WHAT MOST PEOPLE DON'T UNDERSTAND ABOUT CHRISTIAN EDUCATION, by Terrill I. Elniff

The secular mind, confronting the Christian school, tends to evaluate what it sees in terms that it can understand. Thus the prevailing view of Christian education is that Christian parents put their children in Christian schools because they are fed up with the problems of the public schools: sex, drugs, immorality, lowered standards, incompetent teachers, secularism, disorder, and violence. But to reason in this way is to overlook a very important aspect of the Christian school movement.

When I began teaching in a Christian school some eighteen years ago, I remember our headmaster emphasizing from time to time that the Christian education movement is not an "anti-public-school movement." Why not? I always asked. I thought public schools should be sold to the highest bidder at public auction. His point was that Christian education must exist for its own reasons, not as an escape from something else. To enter a Christian school as an escape from the modern, secular, world was essentially to betray the unique reason for Christian education, which was to study the world from a biblical point of view.

Now, eighteen years later, I appreciate the wisdom of his insight. I still think that public schools should be sold at public auction (that's a little more direct than tuition vouchers, but it accomplishes the same thing by putting education into the private marketplace), but making education private rather than public has nothing to do with Christian education. Private education is not necessarily Christian education. Religious education is not necessarily Christian education either. These-categories are all wrong. The real alternatives are man-centered education over against God-centered education.

If education is humanistic in its perspective, all the trappings of religion won't make it Christian. Baptized humanism is still humanism. Education may be moral, religious, conservative, and competent, and still be humanistic. Schools may have values, standards, rules, and even prayers, and still teach a man-centered curriculum. The one distinguishing mark of a Christian school relates to that one unique reason for Christian education: to gain a knowledge of the world from God's point of view (rather than man's) through the application of biblical presuppositions in every area of the curriculum and school activity.

That is the kernel of Christian education. Everything else is peripheral. Everything else can be duplicated or imitated. Christian education will not cease to be needed just because the public schools clean up their act, as some commentators seem to believe. Scott Thompson, executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, has been quoted (WSJ, 6-30-81, p. 30) as saying that "What the Christian schools movement is saying... is that public schools have two to three years to do a better job. If public school teachers are moral...and don't hide behind one or another legal curtain in dealing with values, then most Christian parents will be happy and they'll go back to teaching Christianity elsewhere as they have done in the past."

Now, I don't know how to measure "most" Christian parents, but I'm pretty sure there are a lot of Christian parents in the Christian schools movement who are simply refugees from the public schools. They are the ones Thompson can expect to receive back into the public schools once the public schools come to grips with their problems. Such Christian parents will go back to public schools because their commitment to Christian education is not positive, but negative, an escape from the modern, secular, world.

But there is also an immense number of Christian parents in the movement who don't intend to go back to the public schools even if they get squeaky clean. They are the ones with a positive commitment to the purposes of Christian education. Their children are in Christian schools because they believe that life must be related to God and learning must be related to truth. For them, secular and humanistic education is not an option.

The future of Christian education, then, does not depend on the reforms made in the public school systems. It depends, rather, on the relative number of Christian parents who understand the purpose of Christian education. The determination to apply biblical presuppositions to every area of life and learning is what most people don't understand about Christian education. The failure of the secular mind to comprehend this determination indicates that it also does not understand the revolutionary nature of the Christian school movement and the impact it will have on the future of education in this country.

Taken from the ICE newsletter: The Biblical Educator (Vol. III, No. 11)

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