3 What Is Not Christian Education?

Dan’s experience with the school administrators had so thoroughly frustrated him that he had decided to investigate moving his child to the local private Christian school. Although raised as a Christian, Dan had grown up going through the traditional public schools. He hadn’t expected to send his child to Christian school. That the public school his child attended had some serious behavioral and academic problems hadn’t surprised Dan. He figured that most schools have their issues with students, and that’s what school is about, teaching children while shaping their behavior. Yet when Dan tried to meet with teachers and school leaders about bullying his child had experienced and his child’s frequent exposure to profane language and immoral conduct among students and staff, school officials basically told Dan to mind his own business. Dan figured, though, that the education of his child was his business.

Contrasts

Defining Christian education can help us understand the strong case for it. So, too, can contrasting Christian education with a school program, whether public or private, that is expressly not Christian in character. This chapter is not a criticism or comparison, necessarily, of the public schools. Public schools can at times and in places retain an implicit, even if not an explicit, Christian character. Christians may teach in the public school, sharing their hidden Christian values even when not having the lawful opportunity to expressly share their values’ Christian basis. But that restriction against explicitly Christian teaching in the public schools can confuse public school students as to the hidden Christian source of the school’s best commitments. It can also diminish the Christian influence in those schools. Yet again, do not construe this chapter as a criticism or comparison of the public schools, instead only as a contrast of schools that lack Christian character. Learn something of Christian schools from schools that lack Christian character.

Oppositional

As the story at the beginning of this chapter illustrates, the one thing that may most discourage parents about a school is when school officials treat the parents’ concerns as irrelevant. When school officials ignore or outright oppose parents in the parents’ pursuit of their child’s best educational interests, the parents have every right and reason to reconsider their choice of schools for the education of their child. Parents aren’t always right in their diagnosis of their child’s educational challenges. Parents, for instance, should generally not argue for the school to reduce academic and behavioral standards, in effect to give their child an unearned free pass. Schools need to challenge students in order to help them learn and grow. Yet school officials should at least listen respectfully and genuinely consider parent concerns. Ideally, schooling should involve a partnership between parents and the school. Scripture urges parents to involve themselves in the education of their children. Educators generally recognize that parent involvement promotes a child’s education. Schools that do not support parent involvement are not Christian in character.

Standardless

Christian character and conduct involves certain commitments, particularly to show love, maintain peace, exhibit patience and kindness, pursue goodness, and express gentleness and self-control. Christians strive for excellence, obey just authority, forgive and serve others, and exhibit a generosity and joy of spirit. These commitments support, respect, and uphold academic and behavioral standards. A school that does not set high student expectations and does not uphold student standards is not a school with Christian character. Schools or their districts generally adopt and publish student codes of conduct. They must do so under state laws, rules, and regulations. Legislators intend that schools impose and uphold academic and behavioral standards. Yet publishing a student code is one thing, while caring to enforce it is another thing. Some school officials are simply unable or unwilling to hold students to reasonable academic and behavioral standards. A standardless school is not a school of Christian conduct and character.

Subjective

Schools that ignore or reject the eternal, objective truths that Christ revealed, embodied, and taught inevitably lose their footing. Reject truth as a construct, and everything becomes subjective. Everyone then does as they please, without regard for others. When a school’s curriculum does not recognize and teach timeless Christian truths, the curriculum itself becomes subjective. Students learn, directly or indirectly, that the only thing that matters is what each person thinks, each to his or her own. In that setting, one encounters only my truth and your truth, not the truth. In the absence of objectivity, order and standards dissolve. So, too, does unity and community. In a school knowing and teaching only this atomistic post-modern view, students swim in a sea of subjectivity. They form and abandon affinities and alliances as quickly as their feelings and opinions change. And when only subjective opinions matter, the leaders are those with the loudest voice or biggest fist. Students cannot build character in such an antithetical school. They find no reassuring pattern or principles and have no foundation and little if any efficacy. Christian schools teach truth, not subjectivity.

Selfish

Schools that abandon Christian foundations for subjective stances run the risk of fostering narcissistic, selfish, and destructive character in their students. Christian schools help students bend their minds and will to, and build their character consistent with, objective reality. The real world has patterns and principles to it that organize and vitalize it, while also making it subject to principled human thought and action. Christians tend to flourish in the world because they discern and follow those principles and patterns, with an appropriate degree of respect, obedience, and humility. A school that does not teach those very objective and genuine patterns and principles leaves students without the discernment and character to follow them. Judgment, to the extent that any exists in a subjective mindset, instead revolves around the student, based on the student’s whims, unverified opinions, and unreliable preferences, no matter what the genuine circumstances demand. That’s a recipe for student selfishness, not for good Christian character. A Christian education is not selfish.

Materialist

Schools that reject the transcendent aspect of Christian faith and spirituality inevitably reduce their curricula to an inadequate and despairing materialism. Religion and spirituality are not superfluous overlays on a solid foundation of scientific materialism, as non-Christian schools might regard them. Christian religion instead brings things together, giving them their meaning and purpose. Spirituality is a necessary dimension of all human thought, even scientific materialism. Reason and rationality have their basis in consciousness, which itself transcends and affects the material. Materialism eliminates the essential spiritual ingredients of attention, purpose, meaning, account, design, organization, and pattern, the same ingredients that undergird the scientific process itself. A materialist program also denies students their ascendant place in the universe, leaving them without purpose, opportunity, and responsibility. Christian schools supply the full remedy to a materialist program, revealing the complete picture, while giving students the best and surest reason to live vitally and responsibly.

Heartless

Schools that reject the Lord Jesus Christ also lose his divinely compassionate heart. In urging students to embrace Jesus, Christian schools continually open students to the sacrificial goodness of his divine heart. In Christian schools, students learn to sacrifice generously and thoughtfully for the good of others, as Christ sacrificed himself. Sacrifice both plants seeds for future harvest and reaches into the future out of which to draw the good. The world revolves around sacrifice, just as parents sacrifice for their children, Christian teachers sacrifice for their students, and Christian schools urge students to devote a portion of their present to serve others, while preparing for their future. Schools that reject Christ and his sacrifice pull the foundation out from under compassion. To give to others can require a sense that someone has already given, or awaits to give, to you. Schools can find other models for compassionate care and giving. But schools cannot find, in anyone other than Christ, a perfect person who created, held, and gave his all for each student’s eternal life. Schools without Christ leave students without the greatest heart of compassion.

Soulless

Schools that reject Christ and his sacrifice and teaching also run the risk of leaving their students without spirit and soul. School is a critical time for forming not only good character and a compassionate heart but also a sound and stable psyche, spirit, and soul. Christian schools help students do so by sharing with them the mind of Christ. Students must learn to integrate their instincts, urges, desires, feelings, and thinking, in a whole, balanced, and healthy interior soul. A child’s mind needs both a sense of orderliness and structure, on the one hand, and a capacity to explore, adventure, and grow, on the other hand. Children, at least as much as adults, must balance sensitive and flexible order with fruitful and creative chaos. The mind of Christ gives them both the certainty and the trust in the unknown to do so. Christ gives them a solid core with a deep respect for the value of boundaries and the important role of the margins. A school program without Christ finds it far more difficult to articulate either the soul’s core or boundary, risking the student’s soul.

Spiritless

Schools that reject Christ also leave their students at risk of lacking the spirit and appetite for life. The Christian account of the world gives us every reason to live the best possible life. Christian cosmology makes humankind the mediators of meaning and material, or in spiritual terms, the mediators between heaven and earth. While our Lord Jesus Christ is both fully human and fully divine, we, too, are fully human with the prospect and assurance of joining him in heaven, if we so choose. We simultaneously pray that his kingdom come on earth, where we seek the greatest good in avid pursuit of his grandest desires. Christian life is bold, confident, adventurous, and joyful, no matter its hardships. Schools that reject Christ lose the opportunity to share with their students that thoroughly motivating account and enlivening purpose. They thus deprive students of the greatest reason for living with the greatest confidence and assurance. By offering students the living Spirit of Christ, Christian education gives students their best and truest reason for living.

Hopeless

Schools that reject Christ thus run the risk of leaving their students hopeless. If life is nothing more than random accidents accumulated from crashing atoms, without any grand narrative or transcendent dimension, then what hope do students have for living? Children growing into youths and soon into young adults begin to find that they, too, like adults, need reasons for living. A day’s small pleasures may for a time be enough to supply and satisfy the child’s zest for living. But too soon, even in childhood, the day’s struggles and challenges grow to the point of needing reasons for facing and overcoming them. Children can have surprising curiosity for and insights into the meaning of life. They can also have profound needs for discerning life’s meaning and purpose. Above all, children need hope for a safe, secure, and flourishing future. Schools that reject Christ lose their best opportunity to support students in grasping and living out life’s meaning.

Lost

The greatest Christian hope, taken boldly not just as a possibility but instead as a promise and assurance, is in the salvation of Jesus Christ. Schools that reject Christ deprive students of an opportunity to investigate, embrace, and confirm their salvation. A public school program that says nothing of Jesus Christ may not, in the student’s mind, have expressly rejected him. Students in public schools still have the First Amendment right in those schools of the free exercise of their Christian religion. In theory, Christian students may bring their Bibles to public school to read on their own time, may gather on their own time for Bible study, and may on their own time pray for themselves and their classmates. In theory, they may also form after-school Christian clubs and societies, and hold after-school Christian events, with rights equal to those of secular clubs and societies. Yet public schools do not always recognize and respect those legal rights. And the absence of Christian references from the curriculum in those schools, along with the occasional or frequent expression of hostility toward the faith, can mislead students into thinking that Christian faith does not matter in secular settings. The greatest concern of a parent sending a child to a school that does not openly profess Christian faith is that the child would lose the faith, whether in that school or later for not having fully developed it in an academic context.

Reflection

Do you have the experience of both Christian and secular schooling, to compare and contrast the two forms? While each school depends on the quality and character of their teachers and leaders, can you nonetheless discern fundamental distinctions in the two educational programs? Do you want your child’s school officials to respect and value your parental role in your child’s education? Do you want your child’s school to set and uphold high student expectations and standards? Do you want your child to learn objective truths about real conditions? Do you want your child to avoid developing selfish and narcissistic character? Do you want your child developing spiritual sensitivity and transcendent character? Do you want your child developing deep compassion for others? Do you want your child developing a sound, stable, and balanced mind? Do you want your child having a sense of purpose and place in the universe? Do you want your child hopeful, ambitious, and eager for the future? Do you want your child to carry a sound, secure, and strong Christian faith into adulthood?

Key Points

Contrasting Christian to secular education reveals deep contrasts.
Schools rejecting Christ may likewise reject parental roles in education.
Schools rejecting Christ may lack meaningful student standards.
Schools rejecting eternal objective truths teach concerning subjectivity.
Schools rejecting objective truths risk selfish student character.
Schools rejecting life’s spiritual dimension teach a sodden materialism.
Schools rejecting Christ’s heart leave students without his compassion.
Schools rejecting Christ’s mind leave students without his soundness.
Schools rejecting Christ’s account leave students without his Spirit.
Schools rejecting Christ’s grand purpose leave students without hope.
Schools rejecting Christ can affect long term a student’s saving faith.

Read Chapter 4.