast. Nor will they lack for women, and plenty of them too, who will be attracted to the dangerous man, the rebel, the leader of the gang. The alternative to rule by fathers, which is what patriarchy means, is male domination in the form of a police state or in the persons of men outside the law.

ANTHONY ESOLEN FROM “OUT OF THE ASHES”

Christ and Culture

The Bible clearly teaches that Christ is Lord. He reigns. He is the universal king, the King of kings and Lord of lords. All authority in heaven and on earth belongs to him. Right now, he is acting throughout the world as he slowly but surely makes every enemy into a footstall. And yet sometimes you’d be forgiven for thinking that Christians didn’t believe this. We have ceded just about every bit of the public sphere to the enemies of Christ and acted if Christ’s lordship applies to our ‘hearts’ alone. We’ve acted as if the kingdom of Christ is an imaginary realm that we access when we die. But at least we’ve invited Jesus into our hearts though!

What happened to the conquering king? What happened to “Jesus shall reign where’er the sun does its successive journeys run, his kingdom stretch from shore to shore, till moons shall wax and wane no more”? Instead, we sing about running to his arms and how ‘nothing compares to his embrace.’ We’ve given up the majestic truth of Christ’s authority and gradual conquering of the nations and his enemies for an insipid private relational realm.

It is time evangelical Christians gained a renewed understanding of the truth of Christ’s lordship and its implications for culture. As education is my particular interest and field of expertise, I will briefly describe two implications of Christ’s lordship for education.

Firstly, Christians, and particularly Christian pastors and leaders, must wake up to the truth that education is not something neutral. It does not sit outside of Christ’s kingdom. Nothing does. And if Christ is Lord of all, there is an imperative for us to train our children up to recognise his kingly authority over every single atom in this universe. That means Christians cannot but be supportive of a truly Christian education, by which I do not mean a basically secular education with a prayer to start the day and a worship assembly once a week. No, I mean we must support an education that trains children to understand everything from a Christian perspective. Christ must be recognised as lord of all – economics, politics, science, history, mathematics and language. If this is true, we must evacuate our children from the government schools which do not recognise Christ’s lordship but teach rather the lordship of demos. Our children cannot hope to learn Christ’s lordship from pagans who deny it.

Secondly, since Christ is indeed Lord, a truly Christian education will reflect the actual structure of reality in a way that false worldviews cannot. Therefore, a truly Christian education will be superior to what is offered by those who deny Christ’s lordship. Christians should fund and run the very best educational institutions in the world. We should be the leaders in providing a first-class education. People should look at what we are doing, and though they deny Christ’s lordship, they should want their children to be trained by us. And that is what we do see in Christian schools which unashamedly provide a truly Christian worldview education.

Now imagine if this were multiplied throughout the West. Imagine if all supposedly Christian schools actually taught and recognised Christ’s lordship. Imagine if Christian film-makers and storytellers, and IT specialists and scientists and philosophers self-consciously acknowledged Christ’s lordship in their field and sought to apply it. Imagine the impact Christianity will again have when we get it back out into the public sphere.

Unteach Racism – Module 3 – Low Expectations

In previous articles, we have investigated the brand new app that The Human Rights Commission and The Teaching Council of Aotearoa New Zealand have put together. The first module was an introductory one and contained the usual fallacy of assuming disparities in ethnic outcomes are caused by racism. In module 2 we were presented with the issue of low self-belief which we were led to believe was caused by teachers and schools. Today we look at module 3 and low expectations.

From the outset, I had more hope for this module. It’s a well-known truth that teacher expectations are extremely significant in the learning process. There has been significant study into this and a psychological phenomenon known as the Pygmalion effect has been noticed. Essentially, the idea is that learners internalise the expectations their teachers have for them. If a teacher has high expectations for a particular child, the child will rise to meet those expectations, and conversely, if a teacher has low expectations for a child, they will sink to meet those expectations. One classic study gave teachers a class that was described as containing extremely gifted students. Teachers were told who these students were. At the conclusion of the study, these students had fared the best. What the teachers didn’t know, was that these ‘gifted students’ were selected at random, and were ordinary children. So, low expectations and high expectations from teachers and our educational system do matter. More on this later, but back to the module for now.

We are initially presented with a quote. Studies have shown that Māori students recognise when teachers have low expectations for them and so put in less effort than they do for teachers who have high expectations for them. We are then reminded of the possibility of implicit bias. It is, we are told, important that we ‘heighten our awareness of these biases.’ These implicit biases may be impacting our view of our students and therefore limiting them. To determine whether we have implicit biases we are then directed to an American Implicit Association Test. The test begins by getting you to identify dark and light faces that come up on your screen, pushing a key with your left hand for light skin and a key with your right hand for dark-skinned. Next, we are presented with good words and bad words and have to sort them out likewise. After this things are mixed up with faces and words appearing. Then various combinations are made so that the person taking the test is thoroughly confused.

What does this supposedly prove? An implicit preference for Light Skinned People relative to Dark Skinned People is assumed if the test subject is faster to sort words when ‘Light Skinned People’ and ‘Good’ share a button relative to when ‘Dark Skinned People’ and ‘Good’ share a button. In the interests of full disclosure, when I sat the test this on two different occasions this week, I came out as supposedly having a slight automatic preference for Dark Skinned People over Light Skinned People. I am not aware of any such bias in my teaching practice.

To begin with, what is really being measured here? Might it just measure familiarity? We tend to find people we are around all the time better looking and tend to associate them with ‘good’ just because they are familiar. But does this mean in a classroom situation we would unconsciously have lower expectations for those who are less familiar? I am not sure this follows at all. It might be equally likely that we expect more of them. It’s not at all clear to me what the test ultimately proves.

Realistically in 21st century New Zealand, there would not be many teachers who unconsciously expect less from a darker (or lighter) face. I think we are too multicultural for that to be a reality. Our actual experience as teachers would counter this supposed implicit bias. For example, my teaching experience has been in classes where children with lighter skin are a distinct minority. Do I expect more or less from them than I do from the many different darker-skinned ethnicities I have taught? I doubt it. I have taught high achievers from many different ethnicities. I do not bring expectations into classes I teach based on skin colour, and I suspect few teachers do despite the absurd and unsupported claims of people like Whetu Cormick who suggests many New Zealand universities are “pumping out teachers and many of them are biased, they discriminate and they are racist.”

Nonetheless, I do believe low expectations are having a negative impact on Maori and Pacific education. The irony is that it is not the conservative teachers, those who oppose the ‘Treaty Partnership’ nonsense being foisted upon the education sector, those critiquing the proposed new history curriculum, those critiquing the vacuous New Zealand curriculum and calling for more stringent standards, or those calling for an end to race-based entry into tertiary courses who have lower expectations for some learners. No, we are the ones who expect high standards from all our learners. We are not the racists.

The very people who have low expectations for Maori and Pacific learners are those putting together modules like Unteach Racism – the Teacher’s Council and many of the ‘elites’ controlling our education system. Let me give four brief examples of the low expectations I see in education. To begin with, let’s take our friend Whetu Cormick, former President of the NZ Principals’ Association. In 2019, in a response to a press release from The New Zealand Initiative critical of New Zealand’s education, Whetu Cormick suggested that what we need is a curriculum that is relevant to the community. He wasn’t worried that many New Zealanders didn’t know the names of the continents. If a kid in Bluff cares more about muttonbirds than continents, that’s what he should learn about says Cormick. So condemning a child to ignorance is OK as long as he studies what his culture is interested in. That’s low expectations.

We also see the tyranny of low expectations in the public schools that extirpate any books of the Western canon from their English literature courses and encourage children to choose books that they can ‘relate to’ as if brown children are incapable of relating to people of the past in the same way Pakeha children can. Surely Shakespeare is foreign to anyone living in 21st century New Zealand, but the riches we can glean from his study of human nature transcend culture and time.

Again we see low expectations in this ridiculous notion that to celebrate culture we must always have children dressing up in cultural garb and performing. If that is taking children out of academic learning time, which it so often is, we are short-selling those children academically. Schools should not be about teaching children their culture – that’s the job of the family. Schools are there to provide what family usually cannot – an academic pathway to success.

Finally, let’s not forget, the low expectations of thinking academic learning has to in some way relate to Tikanga Maori. You know, the typical nonsense that a teacher must relate all his lessons to the children’s cultural background. How does one relate differential calculus, or inorganic Chemistry to Maori culture – or any culture for that matter? Are we not humans, and isn’t investigating the world and seeking to understand its complexity and design a part of our human nature? Isn’t that larger than our own particular culture?

The truth of the matter is this: the path to wealth and success for many children in poorer families is not through focussing on their own community values and culture. In some cases, these values are precisely what is causing or exacerbating poverty. Rather, education should enable all our children to access the riches of the wider community. Education is not about keeping our children comfortably coddled in the culture and community they grew up in. Rather we need to be offering all our children the treasures of millennia of Western Civilization (and the many cultures and that have contributed to this). Let’s not sell our children’s birthright for a racist mess of pottage. Let’s give all our children their birthright as citizens of a Western democracy.

Masculinity

…we must cease the destructive chatter about “gender roles,” as if they were thoroughly arbitrary and not built upon nature….A role is something we pick up as actors, and we can exchange one role for another. A man can act like a dog, but not very well, because in fact he is not a dog. A man can act like a woman, but not very well, because in fact he is not a woman. When a man is a man, he is not simply playing a role. He is fulfilling his being.

Anthony Esolen in “Out of the Ashes”

Unteach Racism – Module 2 – Low Self Belief

In our previous post, we evaluated the first module of Unteach Racism, finding it to be worthy of an F- grade. Today we are moving on to module 2 entitled “Low Self Belief”. We come to this second module with lower expectations given the pure unadulterated manure we found in the first module.

The goals of the second module are to introduce the concept of intrapersonal racism and explore “learner voice and experience of low self-belief and internalised racism”. For those of you who don’t see everything through the lens of racism, otherwise known as normal and unwarped human beings, you may be unaware of some of the language here. You’re probably busy working hard earning an income to feed your loved ones rather than stealing taxpayer money to produce divisive drivel being commissioned by the government to investigate important issues facing us all. So, you ignorant rubes, intrapersonal racism (also called internalised racism) is racism taken on board about one’s own race.

So where are we supposed to see this intrapersonal racism? It apparently occurs when people “accept society’s negative beliefs about their own culture.” Apparently, it happens through constant exposure to a negative view of your own particular race. You know, when society constantly presents you with a negative racial stereotype.

Now, readers, I know what your wicked hearts are thinking already before you say it. You are thinking to yourself “Oh great! Someone has finally seen the danger of the elites and media constantly banging on about white people and their supposed privilege! That’s sure to lead to internalised racism,” I suggest you settle down you racist bigots. That’s not going to lead to intrapersonal racism. Honestly, what were you thinking?! You need to read more academics. It’s quite simple really. Those people are white. They can’t help but be racist, except they never experience intrapersonal racism. Just because. So shut up now and don’t ask any more questions or I’ll report you to the Teaching Council. Racism is bad, white people do it and never suffer it. Intrapersonal racism is bad, white people cause it but never suffer it.

So who experiences this terrible intrapersonal racism? Did you say Maori? Well done! Come to the head of the class you genius…unless of course, you are a white male. In which case just shut up. So according to our beneficent overlords at the Teaching Council of Aotearoa NZ, it is up to teachers to help lift the ‘limits society is causing our learners to place on themselves through internalised, intrapersonal racism.’

What limits are we talking about here? Is it the limit of assuming that Maori children need to be focussing on cultural activities like kapa haka as if this is what education is centred around? Because as any teacher who subjects themselves to the tripe put out by every trendy mainstream educational publication like the Education Gazette will tell you, just about every article on Maori education is accompanied with photos of Maori in kapa haka and cultural garb as if this is what culturally appropriate education for Maori looks like – limiting them to dancing and singing. Is that the kind of limit we are talking about? No of course not. That is helping Maori achieve excellence apparently. Let me quote from a particularly egregious example of this mindset from the Education Gazette. Here kapa haka teacher Brad is quoted as saying, “Our children are extraordinary, They’re doing genealogy, mathematics, social studies, performance arts – all on stage,” and later he denigrates the “solution of one teacher, one subject, one way of delivering.” He says, “Imagine if you could box this up – kapa haka – and place it into schools.” Yes, imagine what a lower GDP would look like for our country….but on the upside, at least we could all enjoy ourselves performing on stage. So is this thinking a limit that society is causing our learners to place on themselves? No of course not! That’s how we will improve education for Maori you racist morons. As we encourage more kapa haka our students’ understanding of complex calculus, biology and chemistry will increase exponentially leading to more Maori in engineering and science careers.

So what is it you ask? What limits is society causing learners to place on themselves? Are they the limits caused by accepting Maori truancy and our leaders blaming it on schools not making their programmes desirable? Or perhaps it is the limit of government policy that encourages fatherless homes by sanctioning all forms of ‘family‘? Maybe you are thinking about drug addiction and alcohol dependency? What about gangs? Perhaps these are things which cause learners to place limits on themselves. Well if you were considering those things, the new hate speech laws can’t come quickly enough. People like you should be locked up permanently.

It’s quite clear that the way society causes our Maori (or ethnic minority) learners to place limits on themselves is through our racist teachers. It is our racist teachers who place these limits on otherwise angelic students who come from loving family backgrounds with parents who encourage their children to study hard each night and attend school regularly with full bellies.

Evidence? All the evidence we need for this is in listening to student ‘voice’. Here’s how one ruined child describes his experience. “We feel like we are failing when we are constantly reminded that we are not doing well – Principal use to bring out all these graphs to show us how we are failing, and it would just piss us off.” I find it surprising that a principal would show graphs comparing achievement of different ethnicities. However, it seems odd to me that one would remain “pissed off” with not doing well. I remember a teacher I had who treated me very poorly and more or less insinuated I was no good at the subject. I was upset and angry. So I knuckled down and went on to kick some butt in that subject.

Here’s another example of student voice. “I don’t get a chance to go to school. I always get suspended first week of term. I’m not sure why.” This one is intriguing. Evidently, the racist teachers and principal and school boards conspire against this poor victim of racism. He innocently arrives at school on the first day of term, but no matter how well he behaves, the school has it in for him. He’ll be gone by Friday. Absolutely crystal clear case of racism. He might not have any idea of why he was suspended, but if we have our biases removed, we should all be able to surmise it’s due to racial bias.

Let’s look at one last example of student voice. “Im real good at maths but my teacher just thinks im stupid so never gave me any time cept to get me n trouble. But if you are a Pakeha its all good.” Well our friend here might be good at Maths, but it’s doubtful the same could be said of his versatility in English. Again this is a clear case of racism. The teacher spends no time with him, because the teacher is racist. It’s not that the teacher is spending time with students who are struggling with maths rather than those who are good at it. No, it’s clearly racism. We see this in the biased way the teacher deals with this student. He deliberately ‘gets the child in trouble.’ Again we have a case of an innocent young man quietly working on factorising his quadratic equations in class, and the teacher deliberately causes trouble for him. Without a doubt it’s racism.

So, dear racist readers. It is now totally clear that New Zealand teachers are responsible for placing limits on Maori and ethnic minority students. No way is this a case of teenage students not liking their teacher and thinking the world is against them. That’s definitely not a thing. These quotes prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that our whole system of education is racist to its very white bones. Teachers are causing students to place limits on themselves.

The module sums up the way our school system and teachers place limits on Maori and ethnic minorities. Teachers do this in five main ways. Firstly Maori culture is not valued. One Maori student complains that this is demonstrated in the way Maori children are always asked to perform kapa haka when visitors attend the school but their culture is ignored the rest of the time. Clearly, this is oppression. Because of course we teachers are always asking our white children to perform highland dancing when dignitaries arrive at the school, and the rest of the time we are focussing on ‘white’ culture in the classroom – you know – drinking cups of tea, saying ‘jolly good show’, listening to classical music all while encouraging the colonising of backward nations to civilise them. Secondly, our racist teaching force negatively stereotypes students and thinks the worst of them. Every teacher I know looks at their class and thinks, “Ok so I’ve got five Maori kids in this class. Gee I better keep an eye on them, they’ll probably be passing weed and stealing my stationery.” Thirdly we apparently deliberately make children feel stupid and dumb. This totally rings true, doesn’t it? Every teacher I know refuses to treat children as individuals, but thinks of them according to their group identity and then treats them like that. Fourthly we expect them to fail. That’s why every teacher gets into teaching. For the perverse enjoyment of seeing children fail. We are excited to promote ethnic inequality in the classroom. The truth is finally out! No way do we offer free after school tutorials to struggling students in order to assist them to grow and develop in their learning. And if we did, we’d only invite the Pakeha and Asian kids. Finally, teachers do their best to ensure Maori and ethnic minority students feel excluded. Teachers deliberately engineer their classes to exclude ethnic minorities. They want them to feel as uncomfortable as possible so they will just stop coming.

Makes you think that we’d be better off without teachers really. Or maybe the Teaching Council of Aotearoa New Zealand needs to be defunded so that good teachers can get on with their jobs without being insulted with this bilge.

Bring Back Beauty

Our young people are not only starved for nature. They are starved for beauty. Everywhere they turn, their eyes fall upon what is drab or garish: their schools, their music, new books for sale, the fast-food joint, a baseball stadium (where you can hardly talk to the fan sitting next to you, for the noise roaring out at you from the loudspeakers), and, of course, their churches. Saint Paul wanted to be all things to all men, to save some (1 Corinthians 9:22). We have applied his dictum to what surrounds us. We are drab with the drab, garish with the garish, inane with the inane, and we save nobody at all.

Anthony Esolen from “Out of the Ashes”