Schumacher, in Small Is Beautiful, says that education is our greatest resource. (see footnote 1) He argues that each new civilization grows and perpetuates itself through schools, i.e. through education. If, as the last issue of The Mind Field suggests, Christianity is a way of life, it is a sub-culture within western civilization, and it must have schools if it is to maintain itself and advance. Given the religious quality of secular humanism, which dominates public education today, it would be folly to expect the public schools to promote the development of a truly Christian culture.
Schumacher makes another trenchant point when he reminds us that ideas are things we think and feel with. All through our childhood and adolescence hosts of ideas seep into our minds without our being ready yet to censor them. When we reach the age of reflective thought, our minds are already filled with panoply of ideas with which we think. Only gradually, if at all, do we develop a Christian perspective on all of life, and, in the light of that worldview, begin to select and reject among the host of our thinking. This point is another powerful argument for Christian teaching in home, church, and school.
Education, then, is something the Christian mind must be concerned with. This issue offers a contribution in an article about Christians and the Fundamental School.

There is widespread demand today for schools to return to teaching the basics. The Fundamental School movement in public education is a front-running instance of the attempt to do that. It is a movement that emphasizes academic achievement, homework, discipline, and high standards of conduct. Waiting lists commonly attest to the deep interest among parents in this kind of teaching.
Many people probably think of the Christian school and the Fundamental School as being very much alike. Indeed, Christian schools often emphasize academics and discipline in their publicity. And it is certainly true that a good Christian school should strive for academic excellence as well as for a disciplined atmosphere in the classroom. If these are not present, a school should hesitate to ask of the parents the level of financial commitment necessary to afford private education. But does this mean that the Christian school is really the traditional American school with the addition of Christian teachers and an emphasis on biblical truth? This article will suggest that a Christian school must be something much more basically Christian than that. The return to basics, in Christian terms, must include the pursuit of excellence and of good discipline but these will be fringe benefits of a return to basics at a deeper level.
Even a superficial look at the original of the traditional American Public school, to which the Fundamental School is a return, will quickly raise doubts about defining the Christian school in those terms. For American education in the early part of this century was shaped most conspicuously by the ideology and the ethics of business and technology. Callahan says it became controlled by "the cult of efficiency." (see footnote 1) He goes on to say that, while he wasn’t surprised to find business ideas and practices being used in education,

"What was unexpected was the extent, not only of the power of the business-industrial groups, but of the strength of the business ideology in the American culture on the one hand and the extreme weakness and vulnerability of schoolmen . . . on the other," (see footnote 2)

And Sachs, after surveying the transformation of American education into the likeness of the business world, comments on the letter grading system as follows: " . . . the letter grading system as we know it today is totally the invention of a materialistically and pragmatically motivated society and has nothing from the Word of God to commend it." (see footnote 3)
This is not a broad front attack on business and technology. They have brought rich blessings from God to the western world, but they have brought frightening dangers as well. As the culmination of the industrial revolution, they have often been the incarnation of the evolutionary principles of competition, natural selection, and the survival of the fittest. They have become the concentration point for faith and hope, the promise of the better life for all, Goudzwaard points out that the Industrial Revolution "can be regarded in part as an unmistakable expression of a living faith, i.e. the faith that things would get better and better through the advance of modern technology within the framework of a growing free market competition." (see footnote 4) He illustrates this by reference to the book, The Gospel Wealth, written by Andrew Carnegie, the great American steel magnate. Carnegie says that obedience to the laws of industrial progress guarantees us the joy of a new life in which poverty and oppression disappear and happiness returns to the earth. (see footnote 5)
The idolatrous nature of such a viewpoint stands out starkly in a quotation from Lord Keynes, the British economist, "For at least another hundred years we must present to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little while longer still." (see footnote 6)
All of which is simply to say that "back to the basics" in Christian education must mean something much deeper than the Fundamental School movement. It must mean a return to basic Biblical directives for the goal, content, and methodology of schooling. Here are seven elements in that return, presented in little more than outline form.

Back to basics means, first of all, that God’s self-revelation is foundational to true knowledge, not only in the area of theology and ethics, but also in every area of human intellectual endeavor. What we know depends on what we believe rather than vice versa.
Probably every Christian institution of learning gives lip service to this concept, but working it out, as Harry Blamires has eloquently demonstrated in The Christian Mind, (see footnote 7) is a horse of another color. " . . . in contradistinction to the secular mind, no vital Christian mind plays fruitfully, as a coherent and recognizable influence, upon our social, political, or cultural life." (see footnote 8) He goes on to say that the application of Christian presuppositions to our thinking about practical affairs "would produce a violent collision between the Christian mind and the secular mind . . ." (see footnote 9) Christian schools are not yet noted for producing that sort of collision outside the area of theology and ethics.

Another basic is the goal of education. The real purpose of education is to convey the prevailing culture from one generation to the next. Jonathan Kozol, as an exception to the prevalent spate of criticism, blames the public schools not because they don’t work well but because they do. What they do, he insists, is to indoctrinate the students to be good citizens in the culture of the United States. He says we call it "state indoctrination" when done in the USSR, but "the socializing function" when performed here. (see footnote 10)
His charge raises an interesting line of speculation. Do even Christian schools primarily prepare children to fit into the American scene? Do they provide a student with the skills and the motivation to succeed in our culture and then encourage him to serve the lord once he has accomplished that primary, natural objective? Perhaps our separation from the secular culture is not so airtight as we had thought.
By way of contrast, our Lord instructed us that the first thing we should pray for is "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth . . ." (see footnote 11) This is not the kind of goal for the discretionary portion of our time, talents, and resources. This is the goal of Christian life. He made it clear that we are to seek first His kingdom and his righteousness. (see footnote 12) This means that the Christian school has to be concerned primarily with preparing the student to fulfill his highest potential as a member of the Body of Christ, the Kingdom of our Lord into which he has been translated. (see footnote 13) Each student is created in God’s image and has the potential of having that image restored and developed through his membership by faith and the Holy Spirit in the community of Christ’s people. That community is the means through which Christ continues "to do and teach" in the world. (This is a clear inference of Luke as he writes Acts 1:1.) It is absolutely unthinkable that the Body of Christ could stand aloof from the great public issues that disturb today’s world – issues like poverty, hunger, abortion, atomic weaponry, racial and other discrimination, and injustice in a wide variety of forms. The goal of Christian education must be the preparation of Christians, in the rich variety of their individual gifts and callings and in the massive solidarity of their being the new race of redeemed men in Jesus Christ, to demonstrate, both verbally and actively, that Christ is Lord and Redeemer of human life in its entirety, societal as well as individual. If we get back to basics in this regard, we shall do something very Christian in today’s world.

Another basic, close to but distinguishable from the matter of objectives, is the insistence that Christianity is a distinctive way of life. That it was called that in the beginning is perfectly clear from the book of Acts (i.e. 19:23). That it should become so once again is one of the basic elements in the effort to teach school of Christianly.
The distinctiveness of the Christian way of life poses some problems. It is neither liberal nor conservative in the accepted usage of those terms today. It is not socialist or free enterprise. It is not the democratic way of life, and surely it isn’t the totalitarian way. As an economic system, Communism is not Christian, but neither is Capitalism. Progressive education doesn’t fit the Christian mold, but neither does traditional education. Christ claims to make all things new; (see footnote 14) It is basic to a truly Christian educational endeavor that we find out what that newness means in the various aspects of human life and communicate it to our students.
One of the primary ingredients of this endeavor is the deeply ingrained assumption that life comes in two parts: the natural part just like anyone else – through the proper cultivation of one’s reasoning powers, and then one learns to live the spiritual part through the Bible. At this point Protestants are generally, though quite unknowingly, good Roman Catholics in their philosophy. The "nature-grace" dichotomy of St. Thomas Aquinas’ philosophy is an unrecognized component of their thinking. It is basic that true Christian education must unmask this dualism, reject it, and work out the distinctiveness of the Christian way.

Editor: Al Greene

Alta Vista College

Footnotes: