I asked my sister-in-law about their
decision to send their junior high kids to a Christian school in 1997. “Our reason for sending them to a Christian
school was two-fold, primarily,” Joyce said.
“We want them to develop a comprehensive world and life view that
encompasses all areas of learning and living.
Secondly, we are concerned that neither Peter nor Rebekah
have the strong self-esteem Tim did while going through school. He was able to stand up for his faith, regardless
of peer or teacher pressure.” Peter is
now doing well working for his uncle and Rebekah is
happily married. However, I have my
doubts as to whether they were well served by going to Faith Academy.
Peter who got straight A’s in the public schools and would have done
well in college dropped out of school and graduated with a GED sometime
later. The move from Arizona to Pennsylvania was wrenching for both of the
children, especially when the family found that the school in Pennsylvania wouldn’t recognize some of the
credits from Faith.
I commend parents who recognize the
special circumstances that warrant home or private schooling for their
child. And there is anecdotal evidence
of children thriving under such conditions.
But I’m generally opposed to non-public schooling. I think it’s important for our children to
find their way in the mainstream of life—the world as it really is. To no small degree, public school is life
writ small with greasers, nerds, jocks, and queen bees and, above all, the
intense competition. I also think it is
arrogance bordering on the delusional that parents can
think that they have the skills in totality needed to feed their children’s
hunger for learning. Even if parents
have the time, energy, resources, and training, they don’t have the different
kinds of teaching styles that makes a well-rounded student. Some teachers are highly demanding and
sticklers for details. Other teachers
require recitation and memorization, while yet others prefer discussion and
debate. No parent can provide all of
that, as well as the competitive environment and the exposure to the
possibility of failure that helps develop a child’s abilities and character.
My approach is to assume nothing about
the public school ability to teach our children, although the school our
children attend continues to impress me.
In the lobby of the Mustang Library in Scottsdale, the Rotary Club had a display of
perhaps fifty local high school students with their photographs listing their
school and community efforts, academic interests, and career goals. Many students from this community are heading
for national universities, such as MIT, Princeton and Harvard with career goals in
medicine, education, and law. I couldn’t
imagine a similar display in Lake in the Hills. Nancy
and I have taken a highly intentional role in our children’s education, much
like many parents in this community. Nancy is on the campus every day, and is
plugged in to all the nuances of the institutional politics that could impact
their educational development. I began
reading to them each night when they were six months old (“Big A, Little A,
What begins with A?, Aunt Annie’s alligator, A… A…A.”). In
consequence, both Zach and Ben were avid readers well before kindergarten, read
at an advanced level today, and got and still get top grades. We surround them with books, talk about
current events, take them to the zoo and museums, and go on frequent
out-of-state vacations. But, above all,
we do what we can to kindle their natural love of learning for its own sake and
to appreciate the romance of ideas. We
want to inoculate them well before they get into middle school with the
rock-solid conviction that learning, reason, education, and intelligence are assets
in life, and to resist the inevitable pull from their peers off this path to
success to mediocrity or failure.
Nancy went to a Lutheran school when she
was in high school. That decision was
forced by the inferior quality of Chicago public schools at that time and the
start of busing. I went to Chefoo, a boarding school run by the mission board. But I’m opposed to sending children to
so-called Christian schools. The
constitutional mandate is for public schools to be religiously neutral. For parents who don’t appreciate that
neutrality, there are alternatives, such as parochial schools and after-school
instruction. Even apart from the quality
of the education, which is sometimes qualitatively and quantitatively inferior,
it‘s a canard that there are no Christians in public school. I once told someone that I was going to a
Christian college. “Oh,” he said. “Are the bricks and grass at Wheaton born again?” “Well, no, but maybe the people there
are.” He asked: “And you won’t find
Christians at Yale or Northwestern?” For
me, at least, at that stage in my life, I needed Wheaton, and many of my professors opened
my eyes to ideas that perhaps I might not have gotten elsewhere. Since it’s in my nature to buck the
prevailing winds, I may have become a religious fanatic had I gone to the University of Illinois.
But I feel it’s important that our children learn to like and play with
children who might be Hindus or atheists.
Some day, those same children will be their managers or colleagues. Children are often more tolerant than their
parents, and some parents who send their kids to Christian schools seem to me
to be bigots who desire that their children be schooled in bigotry. Just as education is an asset in life,
intolerance is a liability, as it closes us off from people and opportunities
that can make our life better and richer.
Parents sometimes place their kids in Christian schools because they
have behavioral problems in public schools.
So what you sometimes get in these classroom are sheltered, gentle
children thrown in with hard-core misfits and bullies—fresh meat for the
wolves. Some think that if the teacher
gets their charges to recite the Ten Commandments in the morning, they won’t
pick on each other in the afternoon recess.
That’s touching but false in its woolly-headed utopianism. And the worst bullies of all are often the
teachers with their knuckle-cracking rulers.
At Chefoo, we had a lot of loving teachers but
some who were borderline psychotics.
Parents will also pay thousands of
dollars for this kind of education because they don’t want their kids to “learn
evolution” and they want their kids to “pray in school” and “learn the
Bible.” Now, I was in high school more
than three decades ago, and things may have changed. But I suspect that public schools still allow
opposing positions on evolution or any other subject. I submit that it’s the parents that need to
develop within their child the steel to defend a point of view. In the abdication of that responsibility,
another point of view will emerge—and it won’t just come from the school. My children can and do pray in school
whenever they want to pray. But teachers
cannot compel them to pray—and nor should they. In the school district that I’m in, that would
mean that the prayers would be led by those who are generally of the Jewish,
Catholic, or Mormon faiths. In my
advanced placement literature class in high school, we spent a few weeks
reading The Book of Job as literature and philosophy. Few teachers deny the importance the Bible
has in our culture and history. We
cannot understand of Shakespeare with knowing the King James Version. We cannot understand the ideas that influenced
the Puritans and founding fathers with knowing the Bible. We cannot understand Islam without knowing
Judaism and Christianity. It would
greatly surprise me that public school teachers prohibit the reading and the
studying of the Bible and Christianity, and frankly I don’t believe that it’s
true.
It’s my conviction that the moral
education of our children rests fundamentally with us parents and to a lesser
extent the church. The purpose of
schools is to teach our children how to think, not what to think.
