Being Faithful To Our Children and Their God

The "Why" Behind Christian Education

Trevin Wax 

The Gospel Coalition

A few years ago, I reviewed a book with contributors who make the case for their preferred choice for Christians and education. The major options—public school, Christian school, or homeschool—have strengths and weaknesses. Every school is different, and every child is different.

As I said in that book review, different conclusions on this matter shouldn’t lead to division in the church. Likewise, we shouldn’t overlook how economic realities often make one or two of these options difficult or impossible for many families.

Still, over the years, I’ve been asked why our family has chosen to go the route of the Christian school (with a brief exception of a year of homeschooling for one of our kids). Even though my wife and I have experienced both Christian and secular schools and have seen weaknesses in both—she grew up in a public school in Romania, and I went to a Christian school in the United States— it’s the overall approach to education that has led us to Christian education.

In a recent issue of Touchstone, Donald Williams lays out four theses on Christian education, which I will list and summarize below. Williams believes Christian education “has a critical role to play alongside the church and the home in transmitting the biblical worldview to the next generation.” Here’s why.

1. Secular education is an oxymoron.

Williams believes that the goal of a secular school—to provide an education that is religiously neutral—is impossible.

Pagans Show Their Teeth

There's Rotten Apples Abroad

Spit The Diseased Apple Out

Disturbing News From The Christian Daily Reporter

Apple Bans Ministry's App for Teaching Biblical View of Sexuality

12/27/2018 -- Apple has banned and removed from its App Store an app by Living Hope Ministries, a Christian nonprofit which, according to its website, "proclaims a Christ-centered, biblical world-view of sexual expression rooted in one man and one woman in a committed, monogamous, heterosexual marriage for life" and describes its mission as "to proclaim God’s truth as we journey with those seeking sexual and relational wholeness through a more intimate relationship with Jesus Christ."

Apple banned the app after a national gay rights organization called Truth Wins Out started a petition to have it removed as "bigoted," "hateful," and "dangerous, homophobic garbage" created by "hateful bigots and bullies" intent on "tormenting LGBT youth." The petition proved successful in getting the app yanked despite only receiving 356 signatures as of this writing.

Beyond Reform

Keeping A Righteous Perspective

There are only two things wrong with our schools: Everything that our children don’t learn there and everything they do. These public schools, with their vast political and bureaucratic machinery, are beyond reform. That does not mean that persons of good will should not offer themselves up as missionaries of truth and goodness and beauty, to teach there… But we would be quite mad to send our children there. We send missionaries to cannibals. We do not serve the cannibals our boys and girls. 

---Anthony Esolen

Re-Building Christendom--No Time to Lose

The Three-Fold Cord

The State's control over education in New Zealand has been with us since the 1880's.  At the time state funding and control was first put forward few realized that it was a very early manifestation of a doctrine that would come to dominate the country--and well nigh bring us to ruin.  Some have called this ideology"Socialism Without Doctrines".  

Migrants to New Zealand (mainly from the UK) in the late nineteenth century and on into the twentieth came from a civilization that had a long pedigree.  It also had well established institutions, such as hospitals and schools.  Migrants naturally wanted to see these things established in New Zealand--and the quickest way was to fund them out of the public purse.  So New Zealand became a socialist country by practice, rather than by dogma.

Churches were largely complicit in this development.  They were comfortable with supporting state schools, rather than establishing their own parochial schools.  After all, the state had the money (extracted through taxation) and churches did not.  It took a century for this model to fail badly. It has turned out that socialism in the education sector--with or without doctrines--would be no more successful than it has proved to be producing not fit-for-purpose, useless widgets.

The Fall and Rise of the Liberal Arts College

Out of the Ashes

Anthony Esolen in His Own Words: ‘Why I Left Providence College for Thomas More’

The acclaimed Catholic translator of Dante’s Divine Comedy shares with the National Catholic Register his reasons for leaving a tenured professorship to join the Thomas More College of the Liberal Arts.

Peter Jesserer Smith
NC Register

PROVIDENCE — Professor Anthony Esolen has thought deeply about the connections between excellence in literature and the cultural renewal of America. For a long time, he has fought a battle on the campus of Providence College, where he holds a tenure as an English professor, for a Catholic worldview that values cultural diversity anchored in truth and virtue, against a politically-inspired moral diversity that he believes homogenizes culture by celebrating mediocrity to the exclusion of Christian civilization’s wide patrimony of letters and learning.

In this interview with the National Catholic Register, Esolen explains in his own words why he decided to leave Providence College behind. The esteemed translator of The Divine Comedy, and recent author of Out of the Ashes: Restoring American Culture, will soon commence a new chapter at the Thomas More College of the Liberal Arts in Merrimack, New Hampshire, where he will have a hand in establishing its new Center for the Restoration of Catholic Culture.

Why are you leaving a tenured position as a literature professor at Providence College for a faculty position at the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts?

First, because Thomas More College is a sound and sweet and wise place that deserves the prayers, the attention, and the support, financial and otherwise, of every Catholic who wishes to see culture — the real thing, not its mass-produced counterfeit — restored in America; culture in general, and a vibrant Catholic life in particular. I came home recently from a day at Thomas More College, full of good cheer and energy, and for somebody who isn’t getting younger, those can take you a long way. They can add many years to your life as a teacher, whereas discouragement and disappointment lead to exhaustion.

Second, it is a great opportunity, because of the center for cultural renewal that the college has begun; it is as if they had read my mind, or I had read their minds, when I wrote my book, Out of the Ashes: Restoring American Culture.

What Makes an Education "Christian" in Quality and Character?

A Christian Liberal Arts Education

The term "liberal arts" has entered the scrapyard, and  is awaiting the crusher.  It appears to be following the course of the dodo.  But for Christians the matter is urgent, pressing, and thoroughly modern.

The first hurdle in coming to understand why the study of Christian liberal arts is vital is to parse "liberal" correctly.  The common understanding of that particular adjective these days refers to something without bounds, limits, or controls.  In today's parlance, a liberal is someone who confronts controls or limits as something to be smashed.  The social conservative might argue that marriage is a sacred life-long institution between a man and a woman.  The "liberal" would rise up against that notion as an affront to human fulfillment and self-realization.  For the liberal, marriage is whatever you might want it to be--a term referring to a relationship between both genders or between a man and his pigeon, or whatever.

But the meaning of "liberal" in the phrase "Christian liberal arts" is something of another order entirely.  It derives from the classical world and refers not to breaking down order and restraint, but the exact opposite.  According to Wikipedia,

The liberal arts (Latin: artes liberales) are those subjects or skills that in classical antiquity were considered essential for a free person (Latin: liberalis, "worthy of a free person") to know in order to take an active part in civic life, something that (for Ancient Greece) included participating in public debate, defending oneself in court, serving on juries, and most importantly, military service.  [Emphasis, ours.]

In this usage, "liberal" means to live and act in a disciplined manner, so as to take up the roles and responsibilities of citizenship.

Fast forward to the beginning of the Modern period.  In the sixteen hundreds, Christian liberal arts schools and curricula and education abounded, particularly under the influence of the Puritans in England and New England.  But, at the same time, these institutions and schools were drawing upon Luther and Calvin and the earlier Reformers.

According to Leland Ryken, Luther had written to the councilmen of Germany:

If I have children and could manage it, I would have them study not only languages and history but also singing and music together with the whole of mathematics. . . . The ancient Greeks trained their children in these disciplines; . . . they grew up to be people of wonderous ability, subsequently fit for everything.

To which Ryken adds:   "Fit for everything: this has always been the goal of liberal education, as distinct from vocational training."  [Leland Ryken, Worldly Saints: The Puritans As They Really Were (Grand Rapids: Academie Books/Zondervan, 1986), p. 164.]

The goal of a Christian liberal arts education was to mould the student into a capable and qualified person, able to fulfill a variety of callings and roles.  Milton said it most succinctly:

I call therefore a complete and generous education that which  fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously, all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war.  [Cited by Ryken, op cit., p. 169.]

To which Ryken appends: "a liberal education is comprehensive.  It prepares a person  to do well at all that he or she may be called to do in this life. . . . Learning a certain amount of information will not by itself constitute a liberal education.  Such knowledge becomes worthwhile only as it is instrumental in forming a qualified person; . . . .  education influences people in their personal lives, and it makes them productive members of society."  [Ibid.]

As Nehemiah would have said, it's time to start building, folks.

Irresponsible Parents

Your Kids Aren’t Equipped to be Public School Missionaries

Matt Walsh
TheBlaze

A concerned parent sent me this. It’s the school newspaper for Mary Ellen Henderson Middle School in Falls Church, Virginia. Among the other hard hitting pieces of journalism targeted at children, ages 11-13, is an article on “transgender rights.”

The article explains how Obama “improved the lives of transgender people by fighting the discrimination against them,” but all of that is now in jeopardy because of President Trump. The next article delves into the intricacies and wonders of various forms of gender identity, including “transgenderism,” “non-binary,” “bigender,” “agender,” “demigender,” “genderfluid,” and “genderflux.” I’m obviously more innocent and naive than the typical middle schooler these days, so I’d never even heard of some of these. For anyone else who may be curious, here’s how the last three types of genders are explained to an audience of pre-pubscent kids:

Demigender: Demigender refers to people who partially identify as one gender. Demigender people may also identify as partially a different gender. Examples include demigirl, or someone who partially identifies as a girl; demiboy, or someone who partially identifies as a boy; demiagender, meaning someone who identifies as partially agender; and more broadly, deminonbinary, or someone who just partially identifies as nonbinary.

Genderfluid and Genderflux: Genderfluid refers to someone whose gender changes between any of the above categories. For example, someone may feel female one day, male another day, and agender the next day. Similarly, genderflux refers to someone whose gender changes in intensity. This typically means that someone’s gender will fluctuate between agender and a different gender, which could be binary or nonbinary. For example, someone might sometimes feel completely female, sometimes demigender, and sometimes agender.

Did you get all that?

Someone can partially not have a gender, while the other part of them has three genders, and the third part is a futon. These are the notions being implanted in our kids’ heads in their public schools.

A Blacklist of Honour

A Mark of Faithfulness

In the United States the LGBT (that's Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual, and Trans-sexual) Campus Pride has published a black-list of Christian schools and colleges which are not dancing to its tune.

Shane Windmeyer, the head of Campus Pride, has an op-ed up on NBCNews.com in which he calls on corporations to blacklist graduates from these universities. Excerpt:

The business case for equality is clear. If companies take pride in “being inclusive and welcoming to all” and say that “discrimination is wrong,” these same corporations must consider their associations with these 102 anti-LGBTQ campuses. Discrimination under the guise of religion is still discrimination. It is the most oppressive and hurtful kind of bias and prejudice to LGBTQ people, who have been victimized by religion-based bigotry for many years.

The harmful association with anti-LGBTQ laws and policies is cause for alarm for any business looking toward the future. If a campus wishes to have an anti-LGBTQ policy sanctioned under the law with a Title IX exemption, that is their choice. Campus Pride published the Shame List so everyone will know about these campuses.

[Hat Tip: Rod Dreher at American Conservative.]

We think this provides a huge opportunity for faithful Christian schools and colleges.  Imagine the brand and recruiting power of being able to proclaim: "xx Christian College, faithful to God and Holy Writ in all things.  Blacklisted by Campus Pride."  If any Christian school ends up not being blacklisted by Campus Pride there are all sorts of questions conscientious Christians need to start asking about that particular institution.

You can imagine concerned school presidents writing to Shane Windmeyer demanding that they be put on the Campus Pride blacklist, whilst presenting all the evidence as to why they rightly ought to be blacklisted.

Matthew 5:11  Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.

Modern Education Epidermal Deep

Never Take Classic Literature From Classrooms

By Gracy Olmstead
The Federalist


Classical literature has always been a part of the high school experience. Novels such as To Kill a Mockingbird and Pride and Prejudice have become quintessential features of our curricula, the subjects of countless book reports and study sessions.

But Shayna Murphy of the Bookbub Blog wants to change that: many books in the classical canon are outdated for today’s students, she argues: “Just because a book is a classic, doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the right fit for a modern-day classroom.” She offers a list of 12 contemporary novels that are, according to her, worthy replacements for our antiquated list of historical reads.

Murphy’s statement—that “just because a book is a classic, doesn’t mean it’s … the right fit”—carries a few assumptions about the nature of the modern-day classroom, and what it is meant to achieve. Do we meet students where they are at, and cater learning to their predispositions and proclivities? Or do we seek to stretch our students, urging them to move beyond what’s comfortable?

Here We Stand: We Can Do No Other

The Lost Purpose for Learning

Rooting Dualism Out of Christian Education

John Stonestreet
Breakpoint

Christian Overman, who directs the Seattle-based Worldview Matters and is a commissioned Colson Fellow, believes—and I largely agree—that we’ve lost the culture because we’ve lost our schools—including, in some cases, important distinctives that make Christian schools, well, Christian. “The shaping of nations begins in the minds of children,” Chris says. “Nation-shaping ideas acquired in elementary and secondary schools are not immediately felt on a national level because it takes time for little acorns to grow into giant oaks. But grow they will.”

In a new, thought-provoking e-book, “The Lost Purpose for Learning,” Chris articulates clearly what has gone awry and offers a systemic, intentional, and repeatable solution for Christian school teachers and headmasters, Sunday school workers, and other church personnel who interact with students between the ages of 4 and 18.

As Christian notes, in the years before the federal government took over teaching our children, education was largely a Christian endeavor—not just in the sense that it was run by Christians, but in that it was founded on Christian assumptions about God, life, the world, and humanity. And the primary assumption was that Christ is Lord of all—not just of so-called “religious” subjects, but of everything, including biology, math, even physics.

When the government took over, some Christians, such as A.A. Hodge, warned that the schools would become indoctrination centers for atheism.

Language and Number

Masters of Language

One of the strong positives of the Cambridge school curriculum is that it is focused upon core subjects.  The core represents subject areas which are the basis for all other learning and knowledge.

Modern, secular education in the government schools is being ruined by curriculum inflation.  Now there are endless choices, options, and multi-form subject areas.  Even the best students are left knowing a little about many subjects, but with little competence over any..  Modern education, as the proverb has it, risks leaving a student as "Jack of all trades, Master of none."

The subject core of the Cambridge curriculum is language, number, and science.  Every year builds upon this core, with all other subjects "tucked" around it.

Here is an example from one Christian school, using the Cambridge curriculum.

Changes and Progress

Insider Advantage

Recently a couple of media articles have focused upon the success of religious schools in New Zealand.  The Christian cynic would say that the day the (overwhelmingly secular) media start to credit Christian schools with success is the day one can safely conclude they must indeed be stellar institutions.  This surely is an occasion when faint praise is not to damn, but to exult.

Notwithstanding the Christian cynic's view, it is good to see church schools (predominantly Roman Catholic and Anglican) doing so well.  The levels of demand for this kind of education in New Zealand are rising.  Moreover, the demand is coming from non-Christian sections of the community.  Why?  Well, the answers are not hard to find.  New Zealand's education system is government controlled; the government and its institutions promote the secular, atheistic world-view by the blunt force of law.  Tolerance of the Christian faith is strictly that--concessional tolerance.  The secular establishment tolerates Christianity in the same way one would tolerate animism or clairvoyance--with the mien of polite condescension towards the ignorant.

But conscientious parents are less philosophically jaundiced.

The Age of the Sophists

Epistemological Sandcastles

Yesterday we published a piece on a false dichotomy being perpetrated throughout schools and colleges in the United States.  The dichotomy alleges that a proposition is either a fact or an opinion.  It also alleges that an opinion can never be true.  Only facts can be true.  It goes further: morals are statements of opinion, not fact.  Therefore, they also can never be true.

Suppressed in all of this nonsense are the presuppositions of empiricism and materialism.  In other words, materialism and empiricism are presupposed as truths and facts.  Then the implications are worked through to morals, facts, opinions, ethics and so forth.  Naturally, when school children and naive college students are exposed to this kind of sophistry, the presuppositions upon which their whole castle of epistemic sand is built are kept carefully hidden behind closed doors.  Concealing the family secrets is the order of the day. 

Nevertheless, the sandcastle is washed away by a simple question: is the dichotomy that a proposition is either a fact or an opinion, a fact or an opinion?  The only answer possible is that it is an opinion, and therefore, according to the dichotomy itself, is untrue.  Truth, after all, belongs only to those things which can be empirically proven as facts.

In summary, it is scandalous but illuminating that the epistemologies which reign in the secular schools of the United States in these days (that is, pretty much most schools) amount to little more than vacuous, empty sophistry.  Let us remind ourselves that the sophists of the ancient world were radical relativists, synonymous with speciousness and deception.  Nothing much has changed.  Some things cannot change their spots.

Let's get our children into Christian schools so they can be taught to think truthfully and clearly.  Anything less would be a travesty.

Total Freedom, If You First Bow to Caesar

Deceit, Damned Self-Deceit, and Secularism

Self-aware Christians know that, "there ain't no neutral ground".  Christians are more likely to be epistemologically self-aware.  They know that all truth is pre-interpreted truth.  It is pre-interpreted by God the creator and sustainer of all things.  Anyone who argues there can be such a thing as a neutral zone--a secular public square, for example--where all views are held with equal respect and have equal validity is either self-deceived, childishly credulous or a snake.

The same reality holds in schools.  Secular schools that are even-handed, and tolerant towards all beliefs and religions, gods, and speculations are a nonsense.  At base, the secularists who make such claims, know it is spurious.  But it feels good.  It is a just-so story they tell themselves to maintain a veneer of self-respect and to fool their opponents.

Christians are liberated from such self-deceits.  If all truth is pre-interpreted truth, as the Christian faith insists is the case, then everyone is pre-committed and biased to a particular world-view from the outset--either Christian or otherwise.  When it comes to schooling, Christians want schools that are independent of the secularist world-view and able fully to reflect the authority of the Word of God as the pre-interpretion all other truth, reality, and knowledge.  In New Zealand, the only way to achieve this is to have truly private schools, self-funded.  If the secularist government pays, eventually the secularist government will control the music its hired piper plays. 

When the Conservative government in the UK set about to reform British schools, it adopted a quasi-market model which was designed to introduce competition into the education market place.

The Giants

Foundational Literature of Western Civilization

June 24, 2014

Justin Taylor

 

 

In his book The Case for Classic Christian Education (Crossway, 2003), Doug Wilson offers a list of “foundational” books for Western Civilization (some of which, but not all, would make their way onto his desert-island reading list.)
I’ve reproduced his list below, along with my own parenthetical recommendations on some translations, editions for kids, etc.

The Scriptures
Of course, the Scriptures are not included in the list of twenty-five books. The Bible is necessarily in a class by itself and forms the center of every class a student takes. But at the same time, the Bible is an important part of our broader literary heritage, particularly in the Authorized Version, popularly known as the King James. . . .

The Iliad
Written by Homer (c. 750 B.C.), this great work is about the fall of Hector in one sense, as well as the tragic fall of Achilles during the siege of Troy. The Trojan War is the setting, but this is not what The Iliad is about. Homer’s poetic gifts were great, but we should remember C. S. Lewis’s comment that it was his giftedness that made his granite despair shine as though it were marble.

[See Robert Fagles's translation. For kids, see Rosemary Sutcliff's retelling, The Wanderings of Odysseus: The Story of the Odyssey---or wait until July 2014 for a new edition of this retelling with illustrations by Alan Lee. For a Christian literary guide to the book, see Leland Ryken's work.]

The Odyssey
Mark Twain once quipped that we now know that Homer was not the author of these works, but they were rather to be attributed to another blind Greek poet with the same name. The Odyssey, more accessible to many modern readers than The Iliad, is about the return of Odysseus from a life of freebooting to his home country and his adventures on the way.

[See Robert Fagles's translation. For children, see Rosemary Sutcliff's Black Ships Before Troy: The Story of 'The Iliad.' Or wait till August 2014 to get her version with Alan Lee's illustrations.]

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

The Paideia Principle

Douglas Wilson

Blog and Mablog

Thursday, June 19, 2014 

The Christian faith is a religion of world conquest, and no, not that kind of world conquest. If we do not believe this, then every form of cultural engagement will be simply a form of slow surrender. It is the way of compromise. You can always tell this kind of person because they are always wrestling with the contours of something or other. And if you don’t believe in the triumph of the gospel, and you don’t want to surrender, then the only safe thing to do is to go the way of the neo-Amish. But there is another approach.

“And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4).

I want to take a moment to review what we mean by the paideia of God. No doubt many of you have heard me on this topic before, and so I will just take a few moments with some review. But I want to do this so that we can go just a little bit further up, and a little bit further in.

So Paul tells Christian fathers to bring their children up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. One of the words he uses here is paideia, which for the ancients was a loaded term.

"Sex Education" in Government Schools

Parents Are Smarter Than Government Bears

In New Zealand government schools--which are part of a government mandated and enforced monopoly--sex education is compulsory.  Now the official reason the government insists on educating your children about sex is the high rate of teenage pregnancy in this country.  But when the government runs a programme with the aim of reducing teenage pregnancy, there is only one possible outcome--more teenage pregnancies--which is what has been happening.

. . . a cross-party [parliamentary] inquiry [has] found New Zealand's high teenage-pregnancy rate was partly the result of inconsistent and sometimes non-existent sexual and reproductive lessons in schools.  [NZ Herald]

According to the propaganda employed to justify compulsory government sex lessons, non-existent sex education in schools causes teenage pregnancies.  Now, however, since government sex education has been compulsory and has been going for some time now and yet more teenage pregnancies have occurred, what's the excuse?  Well, it's because monopoly government sex propaganda has been inconsistent, and sometimes non-existent.  This is what we call the "great double down".  Sex education in the monopolistic government schools is not working because there is not enough of it.  So, we will have more.

But also, a qualitative improvement is being proposed.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

School Growing Pains

School Rules Are Not the Answer

Posted on Thursday, October 10, 2013  
By Douglas Wilson
Blog and Mablog

One of the great challenges faced by classical and Christian schools is the challenge of growth swamping that which is the cause of the growth. If there is one three-man lifeboat in the water, and a hundred people also in the water, the thing that makes the lifeboat an object of desire is the same reason it won’t be floating for very long.

Classical Christian schools have a great pedagogical method — it works. Moreover, the people who were crazy enough to see that it was going to work are those parents who were visionary enough to establish the school in the first place. They were dedicated parents, usually with godly homes, and when the school got established in its first few years, the culture of the student body was determined as much by the spiritual and cultural condition of the founding families as anything else. That, as much as the pedagogical method, is the reason the school became a really attractive place to be.

But back in the pure days, it was hard to pay the teachers. It was hard to keep the lights on. It was hard to find someone who would do the janitorial work. So when the school started to grow, the first sensation (felt by the board) was a sense of relief. Ahhhh.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

Not All Cake 

Education - Education
Written by Douglas Wilson
Tuesday, 21 May 2013

Levi Heiple has graciously interacted with my post on technology and education here. As he notes, we have a good bit of common ground -- and so what follows here is simply what I believe to be a necessary voice of caution. There are principles involved in education, and there are methods, and whenever you come across a dazzling new method, the temptation is to forget or slight the principle. I am not against the right use of a new method; I am jealous for the principle.

For me, the issue is not whether these new technologies are  going to affect education -- of course they are. The issue is where and how we categorize it all -- which was my point about the enhanced library. This is the basic distinction I was making there. You either learn from someone you know personally, or from someone you do not know personally. If it is the latter, then it is enhanced library learning -- with the difference that I might be fooled into thinking otherwise with the new technologies.

Grave Injustice

An Open Letter to The Commentariat About Christian Education

According to a report in Stuff, [21st May, 2013] the Post Primary Teachers' Association ["PPTA"] "outed" those organizations which had expressed interest in applying to become a charter school.  Your name, Angela (as PPTA President) was cited in that report. 

In particular you were quoted as opposing a situation where charter schools would be accepting state funding and would be teaching "creationism".  (We note that "creationism" was undefined, either by you or the report, so we are left somewhat uncertain about precisely what approach to science you were opposing.)   You, Angela were quoted as follows: