1 Why Christian Schools?

Bernard and his family were new to Christian education. Neither Bernard nor his wife had attended Christian schools when young. They both just felt that their children would do better starting in their community’s fine local Christian school, where they knew several of the school families. Bernard and his wife planned to see how things went, without any further commitment. They didn’t have an especially clear view of Christian education, other than that it included religious instruction along with the usual academics. And they were fine with that. Indeed, they appreciated their own Christian faith and the difference that it made in their outlook. They wanted their children to share their Christian faith, and they expected that Christian school would help their children embrace Jesus Christ as their hope and salvation. Yet Bernard and his wife were still getting used to the idea of Christian school. Bernard even wondered sometimes where it all came from.

History

To those unfamiliar with them, Christian schools can seem unusual, peculiar, perhaps an anachronism. Why have separate schools integrating religious forms with classical academics, when church attendance and Sunday school classes might do just as well for religious instruction? A later chapter gives a more-direct and foundational answer to that question. But the history of schooling, especially in America, is a big part of the answer. Get a sense of the history of Christian education, and you’ll have a better sense of why we have Christian schools. You’ll also get a sense of why millions of Americans value Christian schools so deeply. Around five-million American children attend private K-12 schools, with the great majority of those schools focused on Christian education. That’s about one in ten children whose parents choose Christian education. This chapter shows the significant history behind those choices. Things are what they are because of what they have been. Know your history, and you’ll see your world more clearly. 

Roots

Christian schools go all the way back to the first centuries after Christ. In the later Roman era, relatively few children attended schools, generally only children of the wealthy and only boys. Boys in commoner families might learn to read and write before training for a trade. Girls generally received training in homemaking. For those fewer children who did receive substantial schooling, Greco-Roman education focused on reading, writing, rhetoric, arithmetic, and Greek language and philosophy, within a polytheistic culture. Christians sought to counter that enculturation in the Greek and Roman gods with their own Christian schooling, and not just for boys from wealthy families but for all children, girls included, from families of all socioeconomic classes. From the start, the goal of Christian schooling was universal literacy in the scriptures. 

Reformation

Medieval times saw Christian monastic and cathedral schools become critical centers for learning. Monastic schools focused on cloistered spiritual life, with monks collecting, reproducing, and studying scripture and other ancient texts. Cathedral schools offered broader training in classical forms, to prepare Christian officials for church and state roles. With the Reformation’s onset, though, a new movement arose to educate all citizens so that they could read and interpret the scriptures on their own, without the intercession or interference of officials following papal authority. Wycliffe, Tyndale, and other heroic figures led the translation of the scriptures into vernacular languages, making the scriptures available as texts in new schools for commoners and their children. Christian education took root as the propagator not only of Christian faith and knowledge of the scriptures but also as the foundation for widespread literacy and the explosion of learning through the Renaissance and beyond. Christian education was the rational, value-laden, and principled crucible within which the modern scientific-materialist mind formed. Credit Christian education for the explosion of learning, literature, commerce, science, medicine, art, technology, and other Renaissance reforms. 

Colonial

The American colonists brought that revolution in Christian learning with them across the ocean. In many cases having fled state persecution, the colonists added to their Christian school commitments their own concerns for the free expression of their faith. Colonies and their settlers established Christian schools both to preserve and promote scriptural truth within their own traditions and to form in their brave citizens the sound character on which a nation’s hope depends. Puritans, for instance, founded Harvard College in 1636 for the expressed purpose of ensuring that the school’s graduates, many of whom would become the emerging nation’s leaders, would know God and Jesus Christ. For another example, when the Massachusetts Colony enacted one of the New World’s first education laws in 1647, the twin objectives it declared were to counter the adversary Satan while ensuring the scriptures’ transmission to future American generations. In colonial times, education outside the home was largely if not exclusively religious instruction, adorned with academic subjects. 

Public

Public religious education grew in America through the early 1800s, founded on the Bible, McGuffey’s Reader, and the New England Primer. Although the American population remained small through the 1700s and into the early 1800s, the Primer sold over six-million copies in hundreds of different editions during that period. The Primer taught children how to read, using popular Calvinist Christian aphorisms. Nearly whatever instruction was going on during that period, whether home schooling or in an organized school, it was thoroughly and expressly Christian education. Children and youths learning reading, writing, and arithmetic, and young adults learning literature, rhetoric, logic, citizenship, law, and philosophy, did so in a fully Christian context. Christian families faced no need for an explicitly Christian education for their children because the readily available texts and schools were Christian in values, commitment, content, and outlook. 

Secular

A pronounced secular shift in public education occurred, though, beginning in the middle of the 1800s. The Massachusetts education reformer and U.S. congressman Thomas Mann, generally credited as the father of American education, became the figurehead for that move away from explicitly Christian public education. Mann recognized the increasing diversity in Christian denominational commitments among the growing nation’s population. Mann thus successfully championed a common school model for universal public education that largely abandoned explicit Christian teachings, while attempting to retain underlying Christian principles and values. The latter half of the 1800s saw significant increases in the number and percentage of children attending these largely secular public schools, with fewer children receiving home or religious schooling. This secularizing trend in public education continued throughout the first half of the 1900s, accelerated by the World Wars. Many Americans, though still largely Christian in identity, accordingly lost their scriptural knowledge and expressly Christian spiritual footing. 

Separation

By the early 1960s, the secular public-education stage was set for the twin Supreme Court decisions Engel v Vitale and Abington School Dist. v Schempp, declaring a formal separation between religion and public education. That separation would have been unimaginable at the nation’s founding, but Supreme Court decisions, supposedly principled, nonetheless often follow cultural trends. The Supreme Court decisions held that public schools could not endorse or lead religious exercises, on the grounds that doing so would violate the First Amendment clause prohibiting state establishment of religion. Public school teachers could no longer require K-12 schoolchildren to read the scriptures, nor lead them in prayer. Far from extinguishing Christian education, though, the rulings began a rise in private Christian school education. Previously, parents with the strong desire to see their children join them in their Christian commitments were willing to let the public schools educate their children in a common form that was at least neutral toward religion. But the new regime no longer looked so neutral. Rather, to many Christian parents, the public schools began looking more and more hostile toward their Christian faith. Private Christian school enrollment accordingly grew.

Culture

Significant shifts in American cultural norms and social mores from the 1960s forward contributed to the growth in private Christian school education. Increasing numbers of parents grew uncomfortable with, or outright disapproved of, negative teacher or administrator attitudes toward church and religion, along with low public school academic performance and behavioral standards. Other parents grew concerned with public school curricula and teacher attitudes toward government authority, substance use and abuse, non-traditional sexual orientation, sexual conduct outside of marriage, and non-traditional family structures, among other social and cultural issues. Increasing numbers of parents came to regard private Christian schools not just as necessary to their children’s spiritual development but also necessary to their academic success and sound moral development. Statistics backed them up. From the time of the Supreme Court decisions in the early 1960s, banning the Bible and other religious instruction in public schools, up until the year 2000, the nation’s divorce rate doubled, depression rate skyrocketed, teen suicide rate tripled, violent crime rate quadrupled, prison population quintupled, babies born to unwed parents sextupled, and cohabitation rates increased sevenfold. 

Closures

Pandemic public school closures beginning in 2020, and the school mask, distancing, and shot mandates accompanying them, further accelerated the growth in private Christian school enrollment. Some private Christian schools successfully resisted the closures and mandates in whole or part, enabling their families to maintain a greater semblance of normality through the difficult times, while advancing their children’s education. New families joined them, embracing the greater liberty, hope, confidence, expectations, and order of Christian schools. Private Christian school enrollment saw substantial growth during and immediately after the pandemic, in many schools and regions. Public school pandemic measures eventually relaxed, but private Christian school enrollment remained at elevated levels, as parents appreciated the commitment and culture of their Christian schools. Parents also appreciated the sacrifices school leaders and staff members made to show children the love of Christ, while devoting themselves fully to their traditional and secure academic, social, emotional, and spiritual development. 

Funding

The increasing availability of public funding for private K-12 school education has contributed to the increase in private Christian K-12 school enrollment. The number of states offering some form of tuition voucher system, giving parents the option of choosing public or private K-12 education for their children, funded by taxpayers, has grown to more than one third of all states. Congress’ 2025 enactment of a limited federal tax credit for donations made to qualified scholarship granting organizations, beginning in 2027, may soon further reduce the cost of a private K-12 Christian school education in those states in which the governor approves the federal program. Private K-12 school education can be expensive, especially when compared to the free public schools. Access to private Christian K-12 schools remains a significant concern, given the necessary tuition cost of operating the schools without public support. Christian schools will continue to address those cost and access issues with fundraising and endowments for tuition scholarships, and by other means, whether public funding is available or not. Access to education in the Christian faith is a Christian school’s strong commitment.

Future

No one can accurately predict the future, especially in the uncertain landscape of American public and private K-12 education. Yet private K-12 Christian schools continue to plan for healthy and growing enrollment. That growth could be substantial if public funding for private education continues to spread. But even without public funding in more than half of the states, Christian K-12 schools are likely to persist with at least stable enrollment. Only an unexpected reversal of Supreme Court precedent, followed by the public schools’ even less expected reembrace of the glorious gospel, might significantly reduce the desire among parents for private Christian K-12 schooling. The future remains bright for Christian education, as it does for all things truly and deeply Christian. 

Reflection

What is your experience, if any, with private Christian K-12 schooling? What is your experience with public school? If you attended public K-12 schools, did you see signs and symbols, if not open expression, of Christian faith? Did you have the sense that Christian students were not only welcome in public schools but also welcome to express their faith in public schools as the First Amendment guarantees and permits? Or did you instead see expressions of faith discouraged? What are your reasons for considering sending your children to private Christian school? What do you believe the future holds for private K-12 Christian education? 

Key Points

• The history of Christian education informs its present conditions.

• Christian education’s roots go back to the first centuries after Christ.

• The Reformation promoted Christian schools teaching the scriptures.

• The colonists brought a strong commitment to Christian education.

• Public schooling was thoroughly Christian through the early 1800s. 

• Public schooling grew secular in the late 1800s and through the 1900s.

• The Supreme Court stopped public school scripture teaching in 1962.

• Christian school enrollment also increased due to public school norms.

• Pandemic measures further increased Christian school enrollment.

• Public funding of private schools increases Christian K-12 enrollment.

• The future remains bright for private Christian K-12 education.

Read Chapter 2.