Christian Education for Christian Children
Every weekday morning at 7:30 a.m. I pull out this Bible and I grab the folder we’ve made which contains selected psalms and hymns, the early Creeds, the Westminster Shorter Catechism, the STGB Virtue Catechism, and I go into one of the classrooms with fourteen students and three other faculty members and start our school day with the worship of the one true and living God. We praise him in song, we recite the ancient faith in the Creeds, we catechize ourselves (myself included), we read a chapter of God’s Holy Word and reflect upon it, and then we pray to God to work in us and use us and make us more like his Son and better ambassadors for his kingdom.
One of the things I am constantly reminding my students as we start our day is that they are blessed. They are blessed because they are Christians from Christian families. They are blessed because they attend a school where every member of the staff and faculty is one of their brothers or sisters in Christ and worships the same Lord as they do. They are blessed because their peers are followers of the Lord Jesus. They are blessed because they come to a school that recognizes that whether they be studying Math, History, Literature, Composition, Logic, Latin, Music, Art, or whatever, they are studying something over which Jesus is Lord. All that is true, good, and beautiful comes from him, is about him, and flows back to him in praise.
As we go throughout our day Christ is regularly on our lips. This does not mean that Math becomes Bible study, but it means that mathematics works because it flows from a rational Creator. In History we see God’s providential hand throughout human history. In Science we see the divine architect making complex systems and organisms that obliterate the genius of our best scientists (who are generally just trying to reverse-engineer what God has already made). In Logic we learn to reason well and order our minds to line up with the truth which God already knows perfectly. In Latin we study language itself and wonder at the meta-grammar which dictates the rules that all languages are beholden to—because the God who made Heaven and Earth spoke it into existence. In Composition and Rhetoric we learn to express ourselves well, with power and precision, because God’s servants are to take the Word of God into all the world and make disciples of every nation.
I often hear a lot about “why Christians shouldn’t send their kids to public school,” and I agree with much of what is said in the negative about the failure of modern education and the drone making process that takes place in many public schools today, but I think we too often leave the argument there. The greater argument about why Christian children should not go to public school isn’t about what they need to avoid, it’s about what they need to be given and can’t get there. A classical Christian education is not merely devoid of worldliness, it is filled with righteousness and virtue and the exaltation of Christ!
The Scriptures are not silent on God’s will for the education of our children.
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deut. 6:4-9)
To be frank, I don’t see how it is possible to be obedient to this commandment if we don’t see to it that our children are educated by followers of the Lord. Whether homeschooled by Christian parents or placed into a quality classical Christian school, we must always be talking to our children about the Lord, in the small things and the big things, showing them how all of life is Christ’s.
I pour no scorn, none whatsoever, on those who are in difficult situations financially and who presently feel that this sort of thing is impossible. Indeed, I ask now in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ that he would lift you up and set you upon a firm place that you might be able to do all you wish concerning his will. I am not writing this to bully anyone. I am simply telling you why Christian education is so incredibly important. I am telling you that it is not merely about avoiding the onslaught of secularism (which is very real), but it is about positively gaining an education fit for disciples of Jesus Christ. We worship the Maker of all things and all things are his. Our children need us to see this and they need us to show it to them so they may in turn tell it to their children and their children’s children.
Blessed is the man
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
but his delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law he meditates day and night.
He is like a tree
planted by streams of water
that yields its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither.
In all that he does, he prospers.
The wicked are not so,
but are like chaff that the wind drives away.
Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;
for the Lord knows the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.
-Psalm 1
Editor’s note: This article is a lightly edited version of the original from Study the Great Books and is republished here with permission.
