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Encouraging parents to take up their God-given responsibility (Ephesians 6:4) to diligently oversee the education of their children, both in the home and in formal educational settings.

This is my third in a series, highlighting key aspects from each chapter of my new book, While We Were Sleeping: A Wake-up Call For All Christians (2025). (Check out my YouTube channel, where I am posting a weekly reflection on each chapter, to complement this post.)

Dylan Oakley’s story introduces our consideration of Education. He is a teacher by training and experience and now runs his own Christian ministry, Freedom Has A Voice.

Dylan’s spiritual antenna was initially alerted by the Twin Towers massacre of 11 September 2001, but the rubber hit the road for him on 9 December 2021, when he walked out of his teaching career as the no jab, no job mandate for Queensland teachers meant that he could no longer, in good conscience, work in the system.

At the end of that same year, his eldest, Anna, was graduating to become a teacher, but she could not take up either of the jobs she was offered, as she too was not jabbed. What madness for a profession suffering massive shortages, that healthy, experienced teachers and enthusiastic new graduates were being barred from service!

Fiona, Dylan’s wife, also a trained teacher, Primary and Special Education, had cut short her career and began a 14-year journey of homeschooling their children. Partnering with their children so directly in education meant she could get to know them very well, and their interaction with adults brought about a maturity beyond their years compared with children in traditional schooling. Fiona is now on the board of one of the largest homeschooling providers in the country, Faith Christian School of Distance Education.

The Oakleys were not going to bow the knee to bad laws. Dylan gained inspiration and confidence from his daughter’s stand. Anna introduced her dad to social media with the launch of his Freedom Has A Voice platform that now has thousands of supporters.

This family’s departure from conventional education has been echoed thousands of times across the country by those who refused to compromise their conscience. A tragedy for their institutions and heartbreaking for the children that these Godly men and women could no longer influence for good.

The Long March Through The Institutions

It is my belief that While We Were Sleeping, our education systems have been seriously compromised and now constitute a serious threat to our children and grandchildren. Some have recognised this in the West and opted for the homeschooling alternative, but this is out of the question for many.

The Long March Through the Institutions, a phrase attributed to the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) and then coined as a succinct mission statement by German Marxist student activist Rudi Dutschke in the 1960s. The phrase is used to describe the intellectual takeover of a society without the need to resort to military conflict.

Instead, the strategy focused on slowly winning over the chief institutions that shape the culture, creating an invisible revolution from within. The focus was first on the universities, then the other institutions were targeted: unions, the arts, K-12 schools, media, major corporations, and finally society as a whole.

A little booklet from 1974 that survives on the internet, Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism, is most revealing about this strategy. This quote illustrates my point:

Our intention is to forge an underground … a clandestine political organisation, with our final goal is the destruction of imperialism, the seizure of power, and the creation of socialism. We will develop insurgent cultures, for the overthrowing of the rotten values of male supremacy, consumerism, passivity, respectability and the rat race.

For women working, forced into the marriage marketplace, trapped in oppressive relationships, raising children alone, the women’s movement brought a new sense of self-worth and dignity; it explained the conditions of women’s oppression.

A further casualty of The Long March Through The Institutions has been teacher training, my own area of expertise. It has been weaponised to infiltrate and dismantle primary and secondary school education from within. So much so that, While We Were Sleeping, our children have been indoctrinated with left-leaning ideology, the death of God and the self-loathing of our culture and traditional family values.

Safe Schools Coalition Australia

The Safe Schools Coalition Australia serves as an illustration of an initiative that has taken root While We Were Sleeping.

I was a school principal between 1997 and 2008. If ever a case of bullying was brought to my attention, I immediately felt concerned that the staff and I had failed the victim, and I was ultimately responsible for rooting out the problem and preventing repetition.

The Safe Schools Coalition Australia was created as a national initiative purporting to address the growing issue of bullying in schools and specifically directing schools as to how they should approach the issue. My view is that professional educators, who know their own unique school communities, should be held accountable to manage their social dynamics without the imposition of a one-size-fits-all approach.

But there was more. This, from Roz Ward, co-founder of Safe Schools in 2014:

Safe Schools Coalition is about supporting gender and sexual diversity. Not about celebrating diversity. Not about stopping bullying. About gender and sexual diversity. About same‐sex attraction. About being transgender. About being lesbian, gay, bisexual – say the words – transgender, intersex. Not just ‘Be nice to everyone. Everyone’s great.’

Perhaps we were not sleeping, but wanted to think the best of people and could not conceive that this little initiative, originally out of Victoria, designed to combat bullying, could be a vehicle designed to demolish the Christian pillars of our society while ushering in modern-day Marxism and Leninism.

In Loco Parentis

In loco parentis is a legal principle that embodies the responsibility of an individual or entity to take on some of the functions and responsibilities of a parent. Originating from Roman law, this term translates literally to ‘in the place of a parent.’ It is a concept that allows an individual or institution to act in the best interests of a child or young person as a parent would, assuming duties such as protection, education, and care.

My argument is that many teachers and even more parents don’t know about this principle and certainly don’t seek to enact it.

All too often, parents are intimidated by their children’s schools and their teachers’ greater knowledge and training, so they ‘hand over their children,’ and ignore the institution and teachers’ responsibility to ‘act in the best interests of the child.’ Who knows their best interest? The state, or the parents?

We think there is nothing amiss with Muslims sending their children to Muslim schools to be taught the principles of Islam. But we are too shy to insist that children of Christian parents be taught the values and beliefs of their Christian faith.

Few issues are as powerful in dividing churches as where to send our children to school. Should Christian parents send their children to public school? Is homeschooling the only right choice for Christian families? What about private Christian schools? These questions are never silent; everyone has an opinion, and most people feel their position is the only correct one.

For example, homeschooling might be right for you, as it was for Dylan and Fiona Oakley and their family, but everyone’s situation is unique. Each child is fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:14), so one size can never fit all. But the responsibility of parents is clear, to ensure their young are ‘brought up in the ways of the Lord’.

And you, fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord. —Ephesians 6:4 (NKJV)

My aim in this chapter has been to illuminate the hidden (and not so hidden) agenda of our education systems. They were originally founded by the Christian church as an outreach to the less fortunate (The Ragged School), but have been hijacked by goals and worldviews at loggerheads with Judeo-Christian values.

Our young are the most vulnerable and impressionable in society. Let’s do all we can to equip them for their fight and give them protection from sociological and psychological injury while at the top of the cliff. Much better than seeking to patch them up at the bottom of the cliff after their fall with near-fatal injuries.

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Image courtesy of Adobe.