There's no such thing as a "Christian school"
Schools don't accept Jesus into their hearts, and it's dangerous to pretend they do.
While trying to build a Biblical case for public schooling on the merits of the institution itself, I need to take a detour and explore Christian schooling. I’m familiar with Christian education not only academically, but also personally; I taught Bible classes at a private Christian school for five years. I have overwhelmingly positive feelings for the people I worked with and for.
This detour is necessary because it’s clear to me that the evangelical distrust of public education is partially linked to the ascendance of private Christian schooling. The religious branding helps to draw lines of distinction—the very existence of explicitly “Christian” schools assumes that all others are non-Christian and governed by Satan. Once the line is drawn, the faithful have to choose and you don’t want to be the one who chooses evil over good. So what is it that common schools are being compared to? Christian schools, to proponents, offer a safe haven for vulnerable children, curriculum centered on and emanating from the Bible, and an excellent education that transforms the mind as well as the heart. Opponents see an institution popularized by the desire to escape integration, curriculum woefully out of touch with science or logic, and indoctrination of children to hate all people who do not think like them.
It’s possible for any school to be both, and the reason is: there’s no such thing as a Christian school.
The term “Christian” means “little anointed ones” and began as a way to describe those who followed the teachings of Jesus. It denotes the state of the heart as eternally belonging to God, purchased by Jesus’s blood and saved from the wages of sin. Tell me how it makes any sense to say that a school has accepted Jesus into its heart. Only humans can be Christians as we’re given some understanding of ourselves and the divine. Schools are learning environments and institutions without souls. Calling a school Christian is like calling your cat a libertarian.
If a school can’t be Christian in the traditional (read: correct) usage of the word then what’s the purpose of the label? Even as many people would agree with the previous paragraph, it doesn’t mean that the “Christian” word choice is useless. Potential customers understand that the brand means some combination of elitism (because not everyone can afford it), educational ethics (e.g., kids getting expelled for having premarital sex), coursework (e.g., reading Thomas Aquinas next to Shakespeare) and pedagogy (e.g., practicing the concepts of creation, fall, redemption and consummation) due to—or in conjunction with—the quality or type of people hired (only Christians).
That last part is key. How much of the evangelical affinity for Christian education is due to the “who is doing the teaching” instead of the “what is being taught?” Tribalism, or the exaltation of a particular people group I’m in above all others, is partially responsible for the way we feel about any institution, but it hides more than it reveals about a school.
Tribalism is bad actually
First, hiring only professing Christians does not *make* an institution good or right. If a casino dubbed itself as the world’s first Christian Casino(TM) and hired Christians only, the work of that business would not somehow become a blessing to the community. Similarly, few believers today would claim that the Christian academies that popped up across the American south in the 1950s and 60s were doing God’s will. There is nothing Christian about running from your neighbors out of hatred and fear. The positive associations that white evangelicals have with Christian schools today are attributable at least in part to the fact that we feel like they’re safe because we recognize the faces in leadership.
Al Wolters’s book on the Biblical worldview and public theology, Creation Regained, describes how original sin touched every facet of this world—not just individual will. Everything from art to sports to how taxes are levied has been perverted and needs to be redeemed. This view of the Fall should inform how we think about schools because it means there is no escaping the perversion of sin, it has affected every institution, program, family and individual heart. You cannot find the perfect school because your child will be in it. The fact that we are all fallen and all given the image of God means that Christian schools have incredible capacity for evil and public schools have incredible capacity for beauty.
When we take solace purely in the label of “Christian” we can ignore the fact that Christians are terrible. It’s literally one of the prerequisites to join the church—recognizing that my sin damns me to hell. I’ve been in more than one conversation where a parent is flabbergasted that students at a Christian school do drugs or bully each other because they assumed that somehow those kids would just be… better… than the public school kids. That’s tribalism, lying to us that being in the right crowd will make something right. Telling me that you employ only Christians doesn’t say anything about how you teach reading, or the Civil War, or how you handle a child with ADHD, etc. Being a Christian school leads the public to believe there will be a centrality of Scripture—a book that is the foremost authority of the human condition but lacks specific instructions on how best to assign homework—but even that noble goal does not come without a cost. Marrying religion with school can lead to some of the most painful divorces and, as with all divorces, the children take it the hardest.
On marrying Christianity and schooling
When I was teaching I had an acquaintance who, years before, had attended my school. He was no longer a part of the church in any meaningful way and I asked him about his time in school, wondering if somehow that had contributed to his leaving the faith. He dismissed the question out of hand and informed me that it was easy to trick teachers into thinking you were a “good Christian” if you just tucked in your shirt. You see this school required all boys to wear a collared shirt tucked into khakis—enforcing the uniform was my least favorite part of the job. Every day I corrected dozens of students to follow a standard that neither they nor I respected or understood. This acquaintance confirmed a fear of mine that students might be conflating Christianity with their ability to follow school rules like the dress code.
The high school would go to chapel on Wednesdays and hear the gospel of God’s love for the leper or prostitute and then immediately after the teachers (including me) would deliver a conflicting message that students’ outward appearance was of primary importance. Worse still, when I took my concerns to another teacher she informed me that a student’s unwillingness to take instruction was illustrative of the state of their souls. Put briefly: “it’s a heart issue.” Now I, as a Bible teacher, was encouraged to tell children that their ability to adhere to a superficial clothing rule showed me something about how they felt about Jesus. Tucking in shirts was one of a number of rules we enforced that might be helpful to a school but dealt more with control than Godliness. I sympathize with students who could not tell the difference.
Zooming out a bit, so much of education today (especially private schooling) is built on concepts that run counter to the Gospel. Schools are sold as gardens of excellence where merit is measured: students who perform the best are promoted, those who refuse hard work are held back or expelled. Children are graded based on their intelligence, work ethic and obedience. Some are picked for enrichment and given additional resources to cultivate their genius. The spots for these gifted or honors classes are limited. Helping others is encouraged, but not if it comes at the expense of your individual accomplishments. At the end of their tenure the student body is ranked by GPA and the top performers are elevated to a special position complete with appropriate titles. It’s hard to square those practices with a religion that targets the lowly, the outcast and rebellious for saving grace.
No one is arguing that there is something wrong with expecting excellence, but giving a school the title of Christian almost encourages students to internalize that academia is tied to eternal value. Knowing this, what else are we teaching Christian school students that needs critical rethinking? What does it tell children when the only Christians they interact with are rich, white and without disability, as many private Christian schools are? What’s the impact of never meeting a kind Muslim kid, or having never learned anything from an atheist? What does it do to a child to refuse to educate her because her parents are gay?
I’m afraid that we are (accidentally or purposefully) lying to students and pulling the faith into the deception. If we take the word Christian further than the Bible allows, we can’t be surprised when people reject the religion for reasons that have nothing to do with Jesus. I’m not saying that this type of private schooling shouldn’t exist, but it has been given an uncritical pass for far too long. Knowing the danger, Christians should be invested in a schooling that reflects Jesus but doesn’t indict Him. A common, public school.