Why Neighborhood Christian School?

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Why Neighborhood Christian School?
Won't it shelter kids from reality?

Christian schools are a mystery to many people. Why would parents want to spend money on their child's education when it is offered "free" by the government? Besides, they ask, "Doesn't Christian education shelter children from the 'real world'?"

To understand the answer we need to understand what goes on each day in the classroom. Apart from parents, classroom teachers have the biggest effect on shaping a child's values and world-view. Teachers have the primary influence determining what is going to be taught. Students learn what really motivates and excites the teacher by how much time and with how much energy different topics are presented in class.

Philosophical Vacuum? There exists no value-free or value-neutral teaching. What a child's teacher considers valuable in life is continually "caught" by the students of that class. Values are communicated continually during the course of the classroom day. An educator's values are obvious when a choice is made to thematically interweave the Easter Bunny in the April elementary school curriculum yet ignore the historical resurrection of Christ because of a distorted perception of separation of church and state. The teacher's personal values are evident when they can teach children to say "No!"to drugs but cannot teach teenagers to say no to premarital sex. Parents then need to realize that values are taught whether by accident or design in the school classroom. Since it is impossible to teach from a value-neutral base, parents should feel the school curriculum and teacher of their children present a similar world-view and value system to their own.

Christian parents have a distinct value system based on the Bible and its
golden rules. They desire their love for God to not be isolated to a one-hour church service on Sunday, but to affect their day-to-day thinking and choices. A Christ-centered education, funded solely by the tuition and gifts of parents, teaches children "the three R's" and other subjects with God's values and purposes. Thus, other than the option of home schooling, it should be their only choice because they want these same values to be lived out and taught in the classroom.

This fact that values are communicated from adults to children is founded on God's counsel. Every command in the Scriptures relative to the training of children is given to parents. (i.e. Deut. 4:9, 11:18, Prov. 22:6) Luke 6:40 states that, "...a student, when he is fully trained, will be like his teacher." As Christians, our teacher is Jesus Christ, and our goal is to be like Him. Likewise, a young impressionable child will emulate those who are teaching him as well as pick up the world-view of the curriculum. These do not sound very frightening to a Christian parent until he realizes what world-view is being presented in the school curriculum today. Dr. Paul Vitz, professor of psychology at New York University, reported the results of a government-funded survey about the way religion and traditional values are represented in public school textbooks. He listed his findings in the book, Censorship: Evidence of Bias in our Children's Textbooks: "Religion, traditional family values, and conservative political and economic positions have been reliably excluded from children's textbooks.

One remarkable conclusion about the Social Studies texts was that

Zero out of 60 textbooks (approximately 15,000 pages) have even one word referring to any religious activity in contemporary life. None of these texts have even one mention of people who go to church or synagogue,who worship or pray or have any religious influence on their lives or on society.

Clearly, many in the national leadership of our public schools have chosen to leave out of America's education the principles that are the foundation of our democracy. The children of our country are indoctrinated into a value system based upon blind faith in the scientific method which is believed to answer all of life's problems. All other truth is deemed "speculative and subjective" by these demagogues.

Christian education revolves around the world-view that says there is a personal and infinite God who is involved with his creation and has lovingly communicated through the Bible what is best for humankind. This was the world-view of the writers of our Constitution who used such terms of absolutism as "self-evident truths" and "inalienable rights endowed upon us by our Creator." Without this manner of thinking, where would we get the ideals of justice, sanctity of human life and goodness which are our only basis for law and democracy?

As this is true reality, then it may be asked, "Who is sheltering students from reality when, in the public school classroom, the Maker of this world is neither thanked, inquired of, or even acknowledged as being alive, let alone affecting human life? "

Cal Thomas, a writer for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, stated it this way:

Why should religious parents educate their children in a school system that, for example, ignores creation theory in favor of evolution and teaches that sex is an option they can exercise before marriage with no concerns other than preventing venereal disease and pregnancy?

So it is easy to see why Christians spend additional money,beyond their taxes, in order to send their children to a Christian school. It is because they understand that during the thousands of hours their children spend in school, they are being exposed to a system of values that presents reality, namely the Author of Life - Jesus Christ.

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