The Need for Christian Education
At the Elementary and Secondary Levels

After a summer of healing, Columbine students and teachers return to school with understandable anxiety and admirable hope.  The circumstances that led to the senseless acts that rocked their school and world last April point further to the need for the proliferation of Christian-based schools.

My call for more Christian schools is not based on a delusion.  Never have I, nor will I, believe that Christian schools offer a utopia wherein brotherly love rules uninterrupted and wrong ideas are never presented.  In the most guarded of settings, students will have to be disciplined and teachers reprimanded.  Some will face dismissal due to the lack of moral or doctrinal integrity.  In these negatives, nevertheless, lie the blessings.

At public schools, students living immorally are applauded by peers, and sometimes by teachers.  Their behavior and such insidiously positive reinforcement are powerfully negative influences on the young Christian trying to live “in, but not of, the world.”   At Christian schools, the enrolled can be disciplined for things like promiscuity and drunkenness, even if those things took place outside of school hours.   At public schools, students who wear advertisements for hate groups and satanic cults are defended by the ACLU.  At Christian schools, their display is stopped, most likely before it degrades into bitter, rebellious acts of violence.  At public schools, teachers trying to integrate a faith in God into any subject, especially science, will be quickly branded fanatical and dangerous.  At Christian schools, they are noted as those who genuinely care for the whole development — academic and spiritual — of the precious child.

The difference is in the control.  Public schools are controlled by a government so overwhelmed with some overblown concept of separation of church and state that Christianity is regarded as the only enemy of an adequate education.  Let the faith of evolution reign supreme (and believing it takes a great deal of faith), but don’t present evidence for an intelligently designed young earth.  Let the Qu’ran and the Baghavad-Vita be stored in the lockers, but keep the Bible off the premises.  Let sex education and birth control enlighten and free hormonally controlled minds, but don’t impose a protective, safe moral code of abstinence.  Education organizations’ highest officials often un-admittedly but practically relish the religion of secular humanism.  Its lack of moral education deprives individuals and devastates society.  There is no good reason, in their atheistic, amoral system for students not to become immoral, unkind and even violent.  The fault is in the atheistic control.

Christian schools, ideally, are controlled by boards of directors made up of Christians with sound moral and doctrinal convictions.  Even when the convictions are questionable, they generally rise far above the standard-less officials of public education.  They, therefore, hire teachers of science who will offer evidence of creation.  They hire choral and band directors who will use the music to reinforce spiritual and emotional well being.  History teachers will focus on the characters of moral courage who based their bold decisions on Christian faith.  Computer science instructors will warn of the abuses of the internet.  Math teachers will emphasize integrity in accounting.  Above all, Bible teachers will be employed.  Daily discussions directed by God’s Word will compose one-seventh of the school-day’s time.  And that’s not even counting the daily devotions in chapel.

Christian schools are operated by a principle that still regards the whole person.  The faculty and staff know life is not broken into secular and religious segments.  The child is an emotional, spiritual, social, physical individual.  One area of growth can not be adequately achieved without the others.  “Jesus increased in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and men” (Luke 2:52).  Christian schools seek to further complete growth into mature Christian adulthood.

Areas that are blessed with a proliferation of Christian schools reap the benefits in society.  Parents have a choice about an education for their children.  Solid citizens are the ones who receive diplomas.  They grow old with principles of marital purity, brotherly kindness and neighborly behavior controlling their lives.  They seek to serve others.  They work for the general good.

To be sure, in areas without Christian schools, public graduates often carry the same noble characteristics.  They have learned them at home.  They’ve learned them at church.  But, my argument for the further proliferation of Christian schools into new territories goes something like this:  “Wouldn’t the world be better if the young people spent their six to eight hours a day at school learning the reinforcements — and not, as is often the case, the contradictions — of the same principles?”  Forty hours a week is a lot of time to spend away from the standards we, as Christian parents, hold dear.

Then, there’s one more sincere disclaimer to make.  Not nearly all public school classrooms are so tainted as the pictures painted above.  Many devout and noble people buck the tide to implement in their students the noble character of Christianity.  They do it by example, and, often at risk of job loss, by word.  Many principals guide their schools of charge with a genuine moral concern.  No, this article is not to berate anyone who has ever believed in the virtues of a public education.  Where atheism and amorality are absent, public education still produces fantastic citizens and great societal results!

Our point is simply that increasing antagonism toward Christianity in the public arena may necessitate the establishment of more Christian institutions as a counterbalance.  It is worth considering.  Perhaps, where you are, you are the one who is prepared to get the ball rolling.  Who knows what amount of good can be accomplished?  At least we know that some can, and that is reason enough to try.