In 2008, in his book Outliers, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell introduced a new concept into the American psyche. The “10,000-Hour-Rule” suggests that if you wish to truly excel in any field of endeavor, you need to dedicate 10,000 hours of focused and targeted practice, study and development.

Successful musicians, athletes, artists, lawyers, actors, doctors, etc. have all given witness to investing this level of commitment into their craft.

According to the Center for Public Education, most states require between 175 and 180 days of school and/or between 900 and 1,000 hours of instructional time per year, depending on the grade level. Taking the lower number of 900 annual hours, this calculates to 10,800 hours of seat instruction for students enrolled in a government school.

Every educator is seeking to utilize those 10,800 hours to their maximum benefit.

Owning the Child’s Time

No education is ideologically neutral.

Every system of education is training a student to embrace a particular set of beliefs and values (and behaviors). To train someone towards a predictable outcome involves many factors, but the most significant (by far) is time. To persuade someone towards an ideology, one must have access to the student.

This is why governmental compulsory attendance laws were deemed to be necessary by those who founded the government school system. They realized that whoever owned the child’s time would eventually own the child.

The Questions of Education

No information is ultimately presented in a values-free vacuum.

There are certain assumptions, or presuppositions, that exist as prime axioms that students are expected to simply receive and accept (without questioning or challenging consciously). Some of these questions include:

Where did we all come from?

What is right and wrong?

Who determines morality for a society?

Is anything objectively good or evil?

What is the purpose of knowledge and learning?

What is my responsibility to society?

Is humankind emerging and improving (social evolution)?

What is the value of human life?

Is the universe simply material or is there a metaphysical reality as well?

While schools do not always answer these questions overtly, they subtly and covertly assign weight to certain views on these matters while diminishing others. In this way a child is conditioned, over time, to embrace one set of values over another.

Who is Responsible for Values?

Rarely do people ever stop to consider who should be responsible for the shaping of a child’s values.

It is naturally assumed (because of social conditioning) that it should be the civil government through the so-called “public” schools. But it is not the values of the “public” that get promoted in these schools (because there is no such thing as a public moral consensus). Some values are promoted, and some values are suppressed.

There are many viewpoints to which you personally do not agree. This is one of the problems inherent in government-controlled schools. As soon as beliefs that are considered to be anathema are being taught at taxpayer expense, education ceases to be for the common good.

The First Amendment recognizes the right of American citizens to have freedom of speech and freedom of religion. This means people are allowed to hold to views we don’t. But when the government dominates the means by which values are transferred to the youth of society, we quickly risk totalitarianism.

Decentralize Education

This is why education is best controlled by parents, not bureaucrats.

As we all know, the proverbial twig tends to stay bent in the direction to which it is inclined in one’s youth (see Proverbs 22:6). Increasingly, our American youth are being trained into irrationality, gender dysphoria, moral relativism, socialism, and other leftist and progressive ideals.

The only way we can hope to have a future that includes our time-honored and hard-won liberties is if students can escape the indoctrination centers we call “public schools.”

In what do you want your child to become an expert? Do you want him or her to learn the values of sacrifice and diligence? What about moral restraint, logical thinking, financial responsibility, humility, honesty, integrity, and perseverance? These lessons do not spring from atheism and social evolution. They come from an objective framework of morality that is only possible if there is a universal moral law; and that is only possible when we acknowledge a universal Moral Law Giver.

Government schools not only do not acknowledge this Supreme Being, but they also undermine His existence by ignoring Him and pretending He is not there.

If you want your children to embrace transcendent ethical values, you need to take full and complete responsibility for passing them on to your children. The government schools will not only NOT pass on these values, but they will also do everything they can to undermine them.

Yes, this will take a lot of time and even financial sacrifice, but previous generations of Americans recognized that anything of value required thinking past our own immediate comfort and convenience. It’s time to bring education home and put parents in charge. Only then can society escape the future tyranny of government control of our society.

It’s time to buy back those 10,800 hours of influence and use them to prepare our children to truly be wise and virtuous beings. Whoever controls education controls the future. What kind of future do you want to see in our land?

It will primarily be determined by whoever is doing the actual teaching of our children.

Hopefully, that will be you, not the government.