losing the next generation

Greetings from the fellowship of believers at the Red Roof Church in Bulverde,  Texas.  I’m Lee Harder, the senior pastor at St. Paul, wishing you God’s blessings and an invitation to join us as we worship our Lord, Jesus Christ.  Our fellowship gathers for worship every Sunday morning at 8:30 AM for a more traditional style of worship and at 10:45 AM for a contemporary flavor.  We’d love to have you join our family.  Check out our website at redroofchurch.org and learn more about us.

I may have to give up looking at the news headlines and Facebook because they are beginning to depress me.  Oh, I don’t mean the “bad news” because there’s always some of that and there’s good news, too.  No, I’m thinking of the reports that keep popping up about what our younger generation is and isn’t doing.

Thanks to my own grandchildren, I am painfully aware that our children are not being taught cursive in our learning institutions (we called it “writing” when I was in school as opposed to “printing”).  Further evidence was provided by my wife when she informed me that the students in her 5th & 6th grade church school class couldn’t “write” their names.  They could only print them out.

I suppose not knowing how to write (cursive) isn’t the end of the world. However, as I recall, most of our historical documents (locally, state, nationally & internationally) were written out, you know, in cursive.  If you can’t write or read it, doesn’t that imply the potential loss of history for posterity, besides one can’t “sign” (usually requiring cursive) a legal document.  Although I imagine this fits in with today’s trend in re-writing (probably re-printing) history.

Truth isn’t nearly as important as making history socially correct, which also means condemning the past based on today’s moral and social standards.  For now, I’ll refrain from commenting on the apparent inability to write (in this case print) the king’s English, you know, stuff like punctuation, sentence structure, and grammar.

Yet, the real killer is what our learning institutions (schools) are doing to math.  I saw it with my own kids decades ago when they brought home “new math.”  Back then there was a lot to do with “guessing” or “estimating” the answer, not to mention some puzzling methods of getting to an answer.  Apparently, the answer (pardon me, the right answer) didn’t matter as much as following the new way of arriving at an answer, sometimes called a guesstimate.  Close was good enough.  I don’t recall the teachers of my day allowing a “close” answer as satisfactory.

However, this week I saw on Facebook a comparison of our old fashioned math (adding, subtracting, multiplying & dividing) with the new math as taught in common core. It almost defies description. In the comparison, they solve a simple multiplication problem.  The old way was to rely on the multiplication  tables we learned as kids by memorizing until we could say them in our sleep.  Today’s equivalent involved diagrams.  The old way was done, coffee was brewed & a dog taken out for its duty while the new way plodded on.  There was an argument that it was a training session for kids versus an adult doing the problem.  True. I will not deny.  However, if this is the way these kids as adults are going to have to solve the problems of math, the world is in for a rude awakening.  It was the most ridiculous and time consuming method I have even been privileged to witness.  This is what our children are learning.

When one adds to that the new, revised and sanitized history, world and American, which portrays our founding fathers as evil and vile while the sources of socialism, totalitarianism, and communism in governments and empires as desirable, we got problems.  Nor should we forget the lack of English literature in the classics which provide a solid grounding in speech and language, again I repeat, we got problems.

And just so we don’t leave the church out, we no longer feel the need to have our children and youth possess a knowledge of what we believe as Christians (according to the Bible as opposed to some politically correct agenda) and why.

I’m not blaming the kids either. I’m blaming us for relaxing our standards to the point where we have none of much value.  Apparently, it isn’t important that we can talk and write correctly (it’s called communication) and use our minds to actually think, so long as we use the right emoji.  So pound sign (#) and hash tag that for what it’s worth.

But those are just my thoughts.
God bless and have a great week.
Pastor Lee