Feature
To Spread His Glory
Four Theses on Christian Education
Christian education should be more than just avoiding the evil influence of the secular academy. It not only has a critical role to play alongside the Church and the home in transmitting the biblical worldview to the next generation; it also, in its higher levels, has a role to play in showing the relevance of the Christian worldview by applying it to all of life. It is not a luxury; it is a necessity if the Church is going to fulfill its mission.
Yet the Christian school movement—whether on the primary, secondary, or collegiate level—is the stepchild of the Church. We give lip service to its importance, but we will not support it on a level at which it can function well. It struggles to pay its faculty a living wage and still remain affordable enough to be a viable option for parents in the real world, for these are incompatible goals. They simply cannot both be met without a constant infusion of cash from outside the tuition structure—whether from endowments or from unrestricted giving. Most Christian schools do not have the endowments and aren’t going to get what they need in gifts. Qualified faculty members are hard to retain, and when they are retained, they are usually overworked in ways that make it difficult for them to advance in their fields.
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Donald T. Williams is Professor Emeritus of Toccoa Falls College. He stays permanently camped out on the borders between serious scholarship and pastoral ministry, between theology and literature, and between Narnia and Middle-Earth. He is the author of fourteen books, including Answers from Aslan: The Enduring Apologetics of C. S. Lewis (DeWard, 2023). He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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