One of our family's favorite TV shows is How it's Made, a Canadian Production similar to the more famous Dirty Jobs. Like Dirty Jobs it shows you the "inside scoop" – in this case of industrial processes – but How it's Made has a straightforward, instructive narrator, not a clever host like Mike Rowe to add witty banter and off-color wise cracks.
One especially memorable episode featured a look into industrial chicken production. Beginning at the point of incubation, it showed untold numbers of eggs all safely stored in rows of rolling incubation cabinets. The cabinets were stainless steel and upright; constantly maintaining temperature and humidity; and inside each cabinet stacks of shelves constantly shifted from side to side rotating the eggs. Normally, of course, this is all done by the mother hen, but industry does not have time to wait for mother hens to get broody. (Curiously, whereas bird eggs must be rotated for the chick to survive to hatching, the leathery eggs of reptiles must not be rotated or the growing reptile embryo will die. Reptile embryos attach to the eggshell after laying and must maintain that orientation until hatching. Keep that in mind if you decide to adopt lizard, turtle, or snake eggs found in the wild.)
The batteries of stainless steel cabinets and automated shelves seemed cold, sterile, and alien to all things cute; and It was, as you might imagine, at the point of hatching that things began to get interesting. Hundreds, even thousands, of baby chicks hatching out all at once, or nearly at once, is truly a compelling and amusing sight. But it was actually what happened next that made this episode so memorable.
After hatching out, the chicks were given, as I recall, a short time to get more or less dry and fluffy. Then, to the wonder of all, the thousands of dry and fluffy personifications of cuteness itself were dumped–and I do mean dumped–completely unceremoniously onto a conveyor belt. And then things began to get downright memorable. In their ride down this conveyor belt, workers stand at various stations grabbing chicks and sorting them according to various criteria. Chicks are stretched, poked, and dropped. Chicks are tossed (tossed!) into chutes on the sides, and all down the line chicks are landing on their heads and rear-ends and everything in between.
Now we ain't vegans or tree-huggers; our family has always eaten meat, and we have long refused to show Bambi in our house simply because we don't want to introduce that kind of foolish (and Godless) sentimentality about animals to our children. But we were all just short of thunderstruck, sitting every one with our mouths agape at this. I was astonished that you could even treat baby chicks like that. I would have thought that half of them would have died.
For several minutes none of us really knew quite what to say.
Upon reflection, I realized that chicks were obviously tougher than I had given them credit for. And if you are running an industrial chicken producing business, I'm sure you have to get them sorted out ASAP and you can't take time to consider the feelings of individual chickies – or even your own feelings for that matter. 'Cause right after these there's another thousand chickies rolling down the line just like 'em. So I guess the workers just have to get used to it and not care, or maybe they have to be the sort of people that don't care to begin with.
Just the same, I couldn't help but think, and remark to my wife and kids, that seeing that footage was one more reason in my mind to think seriously about raising our own chickens for eating. At least we would know that they had been given a more "chicken like" life than that. Clearly you can treat chicks like that, because these folks are doing it. But should you? After all, The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel, but the righteous considers even his animal.
Now chickens are just chickens. Today they are alive, and tomorrow they are thrown into the frying pan, and that's the end of that. Cute they might be, and pretty as a grown chicken, maybe; but even if you spare it to live a long and full life in an air-conditioned coop with veterinarian's care, it will still die quite soon enough, and that will still be the end of that, without even a good meal to show for it. Not so with, say, children. They too will die – all too soon I am afraid – but that is not the end of that. Unlike the chicken they will go on forever. For good or for ill they will have an eternal legacy; an eternal existence.
Question: Is it acceptable to put children on a big conveyor belt?
Well that is precisely what we are doing. Every year, millions of children are dropped unceremoniously onto a great conveyor belt in a strange, cold, and alien environment. Along the way dispassionate industrial workers sort through the children and toss them carelessly into various chutes, where they land on their heads and rear-ends and everything in between. If you hadn't seen it for yourself you wouldn't know that you could treat children like that. But a whole new load of kids will be sailing down the belt any minute and there isn't time to care about the feelings of one individual child – or even the worker's own feelings for that matter. The conveyor belt of which I speak is called School. And it really doesn't matter if it's Public School, Private School, or even – here's the real shocker – Christian School. They're all strange, cold, alien, industrial conveyor belts cranking out the children with no time to spare.
Recently my wife and I drove past the nearest school in our county. There was a continuous line of waiting cars that ran from the front door, across the parking lot, down the driveway, down the access road, and backed up a considerable distance on the main road. I don't know how many cars there were, but there were a lot. A whole lot. And I expect that every one of those parents in those cars was proud that they were driving their child to school themselves, because I was when we did it. I prided myself on the idea that, if our daughter had to be in school, at least we cared enough to drive her there ourselves instead of putting her on the bus. I even changed my work schedule to be able to do it.
Now isn't that nice?
Well, let's examine that idea: We cared enough about our daughter that we took the time and effort to reschedule my work, drive her our own selves, and with our own hands we opened the doors, and we handed her over to....complete strangers who did not give a fig about our daughter or any of her thoughts, feelings, wishes, or desires – or ours either I can tell you. Just like the workers in any factory, they were there for the paycheck, they needed the money, and they'd have been anywhere else if they could figure out a way to do that and pay the mortgage too. Any institution has to concern itself primarily with keeping the conveyor belts running as efficiently as possible, and can't allow individual chickies to get in the way.
Besides, kids are pretty flexible aren't they? We all know by experience that most of them can be run through the Schools and not be too damaged... But is that really the level of care and consideration you want for your own kids? I can tell you it is certainly not the level of care and consideration that God wants for your kids. How do I know that? Well let's start with the basics: who did He entrust them to? Schools? No, He entrusted them to you. Do you really think He couldn't have done otherwise if that's what He had wanted? Do you really think God was sitting around nibbling His celestial fingernails century after century until some genius finally got the notion to take children away from their parents and put them in a school?
Question: Where is the best place for little chickies?
Do you accept the "Adam and Steve" argument? You know, "..God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve'? The underpinnings of this trite argument against homosexuality is to point back to God's Original Creation Order: If that was the way it was created at the beginning, then that was God's intended best purpose. This is the same argument that Jesus uses when He speaks against divorce. Pointing to the original creation order, He says, "God made them one. So man has no business pulling them apart." Well then, who did God give the first children to? Not to schools (which He could have if He had wished), but to the parents. And no man has any business pulling them apart.
When the doctor at our pediatrician's office learned that we teach our own at home, he said, "...but that is definitely a calling; it isn't for everyone." I didn't have time to debate the doctor that day, but I profoundly disagree with that thinking. Teaching your own children at home is not a special calling for special people. If you have children, God has called you to teach them. The pitter patter of little feet is the calling. When God blesses you with children He is calling you to teach them, to raise them, not to give them over to be raised by someone else – or more likely by anyone else.
To take a slightly different tack: If you have children, God's perfect will for you is definitely to raise your children at home and educate them yourself – primarily in the things of God, but also in the "Three R's." God's acceptable will for you might be to entrust them to someone else to teach them if you are unwilling or find yourself incapable, and if the someone else is trustworthy, willing and capable of teaching them with an eye towards godliness first. To entrust your children to an institution of any kind – where you have little or no knowledge or input into who is teaching them, or what they are teaching them – is outside the will of God, even if it's a Christian school. Even if it's the overwhelming social norm. Even if it's required of you by ungodly compulsory education laws. Even if none of your friends and family understand what in the world you are doing.
Easy? No. That is why the Word says, "Be not conformed to this world..."
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