A few things
you should know about me. I attended Christian schools for 13 years; after that
I spent 7 years getting two degrees at a state[1]
university. I think this gives me a good perspective on both Christian and
secular education.
There are
many reasons you should give your children a Christian education. I will focus
on just three: the teleology of education, the relationship between philosophy and
the Gospel, and the process of character formation.
Teleology
Education
comes from two Latin words: e/ex and dux/ducis; the latter
means “to lead” and the former means “out of.” Given this etymology, education
literally means “to lead out of.” What are we to lead people out of? Well,
think about what people are by nature: they are ignorant, wicked, and immature.
Education is the process of leading people out of ignorance, wickedness, and
immaturity. We may want to lead them out of these things, but this begs the
question, what are we leading them into? In a word, truth. One that knows truth
lacks ignorance and one that lives truth is not wicked; moreover, one that is
mature will have the character to consistently pursue and live according to
truth in every sphere of his or her life.
But what is
truth? Truth is not mere understanding or some ethereal abstract idea,
according to the Bible, truth is a person: the God-man Jesus Christ. If the
purpose of education is to pursue truth, then only a Christian school can give
a real education because only Christians recognize Jesus Christ as the
embodiment of truth!
The reason
why our state schools are failing is not because of lack of funds, but because
of lack of truth. How can you have an institution designed to spread truth that
does not recognize truth? This is a contradiction that goes down to the very
root of our educational establishment. Educating without truth is like trying
to teach a bunch of kids about basketball without a ball or a hoop. Yes you can
have them run sprints and lift weights and get them in good condition, but all
that you do will lack an ultimate purpose as well as any sense of internal
coherence. This lack of purpose and coherence will lead to a lack of motivation
for they will have no understanding of what they are doing.
Many
students in our government schools lack motivation because we have replaced the
pursuit of truth with the pursuit of a job. When students ask, “why do I need
to go to school?” we respond, “you need this so that you can get a job.”
Instead of having them pursue something of high and eternal value, we tell them
to devote the lion’s share of their time and energy to getting the skills that
we think will help them get a job, years from now in the distant future. How’s
that for motivation! This is especially demotivating when the majority of the
adults they know dislike their jobs and when plenty of people with good
educations are unemployed and plenty of people with little education are
financially well off.
Having the
wrong end, the wrong telos in mind,
destroys the whole of anything. Consider marriage. If I believe that the
purpose of marriage is my personal fulfillment and happiness, how happy will I
be and for how long will I remain married? Because I have the wrong goal in
mind, no matter what techniques I introduce, I will have a failed marriage.
Likewise, the end of education is truth. If we lack this end, it doesn’t matter
what facilities or resources we have, our educational endeavors will fail.
Now some of
you may be thinking that I am playing games with the meaning of education.
Isn’t education about reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic? No. No it is not.
Literacy and scientific knowledge and understanding are not education, they are
matters of technical proficiency and technical proficiency is not education.
Learning to read and think does not mean one is educated; one learns to read
and think so that one can become
educated. The Germans of the early 20th century were technically
proficient, but they were not educated because they collectively lacked
understanding of the truth. This lack of education caused them to use their
technical proficiency to wreak havoc and destruction on humanity.
No matter
our intention, no matter our ability, if we lack the correct goal we will go in
the wrong direction.
Philosophy
We all know
that the materialistic philosophy of the secular world contradicts Christian
claims. For example, materialism posits that you are the result of mindless
matter endlessly becoming. Alternatively, Christianity claims you are made in
the image of God and meant to share in His glory forever. This is a fairly
clear in stark contrast. If your child goes to a school where materialism is
clearly proclaimed, it will be fairly easy for you to identify this claim and refute
it with Christian truth. The problem is that most of the secular philosophies
at work in our schools are not stated so clearly. This makes them difficult to
identify. Left unidentified, these subtle claims undermine faith.
To give just
one example, in the area of ethics secularists have reduced virtue to kindness.
Over and over kids are told to be kind and not to be mean to one another. Should
our kids be kind? Should they refrain from hurting each other? Of course. But reducing
virtue to kindness destroys our ability to think of virtue in Christian terms.
Our
philosophies create plausibility structures that make it easier or more
difficult to believe a certain thing. This is especially true when it comes to
the Gospel. Certain philosophies make the Gospel more plausible, while others
make it more difficult to believe. For example, a child loved unconditionally
by his parents is going to find God’s gracious salvation easier to accept than
a child that is told he must earn his parents love by being a good boy.
Consider how
this works in regards to the morality that students learn in government schools.
As part of our societal secular humanism, they are taught that virtue is
kindness. But if something is only wrong because it hurts someone, that is, if
something is only wrong if it is unkind, then what are they to do with all the
prohibitions of God that don’t seem to hurt anyone? A student can easily think,
why shouldn’t I sleep with my boyfriend or girlfriend? We both want this and
aren’t hurting anyone, how could it possibly be wrong? Why shouldn’t a man be
able to marry another man? If they are both consenting adults, then no one is
getting hurt and therefore this could not be immoral.
If harm is
the basis of morality, then a lot of God’s commands are unnecessary because they
prohibit things that don’t seem to hurt anyone! But why on earth would a good
and loving God keep us from things that we enjoy that don’t hurt anyone? Why
would God call things sin when they aren’t wrong? Well, either God is unloving
or God didn’t say those things. Either way, this approach to ethics undermines
Christian faith. Moreover, this approach is so subtly different from the
Christian approach to ethics, in that it focuses on “love” and kindness, that
it is very difficult to detect.
Your child
will spend 14,000 hours in a school from Kindergarten to 12th grade.
Do you want your child in an environment where the best possible outcome is that you are able to undo the worldview
that they are being taught explicitly and implicitly every single day?
Character Formation
Likewise,
the moral atmosphere in the average, contemporary government run school is one
that destroys character. As Americans we like to think of ourselves as cowboy
individualists standing strongly against the world. We like to think that we
create our own values and habits and make ourselves. But this is false. We are
formed, not completely, but to a very significant degree, by our communities.
We are
formed first and foremost by the community that we are born into, the family. After
that we are formed by the voluntary associations that we take part in: things
like our church, our neighborhoods, and our schools. We’ve all experienced
this. Being around good friends influenced us to make better decisions; while
being around bad friends often influenced us to make bad decisions. In the
average state-run school today the majority of people are not making good
decisions. It is very difficult to make good decisions when the people around
you are doing what they want to do and there isn’t built-in accountability. The
best way to avoid sin is to avoid temptation. Putting your kid into a situation
where they’ll be surrounded by temptation on a daily basis is setting them up
for failure.
Now you may
be thinking, it sounds like you are talking about discipleship and discipleship
is the job of the church, not the school. Our word disciple comes from the
Latin word discipulus. However, discipulus is most frequently translated
as student. To be a disciple of Jesus is to be His student—after all His
disciples called him teacher (Rabbi)!
Christ
instructed His followers to make disciples of all nations. How exactly do we do
this? Think about how people are formed. We are formed by our communities,
friends, the media we consume, and our schools. Our media on the whole tends to
be opposed to truth. Every day our children are being schooled in falsehood
through the music they listen to, the shows and movies they watch, and from
much of what they interact with on social media. After spending, on average, 40
hours a week consuming various forms of secular media, do you really want your
child to spend another 40 hours having their minds filled with a false
world-view at school? Do you really think the hour you spend at church most
Sunday mornings is going to allow your son or daughter to flourish in their
faith and become mature a man or woman of God?
We can’t
control our media and we can’t control how our neighbors live. Don’t we owe it
to our children to have a Christ-centered family and to send them to a
Christian school?
Still, some
of you may be thinking, does this mean a child cannot flourish in a state
school? Of course not! If God can bring water out of a rock, He can certainly
help your child to flourish even in a bad school. However, even though God can
bring water out of a rock, it does not follow that it is wise to start a farm
in the middle of the desert and expect it to flourish.
Conclusion
If you are
planning on sending your child to a state-run school, you had better be
confident that you can help your son or daughter identify the subtle claims of
secular philosophies and successfully deconstruct those claims.
At a
Christian school your children will be confronted with secular philosophies and
non-Christian ways of thinking, but the teachers will help them identify and
refute false claims and understandings. Likewise, there will be some bad
influences around them, but there is accountability, there are consequences,
and bad behavior is never condoned by people in authority.
God clearly
gives us as parents the responsibility of educating our children. We can
delegate some of our authority to a Christian school or we can delegate some of
it to the state, but either way the education choice we make should be an
active choice and not a passive choice.
Ultimately
you have to ask yourself the question: do I want my child in a community that is
fundamentally opposed to what I believe? Do I want my children to repeatedly hear
things from people in authority that undercut my most essential beliefs? Or do
I want them in a place that daily reinforces what I am trying to teach them and
that is designed to help them know the truth and live according to it?
[1] I
refer to so called “public schools” as state or government schools because they
are run and administered by the state, not the public.
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