Faith-Based Schools
2008 February 13
(Via Bene Diction) The Internet Monk has written a Screwtape-style critique of Christian schools. If you look carefully, you can also read it as a sort of indictment of the entire evangelical project of creating a fully-formed parallel culture and society.
Thoughts?
I find it hard to take seriously; he’s backing this up entirely with anecdotes, as far as I can tell. That does nothing to answer the theological/psychological/sociological arguments for something like distinctively Christian schooling.
I’m sure someone just as clever at sarcasm (Doug Wilson?) could write the exact same thing except directed toward parents who assume public school + hour of sunday school a week (if that) is sufficient to raise a child in the fear and admonition of the Lord. I’m not sure what it accomplishes to write this kind of thing about this issue besides getting some attaboys out of people on your own side.
But that’s just my .02.
Good find!
What makes all the difference is whether parents are abdicating their responsibility to parent. Often (and I’m almost certain, since I attended Christian schools for 12 years) the compulsion to toss a kid into a Christian school really is, at the heart, a desperate move to have someone more qualified instill spirituality into kids.
There are SOME merits of course, but if the choice is Godly parents who are wise and leading, or a Christian institution, the former always wins.
When will we stop trying to have other people live out our spirituality for us?
Don’t get me started on why Western “church” (specifically North American church) is actually to blame for the entire phenomenon of Vicarious Spirituality.
Andrew, good comment. Yes, no problems are being dealt with in a meaningful way… but I don’t think that was really the intent.
There ARE really issues with Christian institutions (as Dan said, attempting to initiate a Parallel Culture).
Perhaps they could be discussed meaningfully here?
Thank you for the link.
Michael Spencer has taught for several years, and he does do write theological/psychological/sociological posts on schooling and all sorts of things.
There are lots of people that are probably better at sarcasm, no reason not to try, I think he did fine.
Blog on!
It’s a lot easier to tear people’s work down than to build them up.
Every child is unique. Each parent has to look at options available for their children’s education at any given point in time and pick from the best that’s available. It’s not an easy job.
Alan Jacbos’ had a post on homeschooling (The American Scene) a few days ago that generated hot comments because some readers wanted to generalize about public schools.
We have a child with special needs, who wouldn’t be accepted at most private schools–an indictment in itself of private Christian schools. Nevertheless, I don’t think one should lodge wholesale attacks against them. Judge each on the merits.
I think the idea behind Spencer posting in this format was to get people talking. It probably worked better than if he had just wrote something like, “Christian school aren’t all that, you know.”
I’m guessing from Spencer’s CV that he has some experience around Christian schools – all this may have been weighing on him a while. It’s worth asking whether any institution does nothing but put on a thick outer shellac of Christian cultural markers.
What exactly is a “culture”, anyway?
I think in some ways it makes perfect sense, biblically speaking, that the church would be trying to create its own culture and society. It’s a nation of priests, a new way of organizing human life, a new polis, or its nothing (or nothing new, anyway). At least, that’s what I come away with from the text (after having read both Reformed and more recently, Mennonite, theology, of course).
I’m sure there are negative ways that this can and has been done, but I don’t think those goals per se are unbiblical or wrong.
A couple things:
I suppose that I should clarify that when I say cultural markers, I don’t equate that with culture itself.
What bothers me about the project of generating an evangelical subculture is how uncritically it adopts everything from the dominate culture and creates a sort of shadow of it.