Our goal for our lives includes not only doing the work [God] has given us to do, what we call the dominion mandate, not only exercising dominion over our children (that is, raising them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord), but seeing that they are about the business of doing the same. You want to see your children, now abiding in the true vine, bear forth much fruit. You want them to grow in grace, to become more sanctified, to become more and more like Jesus. You want them to be consumed with pursuing first the kingdom of God. […] Thinking that education is something different from discipling our children is a sure sign that we have been ‘educated’ by the state. Education is discipleship.”
R.C. Sproul Jr., When You Rise Up: A Covenantal Approach to Homeschooling
No matter how devoted we are as Christian parents to seeing that our children get a “Christian education”, most of us still associate learning with this false dichotomy of “religion” and “education” that we’ve all been taught. It’s hard to think outside of that because of how ingrained it is in us, and has been for generations now.
You go to church to learn about the things of God and school to learn about all the “other stuff”, right?
But there is no “other stuff”! All things there are to know are either the things of God or, because we live in a fallen world, the things in opposition to him. There is no neutral ground in a world created by and ruled by him.
Sending our children to the state for education is not neutral.
But neither is taking the state’s model home and trying to tack Jesus onto it.
“Knowledge” in the Bible consistently implies knowing the things of God, not some specific scope and sequence laid out by man.
But we’ve been taught all of those things for so long that we accept them as true and function as if they are true. I grew up homeschooled most of the way through myself, my mother being a Christian and strongly emphasizing a Christian approach, but it hasn’t been until the last several years that I’ve realized the deep effects of any dichotomy at all existing in how we are taught.
Learning math (the logical order God has written into the fabric of the world) or science (how the parts of his world function and interact with each other) or history (how he has providentially worked in time) or life skills (how we are to function in a way that brings him glory) all fall under that knowledge. They aren’t separate, they aren’t “secular”, they can’t be learned well in a vacuum.
I grew up thinking that math and English “skills” were somehow set apart from life in general. Separate. That they were kind of “neutral” but you had to master them to live out in the world. Secular. That science could be learned 100% indoors. Vacuum.
My mother never said any of that. It’s just how “school” is “done”.
I hated history throughout all of my school years, it just seemed entirely disconnected from real life and felt overwhelming and boring and burdensome. I saw it as separate from my faith that was so deeply precious to me, as secular – essentially just a massive heap of facts to memorize for no apparent reason – and learned it in the lovely, dry vacuum known as History Books without all the priceless interconnectedness of people’s lives and events and God’s working in it all. If it had been presented to me as deeply interconnected to my faith and I could have learned it through books that brought it to life, I would have been all over it, as I am now!
I don’t say any of that to pick on my mom… I believe she did the best that she could with her understanding of how to Biblically raise her children. And how I grew up was so vastly different than how I could have if I had been raised by the public school system. I am so very thankful for how God protected me in that way.
I only share it all to say that homeschooling unfortunately doesn’t solve this problem.
Setting apart hours of your child’s day for “school” (which I might point out is itself borrowed terminology)naturally teaches this separation.
Teaching your children, this is “school time” and this is “normal life” teaches the dichotomy. You don’t even have to say it.
All of this is why I would implore all Christian parents to determine to tear down the example of government schools all the way to the foundation and start over.
Don’t try to dig the old foundation out from under the building and awkwardly shove a new one down there. Don’t decide that increasing the height of the building and adding some architectural flair to it will make it better. Tear it all down.
And start by building a brand new foundation. One that says that discipleship is the main thing. Because it is. Education is discipleship.
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