And y'all tell me if this quote sits well with you or not. Okay, this is talking about that whole egalitarian thing again. This guy says this, he says, talking about rewards. Quote, rewards are usually experienced as controlling, and we tend to recoil from situations where our autonomy has been diminished. We need to maintain a measure of control over our own destiny. to have some choice about what happens to us. When something interferes with the sense of self-determination, when, for example, we are simply told what we have to do and how and when to do it, various undesirable consequences will follow." End quote. What do you think of that? Exactly. Yeah. So the guy who quoted this, his name is Alfie Kahn. He's a He's big in the education world right now. He's big in the egalitarian education world. And that's what he said. So that's a brief summary of his thought in a nutshell. And autonomy, he praises autonomy. He said in the quote, we need to have some choice about what happens to us. And when something interferes with this sense of self-determination, for example, we're simply told what we have to do and how to do it, various undesirable consequences will follow. I haven't read that far in the book yet to know what those undesirable consequences are, but I don't know. So in other words, if there's ever a bar that you might like that it says, here is what is good, essentially, you're taking away a person's autonomy. Right, because they need the opportunity for themselves to determine their own bar. But there is still a bar, like in every... Well, you can't escape it. That's built into reality. Regardless if you... Even if you choose to deny God's bar, you still have a mental bar. Gravity still exists. Yeah. And undesirable consequences will follow if you don't adhere to that law. At first I thought you were just criticizing our system. I know, but then that got flipped real quick. Here's another one. Two general principles that might be thought of as the standards against which all praise should be measured. The first principle is self-determination. With every comment we make, and specifically every compliment we give, we need to ask whether we are helping that individual to feel a sense of control over his life. Are we encouraging him to make his own judgments about what constitutes a good performance or desirable action? Are we contributing to or at least preserving his ability to choose what kind of person to be? Or are we attempting to manipulate his behavior by getting him to think about whether he has met our criteria? There's just certain choices in life that my children are not allowed to make. You just can't. But you're encroaching upon their autonomy. I am. You've said this before about our school. We are indoctrinating. We are, no doubt. You can't escape indoctrination. Deuteronomy 6.6 happens. Yeah, for sure. So it wouldn't be a fair statement to say to a kid, you got this. They're struggling, but you say you got this. Well, it depends on what you mean when you say you got this. What do you mean by that? I believe you have the potential. Right. Yeah, that's a good thing. That's good. No, what if you would follow his mind, his doctrine there, you would say when he doesn't do well, well, you can go ahead and determine whether it's good for you to do this at all or not. You're encouraging them to achieve a certain level or standard. So he's saying that we shouldn't have those external standards for children, because that would encroach upon their potential. That can encroach upon their own individual decisions to decide what their own standard is. Having their own standard is the best. Autonomy is the ideal. That's what he's saying. It's totally humanistic. It's not Christian or godly in any way. He boils it down to the child's expectation, and then he says your expectation. He boils it down to only those two things. He does not reference the higher expectation of God. Right, but he is referencing his higher authority that he wants to follow, which is what? Himself. Man. Man is the measure. That's the problem. So we always appeal to a higher authority, but just who is that higher authority? For the Christian, it's God. I really don't think people really, we know that, they don't really believe this full out because you want things like, let's say gun control, that's a pretty popular thing right now that a lot of liberal people want. But you want to give children, like children, the right to discern and use reasoning they don't have yet. But you want to control adults who have technically more. You don't want to let children vote. You don't want to let them drive. Because they can't yet. They're not wise enough. So why do we want to let them make life choices? Deciding whether to be a boy or a girl. Right. That's not true. You don't really want that. Right. Well, and that's what I was saying earlier. Ideas have destinations. And no one really thinks of, they think this idea of letting them decide whether to be a boy or a girl is harmless. and it's actually going to help them and not hurt them, but they're not seeing where this idea is traveling. It's traveling to very undesirable consequences. Right, exactly. Right, they're rebelling against God. They're rebelling against the real higher authority. by kicking God off the throne in their own minds and putting themselves on it. That's exactly right. Yeah. So when we start saying your individual criteria for success, you're throwing out the window the criteria that God has given to you, that God requires for faithfulness. So no, it's faithfulness to God and his law that sets the standard for what success is. It's his standard. We're not to measure up to our own criteria. We're not to measure up to our own version of self-actualization. That's all psychology babble, doing that sort of thing. To say that man can determine what the standard is, we can't do that. That's humanism. The saying of humanism is that man is the measure. And it's unfaithful. It's unfaithful to God. It's unfaithful to our covenant head. And humanists want to establish a system where autonomy is established across the board, and it's unfaithful to God. And there's something else going on with this worldview of autonomy. As Alfie Kahn says here, it says, finally, a few words to administrators. I guess that's me. Asking teachers to reduce the salience of grades by changing their daily classroom practices is a stopgap measure. Ideally, end of term grades can and should be dispensed with as well. That means tossed out. Moreover, when teachers are left to de-emphasize grades on their own and only a few attempt to do so, students may be left with the message that some non-graded class or subject is less important than others where they're still marked. Well, duh. As with most other kinds of educational reform, change must be made at the school-wide, if not the district-wide level." So Khan is giving warnings saying, no matter what, you should never violate the autonomy of the student. And the interesting thing in all this is that he's telling us what to do. You are violating my autonomy by telling me what to do. Yeah, absolutely. You're telling me to violate my autonomy by telling the teachers to violate their autonomy. But students should have full autonomy. Yeah, exactly. People who can't be trusted to go to the bathroom by themselves. Exactly. Right. So, yeah, so he's not... I can't leave him in the car while I go pick up something from the counter. Right, exactly. So he's telling us what to do by saying these things. So does he know that undesirable consequences will follow? He said that in a couple paragraphs earlier. It says that you've got to, this can't just happen on a school-wide level. It's got to happen on a district-wide level. Top down. I would argue it has to happen even further than that, because if you push kids out the door not understanding where they're incompetent, or not understanding, not having any level of competence, then you've got to change the whole society as well. Because people can't get certain jobs. You've got a kid who passed with flying colors, quote unquote, and so he's viable for a job, but he's really not, because he doesn't know that he is, because he hasn't been taught so. Right. And we can see that going on, this mindset being pushed into every aspect of society, everywhere. We see it happening now. But the truth is, is that we're commanded to imitate God. We're not commanded to follow after these unfaithful teachings. And in Ephesians 5.1, we're told to be his children and to watch the way he works and to imitate him. And quite honestly, the way that God deals with his children is that he gives different gifts to one child than he gives to another. He gives different gifts to children. And the truth is, is that they steward and manage these gifts well, they'll be blessed in accordance to what they've been given. That's the truth. And we as educators and parents need to be about the business of helping our children to know where God has blessed them. That's what I was saying earlier. You know, has God blessed you in such a way that you're inclined toward this? Has God made you in such a way that you're inclined toward that? You know, are you gifted in this? Are you gifted in that? What are the areas in your life that you should be the most thankful? Because the areas that you've been gifted in is where you should be the most thankful for God for giving these gifts. Obviously, this is what you've given to me. Thank you. I don't deserve any gifts at all, first of all. So thank you for at least giving me these things. You know, thank you. And at the same time, we have to teach our kids, our students, our kids to be good stewards of what they've been given. You might have been given an amazing gift of mathematics, but if you're lazy, you're not going to see the fruits of that gift. You won't see the prosperity that comes through the hard work of honing in your gifts. You can't bury the talents that we've been given. So it's a matter of understanding what you've been giving and managing that wisely and faithfully in order to please the Lord. So egalitarianism, that's one assumption that all of us have in some way, shape or form. Another one is malicious compassion. That's what I call malicious compassion. It's described by a number of different sayings. It's like the love that kills. It's the, my little baby can't do no wrong. That sort of thing. Children will be children, kids will be kids. Or saying, I just love him too much to crack down on him. I don't wanna quench his spirit. I love him too much to spank him. Well, we'll get to those in a minute. But I'm just laying out the assumption that's pervasive in our world. Or I don't want my baby to miss her childhood. So she needs to sow her wild oats, I guess. Those types of things. So this disposition of protecting our little ones from discipline, whether it's behavioral discipline or academic discipline, that's hatred. That's hating our kids. when we do that. When we protect our young ones from loving discipline, it's basically just saying, I hate you. And you can go to hell. That's essentially what that's saying, because that sends them to hell. If you don't want them to be disciplined, you don't want them to work hard, you don't want them to know what it means to sweat, then you are suffocating your children. We're suffocating our students, and that's not loving them. And I think this comes out in a couple of different ways. One is academic hatred. And the other one is behavioral hatred. And academic hatred teaches the lesson that education's all about entertainment. I don't believe we really have this problem here at school. And really what I mean by that is that wisdom can really only be acquired only by playing games and having fun and appealing to children's sensibilities, that they'll be more engaged whenever you teach them something in a way that they can play, learn through play. There's some value to that. I'm not saying that you can't ever learn anything by playing. But I'm going to the extreme side to where the only way they're going to learn and the only way they're going to be engaged is through entertainment and never hard work. You know, sometimes education is just hard work. Reading is hard work. Writing is hard work. Studying is hard work. But if you go down this road, this idea of this malicious compassion, two things are going to happen. Number one, they're not going to get wisdom. They're not going to get wisdom. They're not going to accomplish what you want them to accomplish. Because wisdom and virtue and patience is only brought out through hard work. That's the only way you're going to get wisdom is through hard work. It's not brought out through always having fun. Having fun is easy for the flesh. It's easy for us to want to have fun. Hard work is not, and if you're trying to give wisdom only through entertainment, it's gonna backfire on us. Because you'll be lying to them about how the world works. Do we always play and have fun? Can we always play and have fun? No, we can't. The world is not all fun and games, and neither should it be. It's serious business. And so we have to let them learn early through hard work. Proverbs 2 says this, it says, my son, if thou will receive my words and hide my commandments with thee, so that thou incline thine ear unto wisdom and apply thine heart to understanding. Yea, if thy cryest after knowledge and liftest up thy voice for understanding, if thou seekest her as silver and searches for her as for hidden treasures, then shalt thou understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God. None of this sounds like fun. None of this sounds like fun. This sounds like hard work. Now, hard work can be fun. It can be, but it's not always. It's just not. This work of inclining the ear, being diligent to listen to your teacher all the time. You know, even when the subject matter that you're listening to her talk about does not interest you in the slightest. That's hard work. Applying the heart to it. Crying out desperately for wisdom. That's what he's saying here. The way to get wisdom is to cry out for it. Seek wisdom like silver. You know, silver's in the ground. And back then they didn't have excavators and skid loaders to get silver out of the ground. What you have to do is you have to get a shovel and a pickaxe and you have to sweat and dig. And that's hard work to mine ore, mine silver. You have to dig for it. That's hard work. And then it says, then through all of that hard work, through it as a means, the hard work is a means for this, then you'll fear the Lord. And then what is the fear of the Lord? The beginning of wisdom. This isn't even the wisdom yet. This is just the very beginning. Now that you've worked hard and you know how to work hard in your discipline, now the real wisdom learning will begin. It's only through hard work that you'll even be ready to start receiving wisdom. So that doesn't sound like entertainment to me. That just sounds like straight up hard work. But if it's all fun and games, you're really going to reap a reward for that if your entire life is just fiddling around? No, you won't. But hard work will reap a reward of righteousness and faithfulness to God. So we can apply it this way. Don't mollycoddle your children or your students. Like, you know, obviously evaluate whether, you know, if a class, sins by complaining about an assignment. In your own mind, evaluate, are the expectations too high? You do have to have the expectations set appropriately. You don't want to try to get them to attain things that they just don't have the maturity or the wisdom to attain yet. But it shouldn't be just the bar set super low to where everybody can get this. No, there has to be a good mixture. It has to be slightly above their reach to where they actually have to work for it. So that's good, and if we don't do that, if we only just entertain them and tickle their ears, that's hating them. That's academic hatred, okay? And then there's the behavioral hatred. How many of y'all, I know some of y'all don't have kids, but y'all sit with kids in church. Our church is full of kids, 150 of them, so I've heard, between the two locations. You know, we have kids that sit with us in the pews. And as parents, you know, I know as me starting out as a new parent, you know, almost 10 years ago, we were in, we were in Abbeville. So there weren't really any other kids to compare with. You know, my kids are sitting in church. There's no, there's nowhere else for them to go. There's 30 people in the room and, you know, two kids that are two little babies that are loud and don't know, to stop talking. This isn't the appropriate time to speak. And they're screaming. They're doing all of that. And we don't know. I'm looking over. Well, actually, I'm not even with Stacy. I'm up there preaching. And I'm looking at my kid just like, man, what do I do about this? So there was that. I'm like, well, there's not much else I can do. There's nowhere else for them to go. Then we come to Northside and we see all these other kids in the pew. And how many of us with kids have, like, kind of done a little comparison? Like, you know, those kids are really I think my kids, what are the expectations of how my kids are to act in church? This is just one example. Should I expect them to be absolutely silent with hands folded, attentively listening to Pastor Brandon as he says things they have no clue what he's talking about yet because they're five years old? talk a little bit or wiggle or move around, what do we normally do? We normally look to other kids in the church and see what the standard is and we normally measure ourselves up by that. That's not necessarily a good thing. And if we continuously try to compare ourselves and our kids by the other kids sitting in the room, that might be pretty bad for us. Because my kids can be, I'm just gonna throw this as an example, my kids can be absolute angels at Christchurch, Lafayette, but hypothetically, let me take them to Christchurch, Moscow, and see how they act. They might be little heathens compared to those children that sit in their piece. I don't know, I'm just throwing that as an example. I think we shouldn't be very secure with the way our kids behave in comparing them to other kids. What should our standard be in how our kids behave, whether it's in church or anywhere? It should be God's word, right? So we have to be careful of that. In our classrooms, we have to be careful of that. The temptation for me is, well, they may not be acting so great today, but at least they're not laughing at high. Those kids are way worse. And then we feel good about ourselves, even though I may not be forcing them to live up to the standard that's really there, the word of God. It's easy for us to compare and say that we're so much better than so-and-so. but we may still not be up to the standard. And so if we don't hold our students up to the standard of God's word, then we're hating them. That's behavioral hatred. And so we have to remember that. And now granted, God's word doesn't give nitty gritty specifics on how kids are to act in every situation. But generally speaking, we need to study and know the word of God enough to know generally where the line and the standard is. And that's going to be different for everybody. But I think in school, it's easy for us to say, well, at least our kids are better than them. And that's a temptation. And it kind of gets us off the hook. I don't have to drive them to a standard quite so much. And it makes us feel good about ourselves. But we can't do that. We have a standard that's outside of comparison. All right. Let's move on to the third assumptions, the last one The third assumption that we see in our schools that's wrong and unbiblical and unfaithful is self-esteem infatuation, this infatuation with self-esteem. And this is what I call education through flattery. Flattery is basically giving exaggerated praise, undue praise. It's giving a student or yourself, praise that's exaggerated. Now, in all this, if someone has really done well, we want to encourage them. We don't always want to, well, that's what you're supposed to do, you know. No, we want to encourage them. We want to say, great job. And when you say you got this and then they really do get it, man, you want to keep on the encouragement and let them know that you really did a great job. That's great. But if you were flattering in order to manipulate, or you're trying to flatter your class into submission, or flatter your class into obedience, or flatter them into self-fulfillment, or into self-esteem, or self-actualization, or to give them a positive self-image. That's hatred too. In the self-esteem movement at the foundation, there's this thing called Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. How many of you have heard of the Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs? It's illustrated like a pyramid, like a triangle. And on the hierarchy of needs, there are ground level needs. And in order to have the needs higher up on the pyramid fulfilled, the ones on the bottom have to be fulfilled first. I don't remember what they all are. I think some are very basic, like food, water, shelter. security, physiological needs, physical needs that need to be fulfilled. And you've got to have those things fulfilled before you can move on to the next level. And then the top of the pyramid is self-actualization. That's the top. You know, you finally have, you finally your full self once all of these needs have been met. In other words, you can put this in a Christian perspective. This would be an example of synthesizing it. Once the pyramid has been topped out and you've met all those things, then the student is prepared for faithfulness, right? Once you've been fulfilled, Once you've put the mask on on the airplane, then you can help others put their masks on. I'm trying to think of other analogies. Once you've been fulfilled, then you're ready to love God and you're ready to love your neighbor. But you got to have all these needs met in you first. That's this idea of self-esteem infatuation. You know, you gotta have the food, the water, security, safety, all these things have to be met before you can be a faithful servant of God. So what we have here is obedience that's contingent upon self-fulfillment, right? Now look, Maslow's hierarchy is all right. I don't have too many problems with it, but I do have this one problem with it, and it's this. I think the pyramid is upside down. It's upside down. So you got a pyramid that says, meet all my needs, and then I'll love God. And then I'll love my neighbor, but my needs have to be met first. But I see God's word that's saying quite the opposite. right? It says to seek ye first all of my needs and then I can serve the kingdom of God. No, seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and then all of these things will be added unto you. So the pyramids upside down. And so the foundational thing that we need first is to be faithful to God. The place where we need to start is obedience. And all of these other things like food, Clothing, security, confidence, all of this stuff that you need will then be added unto you. Totally upside down. We have an upside down inverted pyramid. And so what we get from this self-esteem infatuation is that flattery is an act of hatred. And Proverbs 29 verse 5 says this, it says, a man that flattereth his neighbor spreadeth a net for his feet. That's bad. And Proverbs 26, 28 says, So if you try to flatter your students into obedience, which education classes at UL teach this stuff, it will work ruin. It does work. in the short term. Pragmatically, it does work to get the immediate goal and result that you want. Think about it like this. Think of a class that's totally out of control. And you walk in, or a teacher walks in, and they try to flatter the class into submission. You're like, oh, Cindy, thank you so much for sitting there with one of your shoes on. Thank you so much for doing that. Or, I really appreciate that. Thank you, Billy, for not hitting your classmate more than once. Thank you. It just pleases me so much. And it sounds ridiculous, but this is what they teach in the education departments in universities all around the country. And you come into the class and you start pinpointing all these things that you can say. And if there aren't any good things to say, then you just need to make some up and just conjure some up. If you can cast some flattery somewhere, then you're doing good. And like I said, this works short term. You'll have some of those really thirsty students who probably don't get enough compliments in their life. They'll be hungry for those compliments. And so you'll have them modify their behavior in order to get them. You'll have some of that. And for some teachers, it's like, hey, you got a mission accomplished. You got them to do what you want to do, right? But there's a problem with this. This is pragmatism. There's a real problem with this. What you're doing when you're flattering them, what motive do you have for flattering them? Is it for them to be formed into the image of God, or is it for your own selfish reasons that you want them? You're flattering them into submission so that they'll be good for you and that they'll stop annoying you and inconveniencing you and so that it will make your life easier. But we have to understand that the word of God says that he who rebukes a man will find more favor afterward than he who flatters with the tongue. Faithful the words of a friend but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful. You're giving kisses to the enemy, so to speak, when you flatter them when they don't need to be flattered. They're sinning. They're sinning against you. They're sinning against the class. It's an act of hatred when you flatter your students into doing what you want them to do. Now, like I said, it's good to encourage them. I'm saying don't ever encourage. If somebody's really doing well, you need to tell them. But if someone's not obeying right away, all the way with a good attitude, then it harms that person to tell them that they're doing a good job as they halfway obey with the intention of them making your life easier. We can't do that. If I'm sinning against you, if I wanna live my life in the light of God's word and I'm not intentionally trying to hide sin, and trying to hide behind things. And if I'm sinning against you, I would want to be told whether I'm sinning against you, right? You know, the way that I can confess that sin and I could be forgiven. We got to have that. You got to have confession of sin. You got to have forgiveness and you got to have repentance. And so if I'm sinning against you, I'm never going to be able to confess that sin or any of that if I don't know I'm doing, if I don't know that that's happening. Okay. Matthew 18, so important. And so we can't gloss over sins in the classroom in an attempt to manipulate our students to behave externally. We can't do that. We have to put the law of God in front of their hearts because that's the only way to the gospel. And if we don't do that, we short circuit all of that if we gloss over their sin like nothing ever happened. That's hating them. That kind of flattery is going to send that child to hell if that's all they receive their whole life. Okay? So we can't do that. We need to call a spade a spade in the classroom. Encourage, rejoice when it's time to rejoice with that student, and take them to task whenever they're acting like a knucklehead, you know? They need to be, you know, bopped. Not literally, but figuratively. They just need a wake-up call. No, they're not. No, they just need a metaphorical, you know, bop. Slap on the wrist or something. So, yeah. So in saying, I'm going to wrap this up. So if you look back on all that I've said, and you think, man, I think I have a few of these wrong assumptions, and I've sinned against my students doing these things to them. Either it's trying to level out the classroom in some way or flattering them in a way that they don't need to be flattered. If I'm doing any of these things, then there's the gospel. You can confess your sin to the Lord. You can repent. You can receive forgiveness. You can confess your sins to your students. If you've done any of these things to your class, you can confess corporately to them. I've sinned against you guys by whatever. I know y'all had a whole summer, y'all really don't have anything in mind probably, but I mean this year, no doubt we'll sin against our students. I've done it quite a bit last year. And I'm like, oh man. And it reveals your heart whenever you're dealing with seemingly obstinate children. They reveal what's in your heart. And how you react is gonna reveal some things that you need to repent of. So remember that. Remember that there is forgiveness. The gospel is there. The Lord is there. And repent of those things and receive forgiveness. And cry out to God to be retrained on what true faithfulness is. and education in all of your life. Do your dishes. Going back to what I said earlier, do your dishes, do all of the other responsibilities that God has given you faithfully. And that way we can be faithful throughout our whole lives. And we can hear one day, well done, good and faithful servant. We want to be able to do that. Amen? Amen. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, I thank you so much for your word. I thank you that it is a lamp into our feet, a light into our path. It's a spotlight that shows us our hearts. It's a mirror that we can look into to see what's really there. And Father, I pray that as we embark on this journey this year, Lord, that you would help us to remember these things, to remember that all that we say and do, whether we walk to the bathrooms, whether we're teaching, whether we're outside, we're teaching our students something. And Lord, help us to teach them your law and your way and your truth and the gospel. Lord, help us to live our lives totally in the light, totally transparent in your faithfulness. Help us to be faithful to you. Lord, we are in and of ourselves adulterers at heart. So I pray, Lord, that you would call us to faithfulness and help us to be faithful in education and faithful in every aspect of our lives. It's in Jesus' name I pray, amen.