The Necessity of the Christian School

 Making my way through Machen’s excellent Shorter Writings I came across a great article on Christian schooling (originally delivered by Machen in 1933 before the Educational Convention of the National Union of Christian Schools in Chicago, IL.).  As always, Machen is clear and quite thought-provoking.

His first reason why Christians should favor Christian schools is for the maintenance of American liberty (p. 161).  This whole section is worth reading, but I’ll quote just one part that I enjoyed. 

“If parents cannot have the great incentive of providing high and special educational advantages for their own children, then we shall have in this country a drab and soul-killing uniformity, and there will be scarcely any opportunity for anyone to get out of the miserable rut.  … Every lover of human freedom ought to oppose with all his might the giving of federal aid to the schools of this country; for federal aid in the long run inevitably means federal control, and federal control means control by a centralized and irresponsible bureaucracy, and control by such a bureaucracy means the death of everything that might make this country great” (p. 167). 

“Against this soul-killing collectivism in education, the Christian school, like the private school, stands as an emphatic protest.  In doing so, it is no real enemy of the public schools.  On the contrary, the only way in which a state-controlled school can be kept even relatively healthy is through the absolutely free possibility of competition by private schools and church schools; if it once becomes monopolistic, it is the most effective engine of tyranny and intellectual stagnation that has yet been devised” (Ibid.).

Those words are worth pondering, even if one disagrees.  Secondly and more importantly to Machen than liberty, in his own words, the Christian school is “necessary to the propagation of the Christian faith” (p. 167).   Machen is quite firm here.

“I can see little consistency in a type of Christian activity which preaches the gospel on the street corners and at the ends of the earth but neglects the children of the covenant by abandoning them to a cold and unbelieving secularism.  If, indeed, the Christian school were in any sort of competition with the Christian family, if it were trying to do what the home ought to do, then I could never favor it.  But one of its marked characteristics, in sharp distinction from the secular education of today, is that it exalts the family as a blessed divine institution and treats the scholars in its classes as children of the covenant to be brought up above all things in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (p. 172). 

Machen praised Christian school teachers: “When I think of such true Christian heroism as yours, I count everything that I ever tried to do in my life to be pitifully unworthy.  I can only say that I stand reverently in your presence as in the presence of brethren to whom God has given richly of his grace” (ibid.).

I’m not looking for a storm of controversy here.  Homeschooling might be the right choice for certain families in certain places; charter schools might be a good possibility, and perhaps some public schools still have vestiges of decency in them.  Also, to be sure, many Christian schools are doctrinally messy or focused on athletics to the detriment of Bible education, so it is not as if all Christian schools are equal.  Furthermore, as Machen noted, Christian schools are neither religious day care nor do they take away the parents’ primary Christian task of training their children in the scriptures.

Basically, I posted this because I thought it was worth pondering.  So ponder on…

shane lems

sunnyside wa