Start & Stay At ECS
With the advent of the WV HOPE Scholarship, interest in enrolling at ECS is rapidly increasing. Year over year, we just increased our enrollment by over 50%. And every student entering kindergarten for the first time is eligible for the HOPE Scholarship, making classical Christian education at ECS more affordable than ever before.
But there are other educational options and choices, including traditional public schools, online charter schools, other forms of private schools, and homeschooling. As a school Emmanuel supports all forms of Christian education. With that said, there are some very serious considerations with respect to education, especially how a student starts education. I want to lay out the case for starting (and staying) at ECS.
First, consistency is key. Good education requires forming sound academic and spiritual habits. If you plan on your student getting a Christian education at all, you should aim to start with a Christian education. This provides the greatest consistency, and thus the greatest chance of success. Education must have continuity, even now we continue to deal with the impact of COVID-19, school closures, virtual learning, etc. Because Emmanuel uses a classical model of Christian education, for a student to be well-formed by high school they need to be prepared in grammar and logic school. That all starts in kindergarten (at Emmanuel, we have a K3, K4, and K5 program; HOPE Scholarship eligibility starts in K5).
No areas of education illustrate the need for consistency and continuity more than the two most foundational academic habits: Reading & mathematics. Emmanuel Christian School begins with phonics. In kindergarten there is simply no more important academic necessity than learning to read. And learning to read requires understanding how English works, English is a phonetic language, so we teach it phonetically. To read requires being able to decode, and to practice decoding enough to gain fluency.
Math works similarly. Reading is foundational as even math texts are written with words. Young children must begin to develop their skills in arithmetic (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division), because arithmetic is the grammar of math. And they shouldn’t merely begin counting and understanding numbers as representations of units, they should also delight in numbers and how they correspond to the world. The chief end of man, according to the Westminster Shorter Catechism, is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. So we must enjoy God in academics in order to glorify God through academics.
This element of delight is my next argument for starting (and staying) at ECS. If students start education and become convinced they are bad at it, it can be exceedingly hard to recover true joy and passion in learning. As Degas is credited with noting, self-doubt kills ability. This does not mean students will all enjoy every subject equally. We know some students are naturally gifted in math, others in language, others in science, and so on. But it does mean every subject should be taught in a way that allows students to see the inherent joy in the subject. My own daughter, who finished kindergarten at ECS last year, often notes her favorite subject is math. I consider that a major win, because it reflects the fact she has been taught to enjoy math. Students will excel at that in which they delight.
And this brings me to the most difficult point I have to address in this post. Students should start (and stay) at ECS because when students start out wrong it is difficult to make up lost ground. We are at a point where grade levels of students transferring in no longer meaningfully connect to where our students are at. That is, it pains me to say, I now must assume a student coming from public school by 5th or 6th grade is 1-2 grade levels behind students who started their academic career at ECS. This is not universally true, but in my third year at ECS it seems the general idea is becoming more prevalent instead of less. If you want your student to attain meaningful learning on par with their developmental abilities, you should start on the right foot in kindergarten at ECS.
One might be tempted to look at the previous arguments and pursue ECS merely for academic reasons. But that brings me to my last argument. Education is not simply a matter of academics. Education is the formation of the soul, not the coding of a robot. We care deeply about truth and knowledge, and want students to be formed that way. As such, we seek to integrate the truth about God into every subject. God is known through natural revelation and through Scripture, and we incorporate both in what we teach students at ECS. Bible (or theology as students get older) is taught as a subject, it is also integrated into every other subject. Science is taught in light of the fact that God reveals Himself through His created world (Psalm 19). History is the story of God’s Providential rule and reign in the world over time.
If you want your students to get the full story, the full course (and curriculum is a life course), they should not only start at ECS but also stay at ECS through high school graduation. Our curriculum is designed with the end in mind. It is all meant to build up to what is reflected in our Portrait of the Graduate. Because it is so designed, a student who starts with us but leaves at high school is going to experience some disconnection between their experience up to that point and their next four years.
Graduation is completion of the course. The more consistent and cohesive that course is over time, the better. To start at ECS and leave midway through (and we do understand people move and there can be contingent circumstances) is like quitting a football game at the end of the 3rd quarter. We design our curriculum with the end in mind, and that creates continuity that necessitates full completion.
I invite you to consider starting, and staying, at ECS. I think you’ll be glad you did.
God bless,
Headmaster Batten
