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The Irrelevance of Institutional Schools
My sweet wife, homeschool mom extraordinaire, turned to me a few years ago and made a suggestion. "You have been talking about home schooling all over the country for years. How would you like to try home schooling yourself?" Our oldest son was 11 years old at the time, and she had had a go at it for. . . well. . . 11 years. Of course I could not argue with such impeccable logic. So that was the day I started home schooling my son. And that was the day that we stopped home schooling our son. On the first day, I immediately realized we had a problem. As it turns out, I have to make a living for my family, but I have to raise my son too. How does one balance these things?
Here's how it shakes out. As we drive from county to county and from state to state to minister across this country, we listen to a set of lectures on World History from a Biblical Worldview. Occasionally, we are forced to shut off the tape, and for twenty miles, we talk of the development of modern empires or the persecution of the Christians under the Romans. One time, as we were speeding down one of the dirt roads out in Elbert County approaching our home, he hit a snag while factoring a trinomial. I worked the problem for him over the emergency brake, and it worked pretty well, except that I forgot who was driving, and had to hit the brakes a little hard, and we almost wound up in the ditch at the intersection of Roads 17 and 98. I spend a few hours at the office hammering out a message for church on Sunday, so he takes the time and works on an exposition of 2 Samuel 6 for our family worship time in the morning. He is constantly interrupted in his academics, to do some research on a radio program I am working on or to order a part for our computer system off the web. While I'm in a business conversation with a client over lunch, and he sits next to me and monitors the cell phone, taking a few messages for me.
I have to admit that this is not a classroom. It does not take place in a home. It's a little disorganized. I'm not sure you can call it education, in the modern sense of the word. And, I'm not sure you can refer to me as an educator. Am I an educator or a mentor?
While my son at 13 years of age may be working through Algebra II and may write like most college students today, his "academic" advancement would be the least of my concerns. Where is his faith and character? How is he developing towards the calling God has on his life?
All of this has brought me to question whether I am a teacher? I am a pastor, an executive director, a radio broadcaster, and a writer. So what is this role of teacher?
The major problem with modern education is that educational institutions have separated themselves from faith and life. Of course, faith and obedience are inseparable, though distinct. Nevertheless, a teacher is not one who merely bequeaths knowledge. He does what Jesus did. He trains the faith, character, and life of those that he teaches. Therefore, when you ask an educator what he does for a living and he responds, "I'm a Latin teacher," he has given something less than a Christian response. He ought to say "I disciple in faith and life, and I teach Latin."
A biblical epistemology (study of knowledge) always includes a life-integration element, and this dictates the environment for education. "Be doers of the word and not hearers only." Therefore, a teacher cannot be one who knows and doesn't do. As Jesus did, we must mentor in faith and life, and do it by example of faith and life. If we have never learned to plug knowledge into life, we have failed in the communication of that knowledge, and it becomes stagnant and rotten.
As an elementary example, I would apply this to my seven-year-old daughter Bethany. She is learning to read for the first time. But she learns to read for a purpose, and it is not so that she will be able to read the "great" philosophers of Aristotle, Plato, and Rousseau. It is so that she will be able to read the Bible, and be a doer of the Word and not a reader only. Within days of her being able to read her first sentence, she joins the rest of the children around the family circle in our Bible time in the morning, reading her own verse in turn. This in itself, motivates her to be a fine reader! She sees that there is a purpose to her reading lessons. She can join in with the others in family worship, and be a part of the Christian life of the home as we read Gods Word, discuss it, and apply it together. We want our children's education to be instantly meaningful and purposeful, which means that it is applied. They will learn to write, but they will write letters to Grandma and letters of encouragement to an elderly widow in the church. They will learn to sing, so that they can sing worship to God on Sundays, and I can hardly think of a better life application. Can you?
Thus, even in a "liberal arts" education, children must learn the Word and the Word must not be stagnant. In the process of learning grammar, logic, and rhetoric, they must minister to others in word and deed, which includes all sorts of service and dominion work.
A' Students Teach
A common adage in the entrepreneurial world tells us that A' students will end up teaching, and B' students will work for C' students. This is because schools are in the business of being well schools. Therefore, those that do well in schools will grow up and work very well in the business of well schools! But schools are not life! Schools are not homes, churches, and dominion work, and as far as they are disconnected from these areas of life, they have denied a true, biblical theory of knowledge. Anybody who takes the sterilized class seriously, becomes a teacher and perpetuates the "school" mill.
There are three contexts for mentoring and none of them include what many think of as a school. The first is the home, the second is the church, and the third is the business. In a Christian world, it is the ministers, priests, elders, or pastors that mentor in the church. This was common from 400 AD to 1300 AD, a period when Christian thinking dominated culture in Europe, prior to the humanist renaissance. Fathers and mothers mentor in the home. This has been common for about 6000 years, more or less. Masters (doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects, carpenters, and firemen) mentor in dominion work. This was the education received by most Americans until the early 19th century, with the exception of those that would go into the ministry (who were taught by other ministers in seminaries like Harvard and Yale). Ministers, fathers, and masters. None of these are teachers and yet all of them are teachers! Could it be that God intends all of us to be teachers (Titus 2:4, Deut. 6:7, 1 Thess. 2:11)? Could it be that the development of a teaching class and teaching colleges (a relatively modern phenomena), is a product of a deficient epistemology (theory of knowledge) and an improper understanding of what a teacher does?
I still remember the sardonic comment used by one of my better teachers in my undergraduate days. "If you can't work, teach," He would tell us, "If you can't teach, write a textbook." Maybe James was right after all, "For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass. For he behold himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was."
Of course this does not mean that a mentor never assembles 12 students in a room
and talks to them about a vine, an unfaithful servant, and the deep love he has for them. It seems to me that Jesus did this kind of teaching. But this teaching reaches the heart and does touch the issues of faith and life. Classrooms have become increasingly sterile places where everything is allowed except faith, useful dominion work, and life in God's law order.
The content of that educational material will be driven by the work that must be done in the life of the student and by the worldview of the mentor, not by some government agency with its concept of statist life.
When I graduated from college with an undergraduate degree 18 years ago, I was amazed at how useless I was for the corporation that hired me. Immediately upon hiring me, they enrolled me in highly useful classes of their own making, classes like Experimental Statistical Design Techniques or Advanced CAD Design (as they did for every new recruit), just so I could be functional at a basic level in the engineering design work. Conversely, there were few (if any) classes that I had taken in one of the best engineering schools in California that were relevant to the design and process engineering work assigned to me in the workplace. Dennis was the best process engineer I ever worked with in 14 years of engineering. He told me once that he spent his off-hours during his college years repairing small engines in a rental shop not far from the college. But while there are some excellent partnerships between business and school (eg. cooperative education or medical school hospitals), the marriage is still unnatural and contrived, and the university struggles to maintain any level of relevance whatsoever. But Prof. Ward Churchill still needs to earn $100,000 a year doing whatever he does at Colorado State University, Boulder.
Beyond a shadow of a doubt, home education has revived this vitally important element of life integration to produce a wildly successful education. Let's not stop there! As your children graduate and move on to college, continue to apply these time-tested, God-established factors of good education. Seek out teachers that are doing the Word whether it be in music, engineering, or life. Seek out universities that work as closely as possible with the marketplace. Moreover, ministry training will best occur in the context of the church itself. If a young person is taking classes in the medical field, he should be working at a hospital at the same time. Or, if he is studying law for three years, he should be working in a law office at the same time. While the connection of his classes to his work (knowledge and application) may not be seamless in the training process, hopefully he will learn how to take the classes he learned in the morning and apply them at the law office in the afternoon.
This is how a young person becomes highly productive in the field into which God calls him. Success in life is finding the calling the God has given each person, preparing for it, and doing it to the glory of God.
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