The basic premise that has been forgotten in Christian households today is that education is never neutral. Worldviews undergird education, and worldviews are inescapable. You don't get to choose whether or not you'll possess a worldview, you only get to choose which worldview you will operate from.
Because worldviews are inescapable, it follows that education is never neutral. If your worldview has Christ at the centre, then education will have Christ at the centre, and you won't do maths, or science, or history, or whatever, without understanding the relationship of the subject matter to the Source and Sustainer of everything there is that can be studied. On the other hand, if your worldview is basically atheistic, then you will end up studying these subjects without reference to the Source and Sustainer of the subject matter, which will inevitably lead to deficiencies in the educational pursuit. How can I truly know something if I do not understand its purpose or design? I might reach some of the same conclusions (for example the 2+2=4), but I won't do this consistently.
Surely everyone can agree that 2+2=4. Or can they? As Doug Wilson has put it, the pantheists can’t, because everything is one. We might also note that the postmodernists can’t do it either because there’s no absolute truth. And postmodernism is the prevailing worldview of our modern education system. Going from is to ought is a vital part of education and you can’t get to an ought without a worldview, and there is no neutral worldview in the world. 2+2=4 and it ought to be that way. Perhaps if a school only taught maths, we could stay mostly neutral. But as soon as you hit chemistry, biology and physics we hit significant worldview issues. Was the earth created? Are men and women, well, men and women? Is there a design to your DNA? Now consider literature and language and imagine trying to actually derive meaning from texts!
What ‘everyone knows’ nowadays, is usually what most people who are either Christians or who have grown up in a culture rooted and founded on a Judeo-Christian worldview knows. And, without that heritage of a Judeo-Christian worldview, what ‘everyone knows’ soon becomes ‘what everyone used to think was right’ and that in turn makes way for ‘progressivism’, which is a polite way of saying that everything up to now has been terrible (what C.S. Lewis called 'chronological snobbery').
Of course, non-Christians know things (often far more than Christians). But what they know is based on assumptions and tools that have been borrowed from God’s common grace. As Wilson again says, "common grace is what happens when God allows non-believers to participate in and enjoy that which could not be true if their view of the universe were true. Common grace is when God allows human beings to be internally inconsistent." In other words, an atheist can know how something works, but cannot know why it does or how it came to be that way. Christians can take their knowledge and draw a straight line from it to God. But atheists can’t. And on the other hand, Christians can have a knowledge of God and get to the conclusions the atheists do about how the world works, but at the same time also understanding why it works and from whence it came.
And so we come back to the neutrality problem. Non-Christian education doesn’t only teach the conclusions (e.g. that a cell is made up of this and that), but also false premises (e.g. that this cell is merely a product of cosmic consequences). Education teaches a worldview all the way down. We need Christian education to teach biology with God at the centre, maths with God at the centre, literature, history, philosophy with God at the centre.
Take history for example. Did Jesus come back from the dead or not? You cannot teach history without arriving at, or teaching some conclusion about that question. Even if you avoid the topic altogether, you are implying something in your silence on that momentous moment in human history.
Christian parents who actually want their children to grow up as Christians should desire more for their children than that they just survive their educational years with their faith intact. Education is meant to be nourishment, building up, equipping for the rest of your life. Our children deserve a Christian education. Christ is either Lord of all or He isn’t Lord at all, and if He is Lord of all, He is Lord over education too.
“You shall not boil a young goat in its mothers’ milk” (Dt 14:21b; Ex 23:19, 34:26) is a command that reveals the following principle: you shouldn’t take anything meant for the nourishment of life and use it to bring death. Unfortunately that’s what is happening in schools up and down the country.
It's time to revive a culture of Christian education.
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