Now Offering Kindergarten thru 10th Grade. (Grades 11 & 12 will be added in 2008 and 2009 respectively)

Consider the End
by G. Tyler Fischer

Parents give their children many things. Some things, like a toy, might not be very important. It is almost proverbial that the gift that was so important on Christmas morning is completely forgotten about by the middle of January. In most cases this is not a big deal. The toy was not that important in the first place. Other things that parents give to their children are of dire importance. Loving care and sustenance fall into this category. If a child does not receive these basic necessities, their life will be horribly marred or even endangered. Parents must strive, above all else, to provide these necessities to their children. Another thing that parents must give to their children is an education. They are charged by God to teach their children about Him and to teach them about His world. My wife and I want our children to have a classical Christian education. In recent days, however, we have had to reconsider how important it is to us. Is insuring that your child receives a classical Christian education of a critical nature, or is it an item that should be relegated into the peripheral concerns? Is it important enough to write into your will? We decided that it was, and I am writing this article to explain why giving your children a classical Christian education should be one of the desires that rests at the center of your life.

The first reason that you should desire a classical Christian education for your child is that a classical Christian education protects your children. It is the responsibility of parents to protect their children. With many things happening in our culture today, however, this statement could be easily misunderstood so let me first explain what I do not mean. I am not talking about protecting our children from the recent outbreak of school shootings. We can all agree that children should be protected from this sort of barbaric violence, but this is not mainly what I mean by saying that a classical Christian education protects your children. I also do not mean to give the impression that classical Christian education is some way to hide from the world. If your goal in educating your child is simply laminating them from the world, thereby sealing off from them all of the dangerous ideas running around in our culture, then know that classical Christian schooling might not be the choice for you.

How does classical Christian education protect our children? I mean it in two senses. First, I mean that classical Christian education protects them from lies. Any good Christian education does. Christian schools can teach them about things as they actually are. Any time a moral issue comes up in a school that is not a Christian school, a lie has to follow. If a teacher at a non-Christian school sees one boy beating up another boy at recess, he might say, “Jimmy, don’t hit Johnny!” This is all fine and well, but what if the bully says, “Why not?” The teacher at this point is left with many alternatives, but none that tell the whole truth. A teacher might appeal to his authority, “Because I said so!” He might appeal to some vague sense of fairness, “How would you like it if someone was beating up on you?” He might even say, “Because it is wrong to hit each other.” This is true, but only beckons another, “Why is it wrong?” Christian schools, however, can tell the whole truth. A Christian school teacher might answer the bully’s “Why not?” by saying, “Because Christ said ‘love your neighbor as yourself,’ and He is the Ruler and King of all creation and you owe Him obedience. You must repent of this sin, and trust in Him for forgiveness.” This is the whole truth.

These lies infect the academic realm as well. If a class is studying ancient history and someone says “Did this Jesus really rise from the dead?” some non-Christians in non-Christian schools might answer, “No, people cannot rise from the dead. Rising from the dead is scientifically impossible. It is all just a myth.” (I have met teachers like this in my school days.) Even Christian teachers who are teaching in a non-Christian school are forced to lie, when they have to say, “Christians believe that He did.” While this is a true statement (Christians do believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead), it is not an answer to the question. The question is not about what Christians do or do not believe. The question is about what really happened. The only true answer is an emphatic “Yes!” These sort of lies also pop up in subjects that, at first glance, might seem immune like math. Imagine a math class in which a wonder-struck third grader who has just discovered the “rule of nines” blurts out, “Wow! Mrs. Smith this is neat. Why is the universe so orderly?” Suddenly the teacher in the non-Christian school has to stare embarrassingly down at her shoes. “That’s just the way it is, Johnny!”  The truth is that God is an orderly God, and He made a universe that exhibits this beauty of His to us.

Looking at our culture, we can see the awful result of these lies. The most damaging result of these lies is the loss of truth. Alan Bloom, in his insightful work The Closing of the American Mind, pointed out that the only thing he could count on as a professor for every student entering his classes each year was that they did not believe in absolute truth. Where did Christian children learn to think like that? They learned their disobedience from us and from the teaching that we allow to be given to them. They speak our lies after us.

From this loss of truth a horrifying flood of judgment sweeps through the upcoming generation. Much of the aforementioned school violence flows from it. It shocks me to watch the reactions of the media when violence like this breaks out. Everyone is wringing their hands and searching for answers. Usually the gun companies receive most of the blame. The truth is that guns don’t cause this violence; lies do. For years children have been told that the universe is an accident; that morality is just social convention; and that Christianity, while it might be meaningful on a personal level, offers no hope for real truth. We are then aghast when they believe what we tell them and act upon it.

Violence, however, is only one of the judgments. Chastity is openly mocked and ridiculed by much of the next generation, and they are paying the penalty for their sins in their own bodies. Rebelling against parents is the accepted norm. What will the lives of these poor children look like in twenty years? If we want to spare our children from these judgments we have to keep them from these lies. We have to teach them the whole truth and show them the falseness and the horrible results of this lying.

Christians are often accused of having their heads in the sand. Many times, I fear, the charge is valid. Our institutions, churches and Christian schools alike, have not prepared our children for the challenges to their faith that they will face in the real world. The story is almost proverbial. A child grows up in the Church in a Christian family, maybe even at a Christian school. They go off to college and faced with the pressures of an unbelieving environment their faith evaporates. They make a shipwreck of their faith, and we all shake our heads and wonder what is wrong. How many children are to be sacrificed on this altar of spiritual impotence to the gods of this age? Still, we seem to have no answer. We protect them by employing the method of constant retreat, taking them farther and farther away from the world. This is the main method employed by many churches and Christian schools for the last eighty years. This method was successful for awhile, but recently has fallen on hard times. The main problem seems to be that we have retreated for so long, that there is nowhere left to retreat. We built the walls around our “Christian” institutions higher and higher. We put more locks on the doors. We put up stronger gates at the entrance. We finally realized that we had not succeeded in locking the world out—but we had found a way to imprison ourselves.

There is, however, another option embraced by classical Christian education. We will protect our children from evil and unbelief, not by teaching them to run away, but by giving them the weapons to defend themselves by teaching them how to fight against the evil ideas that have infected our culture. We will not cower; we will charge. I realize that all of this talk of fighting might open me to the charge of being less than Christian in my attitude. Let me take a moment to answer that charge. First, believers down through history will stand with me in my call to vigilance. The ancients often used the adjective “militant” to describe the church on earth. This is not to say that we should all show up for services next Sunday morning in camouflage or practice marching around the church in formation. It does, however, recognize that the Church is constantly at war with unbelief. We cannot compromise. We must not compromise our children. Second, in my call for teaching our children spiritual self-defense, I am only parroting Scripture. At times Paul sounds a little militant—“Put on the full armor of God. ...raise your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord....our battle is not with flesh and blood, but with principalities and powers....” Even “gentle” Jesus seems to openly advocate battle at times—“I did not come to bring peace but a sword....the gates of hell will not prevail against her [the Church]....the strongman must be bound before his house can be ransacked....”Lastly, I would simply point out that there is no other choice. Where should we run? We have surrendered the most important institutions of society to the unbelievers. We live in the ruins of a once great civilization. Shall we all run off to another country and found a Christian society? Most of the habitable regions on earth are populated. There is no America to escape to. Shall we go to other planets? (The recent Mars mission should dissuade us of this.)

Negotiation with unbelief is not an option. We can never reach a settlement that will be suitable for both sides. They will not willingly surrender to Christ, and we will not, we must not, make Him one option among many (“I am the door....I am the way, the truth and the life....I am the resurrection....No one comes to the Father except by Me”). There can be no peace between light and darkness. The gray pallor that hangs above our heads is not a sign of a negotiated settlement but of our unfaithfulness. Our only choices for our children are either surrender or battle. As for me and my house, we choose war—not because we love war, but because we cannot stomach the other alternative. I will do everything in my power to see my daughter and any other children that we have following after us in the Lord. I want to live to see my grandchildren putting on their spiritual armor. I hope even to bounce my great grandchildren on my knee and start to teach them that truth is worth fighting for.

That is what is so exciting about classical education. This is the very method that produced our greatest fighters down through the ages. The litany of names is seemingly endless. I will only scrape the tops of the highest mountains. Augustine, the greatest Christian teacher after the apostles, was trained in this manner (before he was a believer he was even a teacher of rhetoric). Aquinas, who ventured off to college at the ripe age of 12, was classically educated. Calvin, who when challenged on a point concerning the church fathers quoted them verbatim for hours without pausing, learned in this manner. Jonathan Edwards, who graduated from Yale at the age of 17 and delivered his valedictory address in Latin, was a classical scholar. Our founding fathers, Adams, Madison, and even the less-than-Christian Jefferson and Franklin, were all educated in this manner. Before men like these, unbelievers retreated, principalities crumbled, powers were shaken, and freedom was won. Classical education trains great fighters.

So, should classical Christian education be at the center of what you desire for your children? It protects them from the lies of our culture. It equips them for the battle into which they inevitably must wade. It even prepares them to win back some of the ground that our generation and our forefathers have surrendered. That is why my children will receive a classical Christian education, so help me God.

G. Tyler Fischer, his wife, Emily, and daughter, Madelyn, live in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he serves as the Headmaster of Veritas Academy, an ACCS Charter Member.