education

The Treasure of a Christian Education

by Ben Zornes · Aug 29, 2022

As the school-year begins, it’s important to be reminded what we’re doing in the education of our children. Children, your education isn’t just something to keep you busy during the day. According to Scripture, the instruction of wise parents & teachers is better than silver & gold (Pro. 8:10). Thus, education is receiving the wealth of wisdom which your ancestors have accumulated. But not all forms of education are equal.

Some advocate for a child-directed form of education. This assumes a view of children that’s unbiblical. Children aren’t founts of wisdom & discerning innocence. There’s folly in children’s hearts which must be driven out through discipline & training.

Others think to treat children as widgets on an assembly line. Get them to pass enough multiple choice questions, and, tada, more federal grants. This dehumanizes children, treating them like consumable products instead of a blessed legacy.

Education, in biblical terms, is receiving wisdom from above. The key which unlocks this treasure chamber is the Wisdom of the Gospel: our redemption through Christ’s blood. The Gospel is the first treasure which unlocks all others, and wise instructors ensure their pupils have this key.

So children, diligently apply yourself to this work of sorting the treasures in this storehouse. Your schoolwork is the labor which God sets before you to do. So you’re commanded to work at it heartily & joyfully, as an offering to the Lord.

Parents, this task is yours to superintend. You must be diligent to ensure that your children are indeed receiving all the riches of all the wisdom & knowledge of God. You’re training them to spot the difference between gold & fools gold.

In short, an education is worthwhile only insofar as Christ is central to it. To repurpose a proverb of Solomon, a Christ-less education is like a golden jewel in the snout of a swine.

The Danger of Christian Education

by Ben Zornes · Mar 28, 2022

Modern conservatives have been shocked to find out that by thoughtlessly sowing their kids into government schools, they’ve reaped a harvest of godless statists. But there is a warning here for us. By and large, recent generations have abdicated their parental duty to educate their children due to disengaged & distant parenting. In a community committed to families providing a Christian education for their children, there’s a lurking danger to think that what happened to a generation of Government educated children can’t happen here.

If you mail in your parental duty to educate, discipline, and train up your children, you can expect to harvest what you’ve sown. You sow in disengaged parenting, you reap resentful & rebellious children. Auto-pilot parenting not only happens amongst the unbelieving, but it can also appear here in the church; and when it does the results are worse by far. You shouldn’t scorn unbelievers for reaping what they’ve sown, if you’re sowing the seeds in your own children for spiritual apathy, uncontrolled passions, and covenantal apostasy.

The blessing of Christian education isn’t an automatic blessing. It will descend into hypocrisy, powerlessness, and compromise the moment that Christian parents think that their duty to raise up their children to love and fear the Lord can be done by others. This temptation is present regardless of the educational choice you make.

We bemoan the fruits of government education, and it deserves all the scorn we can heap upon it. But you must not be deceived. You can’t raise faithful Christian children just by being in proximity to other Christians. Christian community in the form of Christian schools or homeschool co-ops are an aid to raising them, but it cannot replace firm and loving discipline from joyful fathers and mothers who faithfully teach their children to love the Lord their God.

As one Scottish pastor once put it, “gunpowder doesn’t grow immune to sparks.” Neither do we grow immune to compromise, temptation, and unfaithfulness. A long life is but a vapor, and that means the time which we as parents have to train up our children in faithfulness is even more of a fleeting wisp. We must take stock and evaluate the ways in which we’ve exported our duties as parents to others, expecting a good outcome simply by being near Christian community. More broadly, we as Christians have wagged our heads at the crumbling of western civilization around us, all while neglecting Scripture, entertaining secret sin, telling ourselves lies about our sin, and presuming that we deserve Your blessing. All of this should drive us to turn to God for forgiveness for this indifference. May He grant that we might be renewed by grace to follow hard after Him, even as His right hand upholds us.

Expensive Skulls of Mush

by Ben Zornes · Jan 18, 2017

The Senate hearing for Trump’s pick for Secretary of Educationâ€“Betsy DeVosâ€“was a cringe-worthy spectacle on many fronts. I, like many conservatives who didn’t support Trump in the general election, have been trying to figure out what it will look like to evaluate, critique, and perhaps even applaud the direction of the Trump campaign. I will say that for the most part, Trump has picked well; although I’m not versant inÂ every cabinet position, thingsÂ seem to be goingÂ better than I would have thought.

Now, the hearing for Betsy DeVos was, shall we say, educational. Senate Democrats were out for blood, as they know that those in charge of educating the next generation can advance their worldview more efficiently. This is a sacred cow for liberals, and their “hand-wringing” was on full display. The prevailing sentiment on social media was that DeVos whiffed hard on many questions and provided all sorts of fodder for viral video clips, intended to make her look like an incompetent richÂ crony.

However, the response I’ve seen on social mediaÂ exposed how many Christians have simply gone along with theÂ presumption that education is a primary responsibility of the Government. There was outcry that someone who has not spent much, if any, time in the public orphanageâ€“erâ€“school system should be appointed to lead that department. I saw one person express their they areÂ “tired of people making decisions about education that have never even stepped foot inside a classroom as an educator”! To which I reply, you realize that that defines theÂ majority of politicians; the issue isn’t that DeVos hasn’t been involved in the Public School system, therefore disqualifying here, the problem is that as a nation, weÂ have handed over the keys of educating our children over to bureaucracy.

Fee.org had a tremendously helpful articleÂ highlighting that the US has been spending more and more money on education, and getting the exact same results! We spend more per child than any other nation, and yetÂ our results are sub-par to say the least. We score lower than smallÂ countries like Macao, Finland, Estonia, Slovenia, and Portugal, despite spending $165,000 per child for a K-12 education.

So the real issue is not that DeVos isn’t versed in all theÂ many government education policies, programs, etc.; the problem is that we think that spending more money onÂ education is the solution. Further, when she was asked whether charter schools that receive Federal funding should be held to the same standards as the typical public school, the response ought to have been, “absolutely not”. Those standards are horrifically ineffective at actually, you know,Â edumacating our young-uns.

About a hundred years ago, the US public school system took a radical turn to the left andÂ adopted a “child-centric” model of eduction whichÂ emphasized “self-fulfillment” as the goal of education. In abandoningÂ older, tried and true methods of teaching children to think, speak, and reason logically, we began a crash course with what we see today: a generation withÂ ambiguous morals, high insecurity, very tender feelings, and rather expensive skulls full of narcissistic mush.

The problem with ourÂ Department of Education is really not about who is running it, but the fact that it is run at all. We have entrusted the training of our children to a secular government and have not surprisingly gotten the result of secular thinking children. When aÂ generation is raised thinking thatÂ they are god, it will inevitably lead to a cataclysm when that generation discovers the fact of their own impotence. Demands ofÂ all sorts are the necessary result of such an upbringing; we taught them they are god, and now they make the demands of a false god: human sacrifice, insatiable greed & lust, and generalÂ confusion about which direction is north.

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In Defense of the History Major

by Ben Zornes · Jun 8, 2016

I Might Be a Joke, But My MajorÂ Isn’t

As the joke my brother tells goes, “how do you get a history major off your doorstep? Pay him for the pizza!” He is currently pursuing a lucrative career in business management & administration, and, back in the day, I chose to be aÂ history major; which is certainly a less lucrative enterprise.

I heard on the radio aÂ few months back that many school are electing to replace history class with courses that are more sensory and will actuallyÂ prepare students for a life in the globalist & tech driven economy of the 21st century. As the thinking goes, no one can provide a curriculum that presents a cohesive history of past events, and it is always going to be lopsided (after all those who write the history textbooks control the perception of what happened).

But, as a history major, I would very much resent the idea of a wholesale disposal of historic instruction. I think vocationalÂ preparation is of great importance and would highly encourage a return to a master/apprentice model. And I suppose I might add that I would also very much like a dissolution of the entire behemoth of the Department of Education. The DMV should be enough of a reminder that government has noÂ business overseeing the education of our children, nor do they have much skill in it. [Read more…] about In Defense of the History Major

The Real State of the Union (Part Second)

by Ben Zornes · Jan 31, 2015

This is the second part in my series addressing several of the issues raised byÂ President Obama in his recent State of the Union Address. Part One can be found here.

The President proposed offering free Community College, and though education is a vital andÂ important aspect of any nationâ€™s future, we would be fools for handing over another sector of our education system over to a government that has been an abysmal failure when it comes to education. According to some accounts, the USA is fifth in the world for how much we spend per student, and yet we are 17th overall in mathematics & reading, and 21st in science! To illustrate this, if an NFL team had the 5th highest paid roster, yet failed to make the playoffs year after year, heads would roll, coaches would be fired, and the fans would be deeply frustrated. Â [Read more…] about The Real State of the Union (Part Second)