Revisiting a Minefield--Part 1

Are you up for wading with me into a minefield?  Some of us have been here before, haven't we?

Someone from another community told me recently "The vision for Christian education in our community is tired."  Is this the inevitable result of 50 continuous years of operating a Christian school?  Maybe.  My dad is famous for saying "God has not sentenced us to failure," and I'm sure he would say the same about operating a Christian school.  I wonder, however, if the system we've adopted for our Christian schools does not contain some elements that predispose it to failure.  No more than many educational systems, certainly, but present nonetheless.

The origins of the typical group schooling system have far more in common with the model of industrial production coming out of Germany in the late 1800s than conforming to a model spelled out in Scripture.  The German model emphasizes efficiency above all else.  Uniformity and assembly-line production are essential elements of this model.  John Taylor Gatto, in his book, The Underground History of American Education, traces this route from Germany to America by way of American industrialists who were as inspired by Social Darwinism as they were by German principles of efficiency.  If people were to willingly submit to the mindless repetition of assembly-line production, they needed to be preconditioned for such a life by the educational system.  The educational system we have now was, according to Gatto, expressly designed to produce robotic individuals by employing robotic educational methods.  Those who could not succeed in the educational system would be weeded out before they got to the factories, which was OK, because only the ones fittest for the industrial system were of value to it anyway.  None of this sounds anything like an educational vision grounded in Scriptural principles.

Schools as we know them are not mentioned at all in the Bible.  The one time the word "school" is used it apparently refers to a center of philosophical disputation--the school of Tyrannus.  Unlike families and churches, which are clearly Biblical, schools are extra-Biblical.  Schools are not expressly forbidden in Scripture, so I do not consider them un-Biblical.  But they can never be accurately described as Biblical.  People try though.  Several decades ago I was vociferously criticized for not being properly loyal to "this Biblical institution" (the Christian school).  I didn't buy the argument then.  I still don't.  

Also several decades ago, I once wrote what I feared would eventually develop in the school system our church was setting up:  "I see tired teachers, disillusioned students, and everyone tired of paying for it all."  Are we there yet?  I'm sure not everyone is there.  Some teachers are still feeling energized, some students are still curious and eager to learn, and some people don't mind digging deeper into their pockets to pay for what we have.  I believe, however, that we also have, in some measure, all of the elements I "saw" a long time ago.  I also believe that this would not have to be true of any church educational system, if a program were built on a firmer Scriptural foundation than what we have attempted so far.

In general, Christian schools have adopted the state's educational system and attempted to make it serve Christian purposes by using Bible-based curriculum and employing Christian teachers.  My theory is that this practice is flawed because it is not sufficiently grounded on what we know from Scripture about how Christian institutions are to function.  Schools, in fact, will be successful only to the degree to which they adhere to what is clear in Scripture about the proper function of the family and church--the two institutions  described in Scripture that are most closely intertwined with what schools concern themselves with.  

(To be continued)