Reflections on Christian Education
Here are some reflections on the question of Christian Education. Please note that our provision of a quotation by an individual does not imply an unqualified agreement with everything that person may have said.
You cannot educate a human being unless you know what a human being is and what he is for. Who are we? Why are we here? What are we for? Any educational system that does not start by asking such questions and that does not insist on having satisfying answers to them is doomed to futility and failure. (Trevin Wax)
Isolating the student from large sections of human knowledge is not the basis of a Christian education. Rather it is giving him or her the framework for total truth, rooted in the Creator’s existence and in the Bible’s teaching, so that in each step of the formal learning process the student will understand what is true and what is false and why it is true or false. (Francis Schaeffer)
A Christian boy or girl can learn mathematics, for example, from a teacher who is not a Christian; and truth is truth however learned. But while truth is truth however learned, the bearing of truth, the meaning of truth, the purpose of truth, even in the sphere of mathematics, seem entirely different to the Christian from that which they seem to the non-Christian; and that is why a truly Christian education is possible only when Christian conviction underlies not a part but all, of the curriculum of the school. (John Gresham Machen)
We should not confuse information with knowledge. (T. S. Eliot)
“A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education.” (Theodore Roosevelt)
The ground for the necessity of Christian schools lies in this very thing, that no fact can be known unless it be known in its relationship to God…. (Douglas Wilson)
Every Christian school must adopt an implicit, absolute, childlike wonder at the glory of the Scriptures. We must be people of the Book, knowing it top to bottom, front to back. And we must resolve, before the fact, to have absolutely no problem with any passage of Scripture once the meaning of that passage has been ascertained through honest exegesis. (Douglas Wilson)
The key distinctive of a truly Christian education…is the effective practice of worldview integration, that is, an approach to biblical integration that leads to a Christian worldview. (Martha MacCullough)
