4 What Is a Christian School Curriculum?

Paula had two concerns regarding the curriculum at her daughter’s new private Christian school. First, Paula wanted to ensure that her daughter would learn everything she needed to know and do to be successful in college and beyond in whatever trade, profession, or homemaking that she might pursue. Paula didn’t want her daughter’s Christian education to slow or impede her daughter’s academic progress. On the other hand, though, Paula wanted to ensure that the new Christian school’s curriculum included instruction in the Christian scriptures and taught the other traditional academic subjects from a Christian perspective. Paula knew that doing so was a tall order. Yet she also suspected that the school she and her daughter had chosen was more than up to the task. Indeed, Paula and her daughter brimmed with excitement. 

Curricula

A school carries out its instructional program through a curriculum. A curriculum designates the required and elective course subjects, and order of courses, for a student to complete each grade level and graduate from the school’s program. Schools generally take substantial care in the design of their curriculum to achieve the program’s overall goals. A school committee of experienced educators may periodically evaluate and adjust the curriculum. The curriculum committee may add or subtract courses, add or remove topics to address within courses, change the order of and prerequisites for courses, or move courses from required to elective status or vice versa. Examine your child’s school curriculum to confirm the program’s goals, course subjects, and course topics. Expect to see both substantial similarity and significant differences between your child’s public school curriculum and private Christian school curriculum. 

Similarity

Private K-12 Christian schools generally include the same traditional academic subjects as the public schools. State K-12 academic benchmarks and standards may not necessarily expressly apply to private Christian schools. But Christian schools often make a point of teaching to and testing against those standards. Indeed, many private Christian schools seek and maintain accreditation under private organizations like the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI) or Christian Schools International (CSI). Those accrediting organizations typically align their own accreditation standards to state standards for public schools. Thus, accredited Christian schools may teach substantially the same subjects as the local public schools, with similar academic goals in mind. Private K-12 Christian schools also generally seek to qualify their graduates for the same or similar academic programs, including higher education at preferred and competitive schools like flagship state universities, as the graduates of public K-12 schools, even if some of those Christian K-12 school graduates may instead choose to attend a Christian college or university. 

Distinction

As similar as curricula tend to be among public and private schools seeking to qualify graduates for the same or similar higher-education programs, curricula can vary from school to school. That variance may be especially significant between a public K-12 school and a private Christian K-12 program. The primary distinction is in the Bible study, biblical history, teaching of Christian character, principles, and doctrine, scripture memorization, and other explicitly Christian content that private Christian schools routinely include in their curricula. One would never see those elements in the required curriculum of a public school. Christian schools at the lower elementary levels would make Bible stories and lessons a core part of their curriculum, while Christian schools at the middle and high school levels might include systematic theology, church history, Christian worldview seminars, Christian literature, and other religious topics of special interest. Christian schools also routinely include in their curriculum weekly chapel services and thorough religious celebrations of Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, Reformation Day, or other significant events on the church calendar within their specific religious tradition. One would not mistake a Christian school for a public school, given these distinctly religious and spiritual features. 

Preparation

Many Christian schools do not hesitate to claim and pursue academic excellence. And some parents, perhaps many, choose Christian education as much for that academic excellence as for the curriculum’s religious content. Given that parents must select and, scholarships or vouchers aside, pay for private K-12 schooling, Christian schools can have natural advantages in their pursuit of academic excellence. Their students may be of the socioeconomic class and other demographics having the desire, intention, and means to pursue academic excellence. Private Christian schools can thus be strong feeder programs for preferred college and university programs, and professional and vocational paths. Whether that advantage exists or not, Christian schools generally embrace their responsibility and opportunity to prepare students for a whole, well-rounded, and flourishing life, including stable and happy family life. The traditional family values, biblical worldview, and moral character that Christian schools seek to instill prepare students well for a good balance of school, home, and work life. 

Classical

The traditional values of a Christian school lend themselves well to a classical approach to education, indeed so well as to recently foster a classical Christian school movement. Whether expressly embracing that movement or not, Christian schools in their curricula generally teach, in one manner or another, the seven classical liberal arts. The first three classical arts of the word, known as the Trivium, are grammar (the rules for language), logic (the art of reasoning), and rhetoric (the art of persuasion). The next four arts of numbers, known as the Quadrivium, are arithmetic (the study of pure numbers), geometry (the study of numbers in space or shapes), music (the study of numbers in time, ratios, and harmonies), and astronomy (the study of numbers in time and space). The Trivium, or arts of the word, represent the human mind and consciousness. The Quadrivium, or arts of numbers, represent the cosmos. The goal of classical education, carrying out a goal of Christian education, is to connect the mind with the cosmos as a basis for understanding God’s exquisitely ordered reality. 

Language

Curricula at Christian schools routinely include English Language Arts or its equivalent as a primary core subject. Language-arts courses at Christian schools teach students vocabulary, grammar rules, syntax, and punctuation, for the clear expression of thought. They may do so while reading both Christian and secular texts, giving students a grounding in both the incredibly rich faith literature and past and current secular classics. Students learn to organize their written and oral expression to state the theme or issue, discern the principle, rule, or authority, and apply that authority to the context for compelling conclusions, exercising the principled and rational mind that faith demands. Students also learn oral and written persuasion, to make a balanced and objective case for truth reflecting their best discernment. Christian schools don’t shy away from teaching students language, reasoning, and persuasion, as the Lord Jesus Christ used language and reasoning to persuade multitudes for their better. Indeed, Christian schools instill in their students a reverence for God’s word and, with that inspiration, the deepest respect for the power of purposeful language.

Society

Curricula at Christian schools also routinely include social studies as a primary core subject, to give students a sound picture of society and social relations. Social studies in any school seeks to integrate history, biography, government, civics, geography, economics, and sociology, in a study of social relations. Christian schools, though, teach social studies through a biblical lens, in a coherent framework reflecting the full cycle of creation, the fall, and redemption. Every historical character and event, and every society in every geographic location, reflect in fractal form that biblical cycle, each part taking its place in God’s grand narrative. Students in Christian schools thus don’t receive their history and social study lessons as a jumble of disconnected dates, facts, figures, and events to learn and quickly forget, but instead as a continually unfolding demonstration of God’s principled and patterned design. Christian school social-studies curricula intentionally weave together each strand to reveal God’s presence and hand in his creation, working out the hard and bad things for their good. 

Design

Curricula at Christian schools also routinely include rigorous science, geography, and mathematics courses as primary core subjects, to give students a solid foundation in the beauty, complexity, and sensitivity of God’s designs. Earth sciences (geology, astronomy, and the environment), life sciences (biology, cells, and genetics), physical science (chemistry and physics), and engineering are all fair game in Christian school science curricula, as they generally would be in public schools. Yet again, in Christian education, students weave their science learning into the coherent framework of God’s rich designs, that all creation reflects his glory. Science, itself a gift of God’s purposeful observation, intervention, and rationality, reveals the order, power, purpose, wisdom, and provision of God’s designs. Christian school teaching also lends science its ethical framework, to help humankind care for and steward creation. Most of all, Christian schools teach science as revealing God to be the beneficent designer of a cosmos exquisitely tuned to support human life after its God-instilled purpose. 

Worldview

Every curriculum, whether at a public or private school, conveys to students some form of worldview. The dominant worldview in public schools is necessarily that of scientific materialism, given the Supreme Court’s peculiar prohibition against public schools teaching transcendent truths. Scientific materialism removes the designer, leaving incomplete explanations for the studied designs. Scientific materialism, while powerful for analyzing patterns, supplies an inadequate framework for appreciating and ethically applying the whole. Materialism as a philosophical foundation also feeds a consumer mentality and survival-of-the-fittest ethic, neither one an adequate basis for a just society and compassionate community. By contrast, Christian education teaches Christ as both creator and redeemer of the world, equipping students with a coherent, complete, beneficial, historically accurate, and rationally objective worldview within which to learn traditional school subjects. 

Character

A Christian school curriculum also places sound character development at the program’s core, hand in hand with the coherent and highly motivating Christian worldview. Christian schools don’t seek just to graduate students who will fit into the workplace like cogs in a machine. They don’t seek to produce consumers who respond obediently to every advertising campaign. And they don’t seek to shape students into strict conformity to government demands or rapidly changing social norms and group dictates. Christian schools instead share Christ’s person and Spirit with students, so that students can receive and explore their genuine Christ-like identity. Humble, gentle, wise, and persevering Christians are the founding bedrock and unifying glue of every society of which they are a significant part. Christian schools seek to graduate students who stand firmly for truth, while serving diligently and sacrificially for the good of all. Christian schools also seek to graduate students who will form stable new families, to carry on the great project of human life, which is to honor and celebrate the creator and redeemer Jesus Christ. 

Application

To achieve these profound instructional goals, Christian school curricula seek to provide a significant degree of engaging student activity. One learns not just by listening and watching but also by doing. Christian school teachers design hands-on activities for students to explore and apply the subjects they are learning. They do so because Christians value embodied wisdom and skilled practice over mere good intentions and impractical head knowledge. A Christian isn’t so because of what the Christian knows as much as by what the Christian does in demonstration of their commitments. One knows a Christian not so much by their words but by the good fruits of their loving actions. Christian school curricula thus include not only student-led science experiments, literature readings, dramatic reenactments of historical events, art projects, and economics exercises, but also school service and community service projects. Christian school curricula take students outside the school into workplaces and bring field experts into the school, to challenge students to try their hand at the skills that fuel professions and vocations. Expect your child to enjoy hands-on instruction at your child’s Christian school.

Reflection

What dimension of your own school’s curriculum served you best? What dimension did your own school’s curriculum seem to miss or provide only inadequately? Do you see the value in a Christian school’s curriculum presenting and integrating both the material and transcendent dimensions of human experience? What perspective, lens, worldview, or framework do you see your local public schools as presenting? Do you see the value of the Christian scriptural lens, for supplying a coherent, complete, hopeful, beneficial, and rationally sound framework? Does it encourage you in your trust of Christian education in the sciences, that many of the world’s leading scientists have been devout Christians? Does it encourage you in your trust of Christian education in social studies, that scripture gives a coherent framework for understanding history and social relations? What alternative framework, if any, do you believe might be superior in equipping your child for success in life? Would you prefer that your child learn in an active environment over a passive one? 

Key Points

• Christian schools distinguish their programs through their curricula.

• Christian schools teach the same or similar subjects as public schools.

• Christian schools teach traditional subjects through a biblical lens.

• Christian schools teach scripture lessons public schools do not teach.

• Christian schools prepare students for higher and advanced education.

• Christian schools generally teach classical liberal arts and numbers.

• Christian schools teach grammar, logic, and persuasion language arts.

• Christian schools teach social studies, history, and geography.

• Christian schools teach earth, physical, life, and space sciences. 

• Christian schools also focus on building sound student character. 

• Christian schools engage students actively to embody learning.

Read Chapter 5.