At the dawn of my youth, when I was eighteen, I came across a sci-fi novel. I can’t recall the author or the title now. The plot of the novel was as follows: an astronaut goes on a mission into space and enters hyperspace, where something amazing happens to the flow of time. One year on the spaceship equals a hundred years on Earth. The astronaut returns to his home planet while he’s still young and finds out that people have changed dramatically. The society changed once again since his last visit to Earth. A certain world government decided that the planet was overpopulated. Therefore, it banned heterosexual relations (male-female) and made only homosexual relations “normal”. The normal heterosexual marriages that were banned by the world government were dubbed abnormal. As for the children, the authorities in the novel decided to grow them in vitro. “What an abomination,” I thought to myself and put the book aside. As I look at what is happening in the world, I recall that novel time and time again…
That’s just some kind of a side note. I would like to use this article to urge parents to be careful with God’s help on the eve of September 1. I believe we should understand that school (any school in any state) is not only a house of knowledge and education, but also a powerful ideological tool. Any ruling party has its own ideology, which it seeks to promote among the public and especially among the immature young generation, the proverbial tabula rasa. Why do they draft young men into the military when they are eighteen? The young recruits are grown up physically but their minds are still childish. One can mold them into the right shape, like clay. Of course, George Orwell’s works represent an exaggeration of social problems: they are hyperbolized to make it possible to see them as if under a microscope. Still, those problems do exist. Some political forces will try to use government funding to plant the ideas they need in the heads of the younger generation so as (in the language of a well-known fable) to put a ring in the bull’s nose and a rope in it and lead it where the master wants it to go. Ideology that emerges in teachers’ manuals and programs is at odds with Christian ethics sometimes, like in China today. The Chinese government has been engaged in another round of struggle against faith in God and virtually all religions. Teachers in Chinese schools say in class that Christianity is evil. There have been cases of children in Christian families coming home from schools and burning or tearing up Christian books.
Europe also has its problems, e. g., gender policies, the introduction of homosexual ideology, religious omnivorousness, the cult of selfishness and consumerism, as well as promiscuity under the guise of sexual education.
Therefore, dear brothers and sisters, dear parents, we must not fall asleep and linger in the spiritual upbringing of a child. The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness! (Matthew 6:22-23). Let us take a spiritual sieve made up of the commandments of the Lord and sift through all the information that comes to our children, with God’s help.
In fact, education is not merely accumulation of knowledge. First of all, education is about being shaped in the image and likeness of God. If a child has access to God and goes along the path that leads him to God, he will have everything else, too. No matter how you spin it, Saint Basil the Great was right a thousand times: the result of keeping God’s commandments is eternal life, and the result of breaking God’s commandments is eternal death. That is the bedrock and the backbone of education and parenting!
Translated by The Catalogue of Good Deeds
