Christians Don’t Have to Enroll in Failing Public Schools

W hen my husband and I married, we broadcast to anyone who’d listen that we were going to send our future children to public school. We were the products of public schools, we said, and we’d had challenging but wonderful experiences. We didn’t want to “shelter” our kids. We wanted them to be cultured and tough. We were earnest, but we also very much liked how we sounded when we said this.

Then we had our children. When it came time to register our oldest (now in third grade) for school, we looked at the stats and saw what the majority of American parents of school-aged kids now also see: that our public schools aren’t educating anymore.

The K–3 literacy rate in my local public-school district is 23 percent. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also referred to as the Nation’s Report Card, roughly 32 percent of fourth-graders in our nation’s public schools can read. The U.S. ranks twelfth globally in math scores, and 28th in science.

Writing recently in Christianity Today, young mom Stefani McDade pushed back against parents who say they don’t want to send their kids to public schools for fear their kids will be teased or bullied for their faith, or that they’ll lose their faith altogether.

“Think of it like strength training: Your children need to build muscles of faith, and public school can provide weight to lift while you’re around to spot them,” McDade wrote. “Let them wrestle with worldly counternarratives to God’s truth while they’re still under your care.”

There’s wisdom in exposing our kids to popular false worldviews and challenges to Christianity when they’re kids. Social psychologist William J. McGuire called it the “inoculation theory” of ideas: trying to hide counterproposals or squashing our kids’ legitimate questions and doubts only makes them less confident Christians as adults. But the idea that parents, like me, who won’t send their kids to public school are chiefly concerned about our kids being teased for following Jesus, or even that their faith will be challenged, is, frankly, quaint — and ultimately immaterial. I’m afraid my kids won’t learn to read. And my fear would be warranted in a majority of American public-school districts.

But this failure of our public schools to educate our kids is directly related to the aggressive infiltration of progressive ideology in the classrooms. There’s another word for “counter-narratives to God’s truth,” and that word is “lies.” If we agree with Saint Augustine that “all Truth is God’s Truth,” then we should view education as a distinctly Christian endeavor. God made Himself and His world knowable, because He wants us to know Him. The “God’s Truth” I want my kids to encounter at school is not exclusively (or even primarily) Old Testament history, the gospels, and the epistles. My husband and I teach these things to them every day, as does our church family. Of course, it’s a profound benefit if these truths are reinforced at school.

But geology is also God’s Truth. So are physics and calculus. World history, in all its glory and brutality, is the story of God’s world. Beautiful literature can reveal God’s Truth. The famous German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler called science “thinking God’s thoughts after Him.” This explains why the concept of public education itself — which was predicated, in part, on the idea that everyone should have the ability to read the Bible for him- or herself — was a Christian contribution to the world.

It makes sense, then, that an unambiguously anti-Christian public-school system would also be anti-math, anti-science, and ultimately anti-learning. I get that it’s considered uncool and unenlightened to admit to worrying about schools presenting LGBTQ+ ideology or calling Jesus dumb. But it is catastrophically naïve to imagine that schools that refuse to teach algebra because it’s “racist,” schools doing land acknowledgments instead of the Pledge of Allegiance, and schools teaching that boys can be girls and also maybe cats are educating anyone about anything true.

The Christian school my girls now attend ranks far above our local public schools in every area of academic achievement every year. Their teachers teach about world history and world religions — there’s no sheltering from bad ideas here, but neither is there presenting bad ideas as good ones. The student body is also remarkably diverse socioeconomically (and ethnically, although the kids could not care less about that), and more than half the students are here on a scholarship.

Public education was a good idea. It still is. But a majority of our country’s public schools have fundamentally abdicated their responsibility to educate. Until they return to that mandate, every single kid in this country — whether Christian or not — deserves an alternative. That’s why advocating for school choice is such a necessary way to love our neighbors. That’s why more churches should partner with schools or start their own, and why more Christian teachers and parents ought to publicly object to the madness in their local public-school districts.

I don’t plan to shelter my kids from bad ideas. But in the name of Jesus Christ, I am going to do everything I can to get them in a school that will actually teach them what’s Good — beginning, at the very least, with reading, writing, and arithmetic.