A Catechesis in Apostasy
Public School as a Training Ground for Faith?
My oldest son spent two years in public schools, one in the UK, one in Canada. By the time we had moved back to America, and he was ready to enter first grade, we never again had a child in public school. Canada was already introducing transgender ideology into its schools in 2011, before it began to infiltrate American school in a widespread fashion. I’m not categorically opposed to the concept of public schools. They need not be ideologically corrupt, antagonistic to Christianity, nor intellectually deficient. Until certain supreme court cases (primarily in the 1960s), in fact, American public education was largely (and overtly) supportive of Christianity. Even more recently, there could be found many instances where it was at least not hostile to Christians. Those days are now gone.
Instead, we have an entire educational system that has been conquered by dangerous ideologues and ideologies, from various shades of wokeness to the aggressive promotion of sexual perversions. Is it possible someone, somewhere, can provide a counterexample to this claim? Sure, though that will not remain the case for long. The time-tested model of Cultural Revolution is running its standard course through our public schools: plead for tolerance when in the minority, exclude dissent after passing over into the majority, demand explicit conformity and punish deviance when little resistance remains. America’s public schools are in the latter stage of this process regarding the whole spectrum of anti-Christian ideologies. I spent most of the last year serving as an interim pastor in a small town in northeast Texas. The town has some factories and industry, but it is still a mostly rural part of Texas. It is exactly the kind of place most Christians and conservatives would feel confident would never succumb to BLM or transgender insanity or other forms of extreme leftism. And to a certain degree that would be true among most people in that town. But even its public schools have fallen into the same grotesque ideological diseases as the public schools in America’s leftist urban centers. And yet Christians continue to insist that their children should be sent to public schools, with a healthy dose of guilt-tripping from many to top it all off: “Our participation in the public school system was directly related to loving our neighbors” (Jen Wilkin).
Christians who have spent even a little time reading about public vs. private schools will know most of the arguments in defense of each. It is not my intention to rehash all of those here. There is a particularly insidious claim, however, that continues to be made frequently, and that comes in a form that for some reason is attractive and persuasive to some. It goes like this: our children need to be exposed to the ungodliness of the world, or else they will be overwhelmed once they enter it. This is plausible because it contains an element of truth. If children aren’t taught what to believe and why to believe it, if they don’t embrace the truths of Scripture as their own, they will be defenseless when those truths are attacked later in life. “Mom and dad believe it so I guess I should too,” won’t cut it in the world, even though it is entirely reasonable for children to trust their godly and knowledgeable parents.
A recent Christianity Today article, entitled “Public School Can Be a Training Ground for Faith,” put this clichéd argument (if it can be called an argument) for public schools like this:
Think of it like strength training: Your children need to build muscles of faith, and public school can provide weight to lift while you’re around to spot them. Let them wrestle with worldly counternarratives to God’s truth while they’re still under your care. That may feel risky, but the alternative—keeping them sheltered, then letting them be exposed to everything all at once when they leave home for work or college—is risky too.
The element of truth is this: Christian parents must teach their children how to respond to “worldly counternarratives to God’s truth while they’re still under [their] care.” But the broader context in which this true idea is placed is perverse in the extreme.
The Christian responsibility toward children is clear in Scripture. Ephesians 6:4 (KJV) states this responsibility succinctly: “Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” Education, then, is not merely a matter of grammar rules, historical dates, and multiplication tables, as important as such things are. It is fundamentally a matter of moral, as well as mental, formation. There are many different types of schooling in which this intellectual and spiritual education can be brought about. But the contention of the author of the Christianity Today article is truly staggering, namely, that Christian parents would knowingly place their children (in their most impressionable years) into a setting in which their mental, moral, and spiritual formation consists in “worldly counternarratives to God’s truth.” This is a catechesis in atheism, nihilism, perversity, and death. It is, in fact, as things stand in our schools today, a defiant refusal to bring our children up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
I recognize that there are Christian parents who send their children to public schools for other reasons, whether financial, educational, social, or otherwise. I would likely disagree with those reasons too, but at least they are reasonable, even if misguided: private school is expensive; we rightly desire our children to be well-educated; and the social interactions of children (in the right social context) are indeed healthy. But the claim that we should willingly send out children to be catechized in “worldly counternarratives to God’s truth” five days a week for 12+ years, and then expect them not to come out having thoroughly embraced that catechesis, is astoundingly naïve. Children are made by God to be impressionable. They naturally trust their earliest teachers, especially their parents. They seek to please them. This is as it should be in a world as it should be. But modern public education is not that world.
To adapt a saying of C.S. Lewis:
We raise children without sound education and expect of them faith and knowledge. We laugh at “sheltering” and are shocked to find apostates in our midst. We catechize in worldly counternarratives to God’s truth and bid the catechumens be faithful.
It is true that our “children need to build muscles of faith.” But how does one go about building muscle? By overeating and a refusal to leave the TV couch? Of course not. One builds muscle by consistent lifting. Children build muscles of faith through the means God has ordained: God’s word, sacraments, and prayer, as well as through their parent’s instruction and care. Does drinking a bottle of poison strengthen me to withstand its effects? Does jumping out of a plane without a parachute land me softly on the ground? Why would we expect that a catechesis in the apostasy would lead to a strengthened faith? God has ordained precisely the opposite for Christian children.
Perhaps the most striking thing I encountered in this Christianity Today article is the author’s paraphrase of Matthew 18:1–6: “Anyone who despises a child or causes one to stumble is better off drowning in the depths of the sea than facing the wrath of God for their actions.” Christian parents must consider the import of those words for how we educate our children.
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