Friday, March 2, 2012

Sacrifices to Parental Ambition and Pride: the new molechs?

And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech… -- Leviticus 18:21 (KJ)
Many parents, feeling that it puts their kids on the "fast track," support school policies that turn the children’s education into counterproductive drudgery. How much more convenient it is to have the school dump hours of homework on our kids than to have to deal with them ourselves in our otherwise ever more scarce "free" time. Why not rid the curriculum of art, music, drama and recess in order to prep the students for standardized testing?

But what is a kid’s childhood worth if it pleases our own ambition to destroy it? The kids, of course, resist our subversions by cheating, plagiarizing and turning off in even the “best” schools. So far as their education is concerned, they are “burned out” before they finish adolescence.

In Genesis 22, Abraham is commanded to, then restrained, from offering Isaac as a burned sacrifice. Some biblical scholars take this story to indicate the renunciation by Israel of the ancient practice of child sacrifice, commonly done in times of extremity by a variety of peoples.

We have reverted to that ancient practice of child sacrifice; not physically, perhaps, but psychologically and spiritually. But the gods we sacrifice our children to are unworthy ones: our own ambition, our own self-aggrandizement, our own reputation.


To continue this train of thought, use this hyperlink Tracking in Schools

Cordially

--- EGR