by benjamin inglis
If you are planning a vegetable garden, the first thing you must do is determine the quality of your soil. Is it stony? Is it sandy? Is it too alkaline or acidic? Are there toxins leaching into it from a nearby plastics factory? It is important to ask such questions because the state of your soil will directly affect the quality of your harvest. You cannot expect vegetables to thrive in sub-par soil.
Similarly, when thinking about your child’s education (and I hope you do), the first question every parent should ask is: does an educational institution’s worldview affect the way they educate? Put another way, will an institution's answers to certain questions—are we pure matter? Spirit? A combination of the two? Is there a presiding, cosmic Intelligence? Are we bound to permanent ethical norms or must each generation construct its own?—impact how they run a school?
There are some who might view such questions as irrelevant, or an exercise in overthinking. Others may deem their children resilient enough to withstand whatever consequences may come about by not thinking about them. The problem here is that when we don’t make decisions based on convictions, we will likely make them based on convenience (the distance, cost, or size of a school). But what if the answers to such questions carried massive implications for your child’s future? What if an educational institution’s “soil” was the most critical factor to the detriment, or flourishing, of their students?
John Dewey, in many ways the father of modern education, believed it was possible, even preferable, to educate outside of religion. While he allowed that it could serve a useful social purpose, as a unifying principle for education, indeed, as a unifying reality of life, Dewey saw little use for religion. In his Common Faith, he states:
The validity of justice, affection, and that intellectual correspondence of our ideas with realities that we call truth, is so assured in its hold upon humanity that it is unnecessary for the religious attitude to encumber itself with the apparatus of dogma and doctrine.
Ultimately, Dewey was a pragmatist, eager to dispense with anything that didn’t immediately contribute to what he viewed as a “practical” education. And surely if, as he believed, the human spirit naturally inclines towards virtues such as justice and affection (love), then what use is moral instruction? Far better to spend class time supplying students with information and allowing their natural tendencies to direct them in constructive, beneficial ways. If humans are already born into this world equipped for greatness, then for Dewey and for much of education, God—if He even exists—cannot be relevant.
At this point it should be increasingly apparent that one’s worldview will most certainly have an impact on how they educate. If you believe your students are inherently inclined towards humility, diligence, kindness, and wisdom, then your entire philosophy of education becomes a matter of explaining how things are, rather than how things should be. If this were true, however, then shouldn’t it follow that the most educated among us should also be the most upstanding? But if this is indeed the case, then why the massive increase in bullying and teacher abuse in Canadian schools? Why the rape chants, positively depraved hazing ceremonies, and frequent incidents of sexual assault found on many prestigious university campuses?
Dewey, it turns out, was not only naïve in his view of human nature, but also in his assumption that a secular education, “liberated” though it was from religious impediment, would be free of its own value system. But even secularism is not exempt from the presence, or consequences, of a worldview; one which, at its core, views an individual’s happiness and success as the most valuable component of human existence. Not only does such a worldview have a negative impact on society (an impact we are currently seeing played out all around us) but on the individual student as well, as it seeks to isolate them from the wisdom of history and the healthy boundaries of proper authority.
Why the popularity of such a detrimental philosophy?
First and foremost because of its personal appeal; who doesn’t want a worldview that celebrates everyone doing exactly what they want to do? The most compelling reason, however, is found in the supposedly “outdated” archives of Scripture. The central message of the Bible is that we were made to worship; that we will worship. The difference is that while secular humanism encourages the worship of self, biblical Christianity illuminates that bankruptcy of self-worship and directs us instead towards the nourishing worship of God.
All of this is to demonstrate the point that an education will inevitably come with a worldview, and that that worldview will profoundly shape a school’s methods and goals of education.
A Christian education not only acknowledges this fact, but draws its strength from it (more on what we mean by Christian education in our next post). It takes into account not only the importance of communicating information (and doing so in an excellent way) to the student, but the importance of developing their character in the midst of it. A child will not only be taught the bare fact that 1+1=2, but the reason why it always will (as it exists within an orderly, quantifiable creation sustained by the living God). Students will not just be told “don’t kick your friend”, but guided to understand why kicking a fellow image-bearer is so destructive. Students will not only be encouraged to memorize but supplied with the memorable treasure of Scripture.
Our goal at KCCS is not just to release intelligent students into our society, but wise students; students who can articulate the why behind the how. The Father, we’re told in John 4:23, is seeking such worshippers just as worshippers are seeking such a Father. Far from being irrelevant, our world also stands in greater need than ever of such worshippers.
Please stay tuned for our next article, which will outline why we believe a Christian education can only properly be understood as a Christ-centered education!
**Just a reminder that although our school is currently closed due to COVID-19, enrolment is now open for September 2020, which we currently anticipate proceeding as planned. Please visit our admissions page to see how a Classical Christian education could benefit your child. **
benjamin inglis
Ben is a founding board member of KCCS. He lives in Peterborough, Ontario where he is a also an elder at Hill City Baptist Church. He is the proprietor at benjamininglis.ca and you can also find him occasionally writing at dragonsetc.ca or getting stomped at Yahtzee by one of his three children.