Elbow Creek Elementary School 1959-1966

K Mrs. Howard - a time to nap, play, milk and Graham crackers, puzzles, learning centers. She corrected me, when I spoke unkindly to a retarded boy near the playground tunnel. That never happened a second time. 

My big heartbreak was that it was uncool for boys to speak to girls (yes, even in kindergarten), so my dearest friend, Greg would only play with me at home, not at school.

1 Mrs. Glover - about to retire a year later, the cafeteria became "Glover Hall”. We daily folded plain paper in twelfths each direction, to write our numbers to 100 before doing a math page each day.

2 Mrs. Beth Vaccaro - most loving. We were all "Sweetheart or Sugarplum" etc.

Bill Willson - in second grade classroom, when I did not square dance, Billy said something like, "I wouldn’t want to be part of a religion that did not allow dancing.”

That same year, Greg Donaldson (who had been placed in a special gifted class with Mrs. Copenhaver) asked me to dance at an event on the blacktop. I tried to explain, "I'm a Christian." "So am I, Come on” he said. No problem, I was delighted to join in, two left feet and all. ~Es

3 Mrs Searls taught cursive.  

Tom Davenport's mom taught an after school Bible class at her house. She picked us up in her old station wagon. Kids loved chanting, "Give me a put, put." Then she'd make the car do that.

4. Mrs. Shazadae evolutionist. She pointed out my shyness as opposed to Steven Swall's boldness to the class. I longed to witness to her. She complained that her Christian husband who spent his time watching TV.

5 Mrs. Fielding had a baby, then we had a substitute.

Mother babysat for Shelly Yoder and her siblings one night. She told kids on the bus what a wonderful mother I have. I was delighted.

6 Mr. Wisenberger hit a dog on the way to work one morning so was very late coming in that day. He was likable but he paired us up [paired our desks] with a member of the opposite sex. 

Mr. Lagrutta, music teacher often yelled, “You bunch of hamburgers!”

Classmates: Teresa Dorado, John Whittington, Gregory Donaldson (brother of Sandra McCoy​), Shelly Yoder, Tom Davenport, Bill Willson, Mario Flores, Lynn Bettencourt, Joe Gulart, Allan Tidwell, Steve Swall, Tom Davenport, Danny Oden, Darlene Green, Anna Bastardo, Lorena Olivera… We were the first class to not continue there after 6th Grade. This was the beginning of Jr. High at Ivanhoe.

There were many reasons, I would not discuss here, that caused me to open my arms to homeschooling as a much wiser course.

Don't Let 'em Gouge Out Your Eyes!

The modern-day ammonites want to gouge out our eyes, spiritually speaking. I noticed on my very first time in America when I came here as a guest of your country back in 1988, I was invited to a school to speak on Africa. As I was walking up to the platform the principle seemed to turn white and he saw my bible.
He said, "What's that?"
I said, "It's my bible."
He said, "You can't bring that here, this is a public school."
I said, "Well I'm a missionary, this is what I do."
He said, "You can't mention God or Jesus or pray or anything religious. Do you understand?"
Yes, I understood. He introduced me, I stood up and I greeted the students in the precious name of our Lord and our Savior Jesus Christ, as I always do in a Parliament, or a Mosque or a terrorist base, that's the way I always start. And then I said, "Your Principle has told me not to read the bible, to pray or to say anything religious." Then I smiled and said, "I spend my life breaking those laws in Communist countries." I opened my bible, read the bible and I went ahead. I could not believe that they were serious that there could be people in a civilized country could honestly ban the bible. Instead, what are they teaching? "Once upon a time there was nothing, and then there was something, and then something became everything." A whole lot of time and a whole lot of nothing made everything. You came from nothing you are going nowhere. Life is meaningless. No wonder the children are committing suicide.

From Dr. Peter Hammond's lecture, "Christian Responsibility"

After Leeper v. Arlington Victory Prosecutions of Homeschoolers Ceased

From Gary North:

"R. J. Rushdoony became one of the major spokesmen of the homeschooling movement in the mid-1980s. He testified repeatedly in court cases where the state had brought charges against homeschooling families.

In 1987, he testified in the case of Leeper v. Arlington. A group of homeschooling families sued the city of Arlington, Texas. There were over 1,000 districts in Texas. They won. Their attorney said in 2011, "After the victory that God gave us in that case, the prosecutions [of homeschoolers] stopped in all the other forty-nine states."

Sharpe brought in Rushdoony as an expert witness. "His testimony was way beyond anything I'd hoped for. It was one of the few times in my career that I ever saw a witness destroy the attorney who was trying to examine him..." Continue reading

IndoctriNation

    Looking at both the origins and practical results of state-run education, Indoctrination takes you on a cross-country tour that's about the decline of American Christianity as well as the decline of schools. Featuring interviews with Christian teachers who couldn't teach Christianity to their students, notable homeschooling advocates Kevin Swanson, Samuel Blumenfeld, John Taylor Gatto, and homeschool celebrities Ken Ham, R.C. Sproul Jr. and Doug Phillips, filmmaker Colin Gunn accumulates conservative perspectives that will lead you straight to their conclusion: that Christians should never put their children into public schools.
    Focusing on the Marxist associations with the origins of schools, issues of sex education, physical safety from gunmen, whether Christians in schools can ever be "salt and light," whether public schools are politically neutral, and finally whether the public school system can be redeemed, Indoctrination dives into the heart of the Homeschool-Only debate with this part-documentary, part-testimonial DVD. 102 minutes on DVD.

Exodus Mandate