The Faithful Ambition of Biblical Education

This is part two. Part one may be read here.

#Fathers

I have already cautioned against absolutising Ephesians 6:4 into a statement of exclusion. It does not prohibit mothers from educating children, nor institutions. It certainly does insist upon the primary importance of fathers, however. Fathers must preeminently take up the task of education. The responsibility falls in their lap.

The biblical evidence for this in excess of Ephesians 6:4 is mountainous, and it clothes Genesis like an honourable robe:

• Genesis 4:17-21 –– The text invariably cites Cain’s descendants as “the father of all who do such and such…” This is the way knowledge is transferred: from fathers to their progeny.
• Genesis 9:24-27 –– Noah speaks powerfully over the destinies of his progeny. As a father, his words had more force than the mere sound and information they propagated. They had creative and destructive power. Fathers today ought to recognise this principle and speak in a manner befitting the weight of their office. Your words, fathers, are never just idle chatter. You are forming not just persons, but generations. You are directing history.
• Genesis 14:14 –– After being called the “father of many nations”, Abram leads into battle 318 servants––”trained men, born in his house.” The fact that these were not Abram’s biological sons strengthens the imperative concerning biological sons: if Abram trained all these men, how much more did he train Isaac and Ishmael?

From Genesis onward, scripture assumes that fathers bear the brunt of educating their households. More than educating, however, we see a shaping, training aspect of the role of fatherhood that exalts it beyond mere giver-of-wisdom. It is not whether fathers train and shape; it is which shape they mould; it is who they train. An absent, abdicating father is shaping his sons into homosexual wimps, his daughters into anxious chameleons. He is, though unwittingly, training his children for Satan’s army. A father who is present and responsible––who deploys his words like a grandmaster moving his queen; who exercises leadership and authority like a shepherd––is shaping arrows for his quiver (Psa. 127:4-5). This father is training fighters for the Lord’s army.

#Institutions

Given the centrailiy of fathers in education, ought we to conclude that the household is the only institution that may provide it?

The clear answer is “no”. We may posit that the household ought to be the primary source of education without resorting to the extreme position of believing it the only source.

For one thing, your children are always learning wherever you take them; so unless you confine their existence entirely to the home, you are permitting them to learn from the bees, the buses, and the baristas of this world. It is logistically impossible to maintain the notion that only the household may provide education, short of a boldly stunted definition of ‘education’. Do your children learn at church? Do they learn from their friends? (They do have friends, right?)

Now, the biblical permission for education outside the home may be found in a few special examples throughout scripture:

1. Samuel –– Hannah handed her son to the priesthood for many, perhaps most, of his formative years.
2. Paul –– He was taught at the feet of Gamaliel, a Jewish teacher. Wehther this was from childhood or later is up for debate; but it is likely that he began his formal education outside the home early, even if not all of it was with Gamaliel.
3. Christ — At the age of twelve, He was found in the temple, busily “being about His Father’s business.”

These examples do not establish a rule that children ought to be educated outside of the family; but they certainly demonstrate that the concept is not per se sinful. It is not like adultery where the act itself is definitionally beyond the possibility of classification as “good.” There may be circumstances where it is warranted.

It would require an extra step, however, before I could claim to have demonstrated that education outside the home is positively required by scripture. Indeed, a leap that abrupt is not my intention; nor, apparently, is it God’s. My goal is more modest: to show that there is no inflexible law necessitating that education be restricted to the home.

In other words, I believe neither homeschoolers nor regular schoolers can claim that they have the way to educate—that everyone ought to follow them. Rather, it becomes a question of individual circumstances. It is a wisdom call.

You must not ask yourself: what does the Bible say about how and where I should educate my son in the Hunter Valley, New South Wales, in the year of our Lord 2026. Ask yourself a more general question: how can I ensure that, as a father, I obtain for my son the best education possible? The former question is one about which Scripture is silent (you will know what I mean by this); the latter can be answered through appeal to scriptural principles, of which there is an abundance.

Educative institutions for children, therefore, are not automatically forbidden; but in order for them to be a wise proposition, they must adhere to the following biblical principles:

1. Parental oversight: Parents, especially fathers, must have direct and crucial input or oversight (Eph. 6:4).
2. Maintain homeward orientation: They must not reorient the place of young children from the home to the world. Given that a prepubescent child’s orientation should be fundamentally homewards, no educative institution should seek to usurp this fact, or worse, become the said child’s mummy or daddy. This has implications for the amount of time a child spends at the institution, and the way his teachers treat him when he is there.
3. Net benefit: They must justify removing a child from home, by offering him something that could not be gained there. In other words, you shouldn’t send your child to an institution merely for the sake of it.

These points, especially the third, call for wise judgement, which is not something that can be learned in a textbook. The world is messy, and there are more difficult problems than how many sides a triangle has.

I am, frankly, in no authoritative position to opine in the area of pros and cons of institutions; so I will present these thoughts with an open hand, willing for them to be debated, and for more points to be suggested on either side.

#Institution Pros

It appears to me that boys benefit from institutionalised education more than girls, though girls may also benefit to a lesser extent.

It is a truism that boys who never leave their mum’s side in youth become incapable of masculinely facing the world. Effeminacy is truly avoidable whilst homeschooling—I have seen it done, repeatedly—but this takes significant effort and conscious planning. By nature, an institution will force a boy away from his mother to face other boys under the same novel pressure. This develops in young men a resilience, competitiveness, and strength of character that cannot be taught at home. Girls, too, benefit from healthy doses of the same resilience-building experiences, but do not run the same risk of becoming effeminate without it.

“Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 6:9-10 LSB).

How could a boy not become effeminate when his only daily role model is his mother? His mother is rightly feminine; he ought not to be. However, he learns by example and experience; these things teach him to properly individuate himself from the feminine—that is, to be masculine. He must, therefore, progressively and over time learn to “leave his father and mother.”

A second upside to institutionalised education is the necessary presence of variegated social interactions. Unlike homeschooling, institutional schooling is necessarily social. Of course, a godly homeschooling family will find no trouble in providing ample social opportunities for its children—through church, co-ops, and other play dates. Yet, as mentioned before, this is not an automatic feature of it, and can easily be neglected from time to time as even the best parents go through phases of forgetfulness or disorganisation.

#Institution Cons

The possibility of mission drift is no theoretical prospect when it comes to institutionalised education. It is embodied in the public schools. At their inception, public schools were protestant-led institutions which bathed children in a very biblical form of education. Prayer, scripture reading, and catechism learning was rife. Fast forward to your local Australian public school, on the other hand, and you will walk in on school assemblies introduced by smoking ceremonies to indigenous demons and lectures on every egalitarian heresy known to man. You will see weak boys, slaves to their lusts; and anxious girls, slaves to their emotions. Few of them will have even half the competence or attention span of previous generations.

This is how institutions can go wrong. It’s not pretty.

Moreover, even the best institutions, whose stated aims are defined well against the possibility of drift, have the potential to be abused. Girls, for example—a class notorious for forming attachments to institutions—may become too invested in the wrong place: school, rather than home. How can we expect women, trained in childhood to give their energy primarily to the world, to suddenly know how to give it to the home? Grace is grace, of course: God takes you from where you are, not where you should have been. But where you are need not be so close to hell; why not step closer to heaven?

#Conclusion

Biblical education relies upon something I will call ‘faithful ambition.’ Ambition is necessary to raise Christians above the comfortably numb masses. If your children are to be anything more than impotent beanbags, you must want more for them than what is given to the masses. Hope for more; work for more; trust you can get more.

You must do it in faith, which means rejecting the notion that God’s favour is conditional upon your own worthiness, or that of your children. Believe that God will do what His word says He will do.

“You shall know therefore that Yahweh your God, He is God, the faithful God, who keeps His covenant and His lovingkindness to a thousand generations with those who love Him and keep His commandments” (Deuteronomy 7:9 LSB).

Act on behalf of your children, therefore, with faithful ambition. Make the wisest decision based upon the intersection of your desires, your abilities, and your opportunities, and trust that God will bless it to a thousand generations.