Should we “force religion” down our children’s throats by sending them to Christian school?

By Terri Brady, WCA Parent

Proverbs 9:10: “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, And the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.”

Should we “force religion” down our children’s throats by sending them to Christian school?

The question of educational choice seems to have more options now than ever as the populace spreads between public school, magnet school, charter school, home school, Christian school – and the list continues to grow. Since school choice was not among the Ten Commandments, we parents are left to pray and discern what is best for our children. Dr. Stephen Davey, Senior Pastor of Colonial Baptist Church, often quips, “We have tried public school, home school, and private school, and none of them work!”

Once as a publicly schooled teen, seeing the news of yet another negative story at a local Christian school, I thought, “See! Even Christian schools have bad things happen. They are not perfect!” I think I had some internal vendetta as a public-schooled Christian that somehow the privately schooled kids thought they were better than us.

So I guess that’s the conclusion: Christian schools are not perfect!
Of course no school is! In raising children, all we can offer is our best.
Children are our gift from God (psalm 127:3), and the way we raise them should be our gift to Him.

So why Christian education? Are we “shoving religion down their throats?”

I like to look at it the way Dr. James Dobson once related: ducks. Ducks, geese and other fowl have a peculiar characteristic. Austrian naturalist Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989) termed the behavior: imprinting. He claimed that young fowl when first out of their shell “imprint” on their mind the first thing they see move. Usually, it would be their mother: and they follow the mother to food, sun or water for a swim.

However, if instead the duck first sees an inanimate battery-powered car or even a human, the hatchlings will line up to go wherever it goes.

According to Lorenz’s study, though, there is a certain time period in which the ducks will follow. Minutes after birth the ducklings are no longer vulnerable to imprinting. In other words, if the correct “what to follow” is not solved immediately, the opportunity is lost and cannot be regained later.

The parallel is clear:  children will follow. What they follow is in God’s hands, but we can give them their best shot by surrounding them with people who are following Him.

One study showed that if children are given unwavering information until the age of ten, they are more likely to accept its truth. If instead those foundational beliefs (such as sanctity in marriage or authority of parents) are taught to be false or at minimum questionable by some figures of authority while other figures try to hold them firm, the blows at the bricks cause the foundation to weaken if not crumble altogether.

A conversation I had with an eighteen-year-old confirmed that theory. Her parents were Christians and were baffled where their daughter had turned aside. I sat with the daughter and her mother, trying to understand the confused life that she was now leading.

“The ‘God thing’ has gotten mixed up somewhere,” she related to me. I told her we would start at the beginning – asking her how the world was made. She answered flatly that there was a big bang, and things appeared, and we evolved from apes. Her mother sat stunned. She had no idea that the big bang theory was taught as fact in first grade where her daughter had attended elementary school. The daughter had no idea it could be false – or that it contradicted the Bible. This teen had just simply followed the mother duck in her first “minutes” of school life.

It excites me that Wake Christian Academy teaches foundational beliefs like creation, and builds from there, the way God intended.

I love that the high school choral groups sing “hymns, psalms and spiritual songs.” (Eph 5:19)

I love that when a student comes to the teacher with a problem, the teacher is able to walk through the solution with prayer and biblical standards, not selfish esteem.

I love that when my child has issues with a certain handicap in the way he looks, a teacher will address him as the “fearfully and wonderfully made” child of God he is. (Ps. 139:14)

I love the “three-legged stool” approach to education that Wake Christian high school Principal Wayne Helder explained. He said that the academy considers three legs in the stool of education: the parents, the church and the school. Since those were the three that I thought so important in my own children’s lives, I was thrilled to know we were not competing against one another, but working together to raise my children for the Lord.

This three-legged stool approach was evident in handling a tragic situation last year. Nothing separates religions so distinctly as what happens after death. After the loss of a Wake Christian student in August, there weren’t “moments of silence” where students were left wondering what they were supposed to be thinking. There were “times of prayer,” led by grieving teachers. Activity buses were filled to take students to celebrate the life and the eternal life of the student. The student was in her Savior’s arms for eternity – and I can’t help but believe that it helped that her parents, her church and her school were all marching in line to the same gates of heaven.

Our children are our first mission field, and keeping truthful teaching all day to back up truth at home has been a great lineup for my “ducklings” to follow.

Psalm 43:11: “Come, my children, listen to me. I will teach you the fear of the Lord.”

Terri Brady currently has two students in Wake Christian Academy (9th and 12th grade). After homeschooling them through 8th grade, she decided Wake had just what she needed to balance their education. She is a co-founder of Life Leadership, author of the blog, Letters to Lindsey and recently published a book by the same title.