Why Christian Education?

As parents consider home school, public school, or Christian school for their child’s education, what many hope to find is a place where their vision for their child and the school’s vision for learning overlap. Families considering Christian schools can expect that these schools will partner with them in helping their children understand that our whole world belongs to God. They can expect that, through experiences both in and out of the classroom, their children will better understand how to be responsive disciples of Jesus Christ.

When students and teachers engage learning from this [Christian] perspective, everything in Christian schools becomes distinct because the core values and truths are framed through the biblical narrative. Student learning is nurtured in the context of faith. The pedagogy teachers use, the topics they choose to teach, and how a school implements its discipline policies must all reflect the story of salvation.

 

When this happens, the Christian school curriculum provides time and space for students to learn how mathematics, poetry, biology, sexuality, evolution, and the environment are part of God’s good creation. Tim Van Soelen, director of the Center for the Advancement of Christian Education at Dordt College, reminds us that “a biblical or Christian perspective informs all of these parts of the curriculum, helping us understand God’s creation and our participatory role in its restoration and reconciliation in a very special way. However, creation and curriculum also help us develop this biblical or Christian perspective or understanding of truth. It is a beautiful reciprocal relationship that recognizes the need to be lifelong learners.”

Christian education explores God’s hope for his world framed in the context of the story of creation, fall, and redemption leading to restoration. Christian schools remind students that there is a loving and good God who creates and upholds the universe and calls students, his human creatures, to live in and restore to goodness what is broken. A distinctly Christian curriculum will focus its attention on this good Creator and what he has made, on how it has gone wrong, and on how we might be called to help restore it to God’s original intent.

The Christian school curriculum must always demonstrate to students how any topic is, in that moment, a small piece of something bigger. A skill such as reading is essential because it is foundational to learning, but literacy also matters because it is a good gift from God that can allow students to become co-creators in God’s kingdom. Jodie Bomhof, a kindergarten teacher, says that every aspect of the Christian school curriculum in every grade matters because “God’s rule extends over all creation and impacts all areas of the curriculum.”

A Christian school curriculum and pedagogy cannot limit student learning to a transactional enterprise where knowledge is valued for the ultimate goal of high test scores or upward mobility. Of course, Christian schools must value a strong academic program. Nurturing learning in the context of faith means that Christian schools will not only prepare students to live faithfully as 6-, 8-, and 18-year-olds; it will also prepare them to enter fields such as law, medicine, plumbing, philosophy, engineering, and landscaping.

 

Within a Christian school, curriculum and pedagogy cannot be separated. Ed Noot, executive director of the Society of Christian Schools of British Columbia, points out that of equal importance to what we teach (the curriculum) is how we teach (our pedagogy). “I believe Christian educators need to become increasingly intentional about ensuring that our pedagogy is authentic, effective, and reflective of our foundational beliefs,” he says. Along with curriculum, pedagogy also shapes a student’s world-and-life view because how a teacher teaches communicates what the Christian school community values.

Children are amazing. Really. Spend a day or two in any school and you will be in awe of the students who line the hallways and fill the classroom. Whether in the form of Instagram or Twitter, the movie theatre, the mall, television, smartphones, texting, the supermarket magazine aisle, or any other idols of our time, children have never faced so many competing interests that desire a piece of their heart. These liturgies seductively and subversively tell our children that they will be fully alive and loved if they “own this” or “do this” or “look this way.” Sadly, many children and adults cannot resist the message.

 

Some parents believe that sending their kids to a Christian school will protect them from these competing stories. But it will not. A Christian school that does not engage the culture in which students live does its children and parents a disservice. Rather, Christian schools are to equip students with the tools to identify and respond to the idols of our time.

 

Engaging culture must go beyond identifying good and evil. Students must be able to understand and articulate how and where and why their desires are being shaped by the stories told by the culture—stories that wear down their hearts and minds. Christian schools must help kids see that they do not need to capitulate. They must offer students a better story—one that reorients their hearts and minds in a radical way. Our students need to see that that the story of Jesus boldly proclaims that there is nothing they can do to make Jesus love them more than he does, and there is nothing they can do to make Jesus love them less than he does.

Christian schools know that students were created to love and to know, and they help students direct their love toward that of Jesus Christ through these unique practices. So, for example, when I walk through our elementary school in the morning, I hear children singing, reciting Scripture, and praying together. Kids pray for grandparents who are sick, for friends who are lonely, for dogs that are lost and fish that have died. What a wonderful response to the cultural stories that desire our children’s hearts!

Each morning these children are acknowledging that our whole world belongs to God. These are goose-bumpy reminders that “nothing matters but the kingdom of God, but because of the kingdom of God, everything, literally everything, matters.” And that includes a child’s concern for his dying fish. Christian schools offer students a chance to “re-story” their lives each day through such practices.

 

Perhaps these seem like simple practices—and they are. Yet ... how children’s hearts are being directed or redirected when they pray, sing, and read Scripture communally each day. In addition, these practices remind us to pause. Yes, mathematics equations and science experiments have deep value, and God calls us to be engaged in these academic pursuits. But in our busy lives, where many children go from one activity to the next, these practices remind us how we are called to be in the world.

 

This is why Christian schools must provide opportunities for students to practice creation care, to visit and sing with older saints at the care home down the road, and to hand out food at the local shelter. These practices connect us to God’s creation and they show students how they can bring hope, faith, and love to a broken world.

Christian schools engage in these activities because practicing them helps students become aware of how to be in a right relationship with God, with others, and with the creation we live in.