Your Children are Yours at ECS
Over the last week President Joe Biden has been popularizing the idea that “there’s no such thing as someone else’s child.” Biden shared this with a Tweet that says “Our children are our nation’s future, and they are in the hands of teachers. This White House will always have their back.” The idea here is clear: Your children do not belong to you; they belong to the state, and the state will raise them through teachers.
Stuff and nonsense!
God gives the responsibility for childrearing to parents (Genesis 1:22, Deuteronomy 11:19, Proverbs 22:6), and this extends to education (Ephesians 6:4). Your children do not belong to the state, and the notion they do belong to the state is ultimately a denial of parental freedom that can only lead to a loss of freedom of thought and conscience. The appropriate label for a loss of freedom resulting from belonging to someone else is slavery. And the President of the United States has no business promoting such a notion.
But this betrays something of the history of public education in the United States. Our modern system of education was designed to undermine parents, particularly with regard to Christian conviction. The father of modern public education in America was John Dewey, a signer of the anti-Christian “Humanist Manifesto.” He intended for the state to use public education to teach children secular humanism. That’s not an accidental feature of his system, that was the goal all along.
This is, among other reasons, exactly why private Christian schools exist. Private Christian schools, like Emmanuel Christian School, are founded on the recognition that our students do NOT belong to Caesar (one of my predecessors, Newton Anderson, said as much quite strongly). We are here to help parents fulfill Ephesians 6:4 and Matthew 28:18-20. Christian children deserve a Christian education.
But wait, if the responsibility of raising and educating children belongs to parents, do even private schools have a role to play? Yes! A good Christian school will recognize that it operates in loco parentis, in the role of a parent in some respects. That is, our authority is a delegated authority.
Do teachers function like a parent when correcting a student, or developing a curriculum, or encouraging students to read, or teaching them about the days of creation? Yes, teachers do function like parents in the realm of education. But we are, at the end of the day, not the parents. And our recognition of that reality now places us in stark contrast to the secular schools.
This gets to a larger issue. Functioning in loco parentis requires a good partnership between the parents and the school. The relationship between school and students will only work to the extent the relationship between school and parents works. For example, our philosphy of discipline assumes repentance. If there’s no repentance, our model of discipline simply will not work. But our approach here does not assume we own your kids, it assumes you agree with us about repentance and we can work together to address whatever issues arise. We try to make sure such assumptions are shared before someone enrolls.
Ultimately, your students are your students. Your children are your children. We are happy to partner with like-minded families to deliver a classical Christian eduation, but we never assume we own your children. Your children are yours, and you have a right to know how they will be educated if they enroll at Emmanuel Christian School. We are only too happy to share that!
