There are a lot of people proclaiming public schools as harmful - bastions of evil, intent on ruining innocent minds and brainwashing hearts. A lot of it can seem like just plain noise, but how much of it is true? What is truly going on in public schools? Is there actually anything going on, or are people just crying wolf?

Is it possible that our legislators are trying their best to make Illinois the California of the Midwest, without the mountains or beautiful weather? Our Governors, most certainly, are competing. Both have wildly inflated egos, both ignored their own directives during the height of the pandemic, and both have designs on the White House.

It seems like common sense: parents of school-aged children should know what their kids are being taught, what kinds of content are being made available to them, and how school officials are using their students’ private data. Even a few decades ago, there would have been a consensus among parents, educators, and legislators that moms and dads, not the public school system, are the primary decision-makers and responsible parties in the lives of their kids. But in the modern, dystopian American educational system, involved parents are now considered a threat to the self-proclaimed experts tasked with teaching our kids.

Why has our culture gotten so bad, so fast? This question has been posed by many of us in recent days: young adults looking at the world we’re about to step into and wondering how we’ll manage, grandparents trying to figure out why their sweet granddaughter wants to be called Bert, parents watching the government school system trash their child’s faith, and pastors, trying to lead their flock away from glittering worldly baubles.

There are a lot of people proclaiming public schools as harmful - bastions of evil, intent on ruining innocent minds and brainwashing hearts. Some of it can seem like just plain noise, but how much of it is true? What is truly going on in public schools? Is there actually anything going on, or are people just crying wolf? During the Village Church of Barrington’s seminar “Parenting in a Godless Culture: Educating Parents and Grandparents,” church elder David Cartwright answers this question by tracing the history of public schools.

There is an enormous threat to children from Social-Emotional Learning (SEL), and there is also a grave danger to the independence of private schools and homeschooling that comes from accepting government funding, warns education researcher Lisa Logan in this explosive interview. It is all part of a global agenda being pushed by the United Nations and UNESCO in particular.

Any parent knows that trying to raise children is difficult. Especially if you are trying to raise your kids in the nurture and admonition of the Lord in a post-Christian society, such as our own. Everywhere you turn it seems like the world is trying to destroy any semblance of innocence in the hearts and minds of the youngest in society. How is a parent supposed to compete when the world is so dark?

Parents will be held responsible by God for their children’s education, says the Bible. This was a view shared by the majority of America’s founders. But today there is a great defiance against this on the part of many in our educational establishment. Many leaders in the educational system seem to think they know better than the parents as to what should and should not be taught.

Why are so many public schools in Illinois keeping so many secrets from the public? Last August, Christopher Rufo disclosed that Lurie’s Children’s Hospital, unbeknownst to parents or the general public, was collaborating with Chicago area schools to promote “radical gender theory, trans activism, and sexually explicit materials in at least four Chicago-area public school systems: District 75, District 120, District 181, and District 204.” Three of these school districts are elementary districts and one is a high school district.

Holiness is a foreign topic for most people. Even Christians. We have a vague familiarity with the context in which it is usually found. First and foremost, we are told that God the Almighty is “holy.” As the Israelites were getting familiar with their Divine Deliverer, these words were given to them: “For I am the LORD your God, so you must consecrate yourselves and be holy because I am holy.” (Leviticus 11:44,  CSB) This is repeated three more times in Leviticus.

Dozens of government schools across Illinois have been unable to produce even one single student proficient in reading or math, according to new data from the Illinois State Board of Education. In hundreds of schools across the state, just 10 percent of children are proficient in the basics. And it is getting worse.

According to Plato the two most important questions for society is who will teach the children and what is taught to them. That was true 2,500 years ago and it is still true today. Sadly, today there simply is no agreement on who teaches the children and nothing but confusion and wildly different positions on what should be taught. Therein lies the greatest threat to children in our modern age.

To help you and your neighbors navigate this critical election, IFI has put together a list of 10 questions for school board candidates. We need your help to get them into the hands of the candidates and then out to voters. You can send these questionnaires to candidates via Facebook messenger, email or contact them by another means and ask them to answer and return the questionnaire.     

We've already given Stanford's Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative (EHLI) a word or two over their confused categories of "ableist language" and "racist language" but the horse we're beating is not quite dead yet. It's one thing to stigmatize normal phrases because their connotation or origin supposedly evoke offensive topics, as the Stanford harmful language list did with those two categories. It's another thing to stigmatize normal phrases because their grammatical structure evokes insensitivity. But believe it or not, academia at the highest level has managed to do just that with the advent of "person-first language."

It is simple: good people don't commit murder. Murderers do!  Multiple mass shootings over the last few years, and especially recently, have caused a great sense of frustration among citizens, yet the only message coming from some politicians is about reducing the number of guns in society. They never address the fundamental issue which is that guns in the hands of good people never cause a problem, and in fact often save lives. Yet law abiding citizens are always the target of Leftists’ gun control laws.