“Fix these words of mine in your hearts and minds; tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.” Deut. 11:18-19 (NIV)
“The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright and out of that knowledge to love Him, to imitate Him, to be like Him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection.” – John Milton
“I advise no one to place his child where the Scriptures do not reign paramount. Every institution in which men are not increasingly occupied with the Word of God must become corrupt…. I am much afraid that schools will prove to be the great gates of hell unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures, engraving them in the hearts of youth.” – Martin Luther
Several years ago, I wrote an article on why our family decided to home school our children. We have done so for eleven years now, having seen two daughters finish high school and one to finish a bachelor’s degree at a distinctively Christian college. Today I am even more convinced that pursuing an educational path that recognizes the centrality of Christian truth is never the more critical. When school started up this past month, we believed God led us to enroll our last two daughters in a Christian School. Every year in fact, we prayed and sought the Lord about the educational choices we made.
What I wrote about education years ago, still shapes my thinking. Here’s a part of what I said in the article:
“The three greatest intellectual forces of our day have been Darwin, Marx and Freud. All three started a revolution in the way we think about the world, and understanding of our world apart from the knowledge of God. Most educational systems of the secular world are influenced by these views to some degree. While there are very few outright atheists in our country, faith in general has been relegated to private opinion and to matters of personal taste. We believe faith and education, as Scripture teach us are inseparably linked.
We believe public education had an important role in serving our society. But, what was once a way to give education to all citizens regardless of class, race or ability, has turned to what John Dewey envisioned as a way to free the individual from the tyranny of the religious mind. Today, most education is little more than indoctrination into the secular world-views that undermine a Biblical world-view. ... We desire to reform our culture and to influence it, but as parents our first obligation before God, is to shape the hearts and the minds of our children and not let others shape the formative years of their lives. As Timothy Dwight put it, “To commit our children to the care of irreligious persons is to commit lambs to the superintendency of wolves.”
We are not reactionary isolationists, who seek to withdraw from the world. Like most home educators we are taking a proactive role in shaping the lives of our children to make a difference in the next generation of our society. We believe to follow the currents of popular society is to invite disaster upon our children and diminish our Christian influence in the world for decades to come.”
Now that we take our girls to a Christian school everyday does not change that commitment or abrogate our God-given responsibility to educate our children. What it means is it gives us greater cause to be ever diligent in watching over what they learn, engaging with teachers and administrators and connecting with our children in their studies and family worship. An article in World Magazine recently highlighted the choices Christian families have in education. It offers a balanced perspective on what parents choose, recognizing that not everybody is the same. See the article http://www.worldmag.com/articles/15835.
My hope is that many young parents today will make one of the most important decisions they will ever face with prayer and wisdom.
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