Why public school education

Two months ago, WORLD published an essay by Covenant College professor Jim Drexler on why believing families should send their children to Christian schools. Today, as part of our Saturday Series of articles, we have an essay written by Steve Cole, a Christian parent and pastor (Calvary Chapel in the City) from Boston who advocates sending children to public schools. —Mickey McLean

“Blessed be the LORD my Rock, Who trains my hands for war, And my fingers for battle” (Psalm 144:1, NKJV).

My wife and I have adopted King David’s wonderful and inspiring declaration as a rule for parenting our children. Although the thought can be unsettling, we recognize that we are preparing our children for war. Not a physical war, but a spiritual war in which they will engage an opponent whose ultimate goal is to marginalize, if not extinguish, the Christian worldview from our society. A spiritual war that is not “against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age …” (Ephesians 6:12, NKJV).

Thinking about preparing our children for this war is a daunting prospect, particularly since we know that someday all of our children will have to engage in it apart from us; some of ours already have. How do we prepare them for this war? My wife and I believe public schooling can be the best vehicle to do that.

First things first

Is there a biblical basis for delegating the role of educating our children to a third party, regardless of whether that third party is Christian or not? There are some in the homeschooling community who argue that there is not. But we believe the Bible is silent on the issue. One of the fundamental principles of biblical hermeneutics is that it is dangerous to speak dogmatically into an area where the Bible is silent. This case is no different. Of course, there is wisdom to draw from the Bible on how to delegate and to whom. But the fact that the Bible is silent on the issue leads us to believe there is freedom in this area.

What about delegating this responsibility to a third party that takes the stance of an unbeliever? Admittedly, that is a more challenging question, but we maintain there is nothing in Scripture that expressly forbids it. This should comfort many Christians who, for a variety of reasons, are unable to provide a Christian education for their children. For example, there are some places where there is limited access to Christian education. New England (where we live) is such a place. There are relatively few Christian high schools in this region of the country, and those who live close enough to a Christian school may not find it affordable. There is only one Christian high school in Boston, and the tuition is $16,500 a year. Even if there is a Christian school that’s accessible, it may lack the biblical vigor one might expect from a Christian institution. For example, the school in Boston claims “neutrality” on the theory of evolution.

What about homeschooling? For single working-parent households, and households in which both parents have to work to provide an income sufficient to survive, homeschooling may not be an option.

But even if a solid Christian education is available and affordable, we maintain that a public school education may still be the best way to prepare children for the spiritual war they will face someday without their parents.

While we concede the Bible has few, if any, examples of parents delegating the role of education of their child to an unbeliever, we take great heart when reading about the lives of Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego. These young men became some of the best examples in the Bible of lives of faith and integrity. The Bible says that even though they were educated by unbelieving pagans in “the language and the literature of the Chaldeans,” God Himself was there with them and “gave them knowledge and skill in all literature and wisdom.”

That said, there is one issue my wife and I know the Bible is not silent on: We are the Lord’s stewards of our children, and we have both the primary and the ultimate responsibility for our children’s education.

Our primary responsibility is to ground our children with a biblically based worldview, which we are obligated to do even before they ever enter the classroom of a third-party educator. We have discovered through personal experience that when our children have this grounding it affects how they process virtually everything they see and hear and read in the classroom regardless of the subject. It also affects how they process virtually everything they see and hear from their peers.

Our ultimate responsibility is to oversee what our children are being taught and what they see and hear from their peers. When we discover something that is not consistent with our biblical worldview, we talk with our children and challenge and correct what they have seen, heard, or read. By owning the primary and ultimate responsibilities for the third-party educator’s involvement with our children, we maintain involvement, control, and oversight of our children’s education. By doing so, we believe we are in full obedience with the biblical mandate to “train up a child in the way he should go.”

A little background

We live in the heart of Boston (Roxbury), and our five children (one son and four daughters) are all seasoned veterans of the Boston Public Schools. Boston has a unique lottery system, which means that families have a choice of what school their children attend. As a result, we were able to get our children into a top-rated school located in Chinatown.

Another unique feature of the Boston Public Schools is its three “exam” schools. Students who qualify in citywide exams are admitted into one of the exam schools, which are for seventh- through 12th-graders. Our children qualified, were admitted, and later attended two of these exam schools, which are generally more academically rigorous and physically safer than other city high schools. Catholicism is the primary religious affiliation of Boston city residents, although secularism and Islam are becoming increasingly prevalent. Often it’s rare to find an evangelical Christian student in a Boston Public School classroom.

We are grateful that we have access to public schools that are physically safe and academically rigorous, even though we live in the city. We also realize that there are some cities where enrolling our children in the public schools would not be our best option. Plus, my wife and I understand that public schools may not be the best option for other Christian families, who instead may choose private Christian education, private secular schooling, or homeschooling, depending on the personalities of their children or a family’s unique needs. Only our son and second daughter attended Boston Public Schools from kindergarten all the way through 12th grade. Our other children had multiple years of homeschooling, Christian education, and/or education at a private secular school along with their public school years. Three of our children have already graduated from high school. Two went on to Christian colleges, while one went on to a Massachusetts state university.

Don’t treat the school as the enemy

A trap we have tried to avoid from early on is viewing the school as the enemy. Aside from that attitude being a poor witness of Christ, teachers and administrators pick up on that “chip-on-the-shoulder” mentality and are likely to react defensively.

On the other hand, sometimes the person we assumed would be the enemy ends up being the furthest thing from that. For example, in what I can only describe as a truly surreal experience, during my first-ever visit to one of our children’s schools, I found myself behind closed doors praying with the principal, who was an elder at his evangelical church.

Time and again administrators and teachers have surprised us with their cooperation. For example, during the early elementary years of our first three children, my wife asked for permission to share with their class the meaning of Christmas for our family. She was never turned down. My wife explained the entire Christmas story, including a clear, unedited explanation of why Jesus had to come into the world—that the world needed a Savior because it had a sin problem, and how God solved that problem by sending His son Jesus to die for the sins of the world and to offer salvation as a free gift.

On one occasion, at the beginning of her presentation, my wife referred to the Bible. The teacher threw up her hand. My wife panicked. For sure the teacher was about to tell her she was out of bounds. Her question? “Could you please explain to the class what the Bible is?” True story.

There have been many other examples of teachers who, far from behaving like an enemy, were cooperative and accommodating to our faith. One teacher cheerfully agreed to remove a macabre Halloween book from her classroom’s bookshelf. A humanities department chair agreed to make changes to an annual student project in which student teams create nihilistic, sadistic, and even gruesome portraits of a dystopian world. Most oddly, from the time our children were in kindergarten, every music teacher they have had has included Christian hymns as part of the schools’ Christmas and other music programs.

Some Christian kids need public schools

One justification I hear for sending Christian children to public schools is that schools need them there as “salt and light.” That justification makes my wife and me a bit squeamish. What if children do not want to play that role? Are they even equipped for it? If they are pressured by us to do that, will we risk alienating them from us and their faith?

We have sent our children to public schools, not because the schools need them, but because our children need the schools. Not only do they need the education, but they also need an environment in which they will get real, sometimes intense, exposure to the world and its darkness in the safest possible way, with their mother and father present every step of the way.

We did not want to wait until our children were outside our home for their first exposure to someone like a highly degreed professor publicly mocking anyone who advocated creation science, with adoring students listening on. We did not want to wait until our children were outside our home for their first (or second, or third, or fourth) exposure to peers actively living in a homosexual (or other immoral) lifestyle with the ardent support of on-campus LGBTQ groups, school textbooks, and sympathetic faculty; to secular humanists proselytizing them with religious zeal; or to serious persecution for their faith.

But how do we reasonably ensure that our children are not “won over” by these ideas? We do it by taking our God-given primary and ultimate responsibilities for parenting very seriously. For example, we exercised our primary responsibility by preparing our children from a very young age with dozens of entertaining DVDs and audio files of creation scientists pointing out the flaws of evolution. We warned our children repeatedly, and so did the creation scientists, that they would encounter teachers who would teach evolution not as a theory but as a fact. We have been blessed to live in a city that is a world education center and attend a church along with many scientists who are vehemently opposed to the science of evolution. We made sure our children were exposed to the experience of these wonderful men and women. My wife and I exercised our ultimate responsibility for parenting by keeping tabs on what was taught in biology class, and explaining the evidence against what was being taught.

So what happened when our children sat through their ninth grade biology teacher’s lectures on evolution? They did not believe anything they heard. It really was that simple. The same was true with the teaching they received on sexuality and secular humanism.

The persecution for their faith was another matter.

Over the years, our children have experienced varying levels and types of persecution. We exercised our primary responsibility for parenting by warning them it would happen, which by the way did not insulate them from the pain and hurt that comes with being rejected, isolated, and mocked for their faith. We exercised our ultimate responsibility for parenting by comforting them, counseling them on giving an appropriate response, and praying for them. On some occasions, we rewarded them!

Once, our eldest daughter came home in tears one night during the latter months of her senior year. Although she was attending a private secular school instead of a public school, her experience still illustrates the type of persecution potentially present in any secular environment.

Our daughter shared that in a French class she was not a part of, a student, while waiting on the late arrival of the teacher, brought up our daughter’s name. Upon hearing her name, another student expressed her hatred for our daughter and her religious beliefs. A third student mocked her “Jesus Saves” necklace. A fourth one mocked her for making a college visit to a Christian school (Liberty University). Yet another student derided her for standing up to her art teacher when a painting was presented to the class that depicted Jesus in a blasphemous manner.

The students apparently were unaware that our daughter’s best friend was sitting in the back of the class. She reported the whole exchange to our daughter.

When our daughter told us, we were heartbroken. But I told her to get ready and put on a formal dress. Although I could ill afford it, I took her that night to one of the best restaurants in Boston, the Top of the Hub on the 52nd floor of the Prudential Center. I brought my Bible along and with tears in my eyes read to her Jesus’ words in John 15:18 (NKJV): “If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you.” Our daughter was thrilled with her “reward,” and by the end of the night was ready to go back to school living for Jesus! We were thankful she was still with us living at home when she experienced this persecution.

Missionaries to the public schools

My wife and I have been careful not to deputize our children as missionaries to their schools. Yet we discovered that sometimes God Himself does that, as He did with our son.

After a transforming experience with Jesus in his early teens, our son felt called as a missionary to his school. By the time he was in 11th grade, he had amassed a vast array of Christian T-shirts, which he frequently wore to school. He deliberately chose shirts that would likely provoke questions, and they often did. This developed into something of a phenomenon in which students, some of whom he did not even know, regularly stopped him in the halls, asking him to explain the shirts’ messages.

All of this provided an opportunity not only to share the gospel, but also to delve into personal issues and troubles these students would share with him. Our son made it his goal to witness to all or most of his football teammates, which he did relentlessly, even after graduation. Over time, his classmates went from seeing him as an oddity to embracing him with fondness and admiration. His senior class voted him “nicest guy” for the yearbook superlative awards.

Our son’s calling included living out his faith in the classroom. For six straight weeks he challenged his biology teacher on evolution. In a humanities class, the teacher pulled out a Bible and insisted to the class that it did not teach that homosexuality was wrong. Right there on the spot, our son pulled out his Bible and proved otherwise by reading verses from Leviticus and 1 Corinthians. His world literature teacher assigned his class to give a five-minute oral presentation on the prompt “If you were banished to a desert island and allowed to bring one book, what book would you bring, and why?” It was as if Christmas had come early for our son! He presented what the Bible says about man, sin, Jesus, and salvation! During the T-shirt phenomenon—which happened to take place during the 2012 presidential election—our son walked into his English class with a shirt parodying the Obama campaign’s well-known “Hope” posters, showing a similarly drawn Jesus and the words “Jesus is our greatest HOPE.” His English teacher asked, in front of the class, “Sam, is that T-shirt serious or ironic?” Our son responded, “Both!”

Owning their own faith

“I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear, But now my eye sees You” (Job 42:5, NKJV).

My wife and I have become convinced during our years as parents that no matter how thorough and diligent we are in teaching our children about our faith, if the Lord does not make Himself real to them, they will not embrace the faith as their own. There is something unique about the public school environment that provides a way for the Lord to do just that. Even as He made Himself real to David in his altercation with Goliath, we find that God makes Himself real to our children as they make steps of faith within that Goliath of American institutions: the public schools.

There are so many examples of this in our experience. One involved our second daughter, who in her junior year inherited by default the leadership of her high school’s Bible Club (the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that public schools are required to accommodate religious-affiliated, after-school clubs). All the previous participants in the Bible Club had graduated; there was no one left but her. At the beginning of the school year, she participated in the annual “club day,” in which all the after-school clubs set up booths to attract members. Students flocked to the other booths manned by multiple members and offering enticements such as cupcakes, candy, and balloons. Our daughter was the only one at her booth, which had just a poster and a sign-up sheet. She felt very alone and small, but she prayed to the Lord, as did my wife and I, along with many others.

At the first Bible Club meeting there were more than a dozen students, and attendance remained high for the remainder for the year. Only one of the students who initially joined that year was a Christian, but all of them received Bible instruction every week. All of us, especially our daughter, knew this result was from the Lord. It greatly increased our daughter’s faith, as well as her boldness.

Our children shared with us that the Lord also showed up in very real ways in classroom settings when they spoke up for the truth. Our youngest two have not had as many opportunities (they’re currently seventh- and ninth-graders), but the oldest three have found themselves in the middle of heated, highly charged, and emotional classroom discussions with faculty and students with few or no others supporting them. But the Lord made it His business to make it abundantly clear to our children that He supported them.

After these intense classroom incidents, our children said they distinctly felt the presence of the Lord, who gave them a supernatural boldness and conviction. Of course, in the process, they gained invaluable experience in engaging with the world, and how to respond to the rejection, mockery, and isolation that sometimes followed these incidents.

They also saw the hand of the Lord when some students, rather than rejecting them, followed up with them later, genuinely seeking answers to questions they had about God and Christianity. Others even agreed to visit church with our children!

Closing thoughts

Thus far I have not made mention of the importance of raising children in a Christ-centered home. Without that, all this “train up a child in the way he should go” business is likely to foster nothing more than rebellion in a child. My wife and I are profoundly imperfect human beings, affected by the fall of Adam and Eve like everyone else. But to the best of our ability, we have fostered a home environment that we believe mirrors the heart of Jesus: love, respect, discipline, warmth, Bible instruction, laughter, adventure, humility, forgiveness, respect, hospitality, and service to others. Why would children want to defend and live out a faith and worldview that have not produced an attractive and enviable environment in their home? Chances are they will not.

Over the years, my wife and I have read and heard so many dogmatic expressions from the Christian community saying that sending children to public schools amounts to a grievous violation of parents’ covenant responsibility to their children and will likely destroy their faith. We believe the Bible gives Christian parents liberty, wherein they not only are upholding their covenant responsibility by sending their children to public school, but they also are building up their children’s faith and preparing them for the much larger spiritual war that awaits them upon graduation.

My wife and I recognize that there is the potential that one or more of our children may walk away from their faith and church. To date, none of them have. On the contrary, the oldest three have continued their walk with Jesus after high school. Our son has graduated from college and is preparing to go on the mission field. Although along the way there have been some hiccups—some of them significant—in their Christian walk, today they are all serving Him and are active in church. Most importantly, our children will tell anyone willing to listen that the most important thing in their life is their daily one-on-one devotional time in the Bible. They will also tell anyone willing to listen that it was their participation in the public schools (or secular private schools) that the Lord used to make them into what they are today.