Preface
For too many generations, Christian parents have trusted their children to the enemy, in the form of what are commonly called our “public schools.” The results have been devastating to our society and have robbed untold millions of believers of reward, in this life and the next. It has only been relatively recently that anyone even thought to question what has long been taken for granted in America. Compulsory schooling, high school through twelfth grade, an increasingly abstract education with no practical value, and then college, has been the norm for so long that very few Christians even question it. Conservatives cry out against unfair taxation and big government while they simultaneously commit spiritual infanticide by sacrificing their most precious gifts, their children, on the altar of humanist schools.
It is not that the public or “common” schools (as they were once known) are formerly good institutions that have gone bad. They have been bad since the beginning. There is no biblical precedent for parents to turn their children over to the civil government to be educated. As R. J. Rushdoony says in The Messianic Character of American Education, “If the schools are agencies of the state, they must inevitably serve the purposes of the state rather than God, man, the family, or any institution.” A state school serves the state. From the beginning, public schools have been laboratories for progressive educational techniques, centers of socialist indoctrination, and nurseries for future state worshipers. The founders of the public schools saw them as absolutely necessary for the maintaining of democratic society. They are the churches of our civil religion, presided over by priests of humanism called “teachers.”
Public schools were never good, but they have gotten worse. At one time a veneer of Christianity was seen as necessary for maintaining public order and civilization. No longer. The destruction of Christian beliefs, particularly Christian morality, is a primary function of the public school system. The production of cooperative, guilt-ridden, morally-handicapped citizens with no absolute sense of right or wrong is the goal. state schools are factories for drones that will willingly serve the collective interests as represented in the state.
An increasing number of Christians, seeing the utter incompatibility of both obeying the biblical mandates given to parents and putting their kids in state schools, have withdrawn their children from public school to put them in Christian schools instead. Alas, these “Christian” schools are often little better than the public schools. The watered-down antinomian Christianity taught is but thinly-veiled humanism. Love is taught instead of law. Dubious secular “virtues” replace the Ten Commandments, and church control leads to students whose first allegiance is to the institutional church, not to God. Even worse are the Classical Christian schools, which somehow attempt to bring Jerusalem and Athens together, and expect God’s blessings for doing so. In either case, a deplorable lack of any teaching of business and practical (i.e., real world) skills characterizes the Christian school.
Many other Christians have gone the homeschool route, with varying degrees of success. One parent, generally the mother, is saddled with the whole responsibility of educating all the children. The challenges for the mother, particularly to keep discipline, are not trivial. The family must limit itself to the father’s income, something increasingly difficult to do in today’s economy. As someone who who was homeschooled growing up, I know the strains that it can put on a family and the sacrifices needed to make it work.
What if you could combine the positives of homeschooling with financial freedom and be able to train your children in a trade as well? What if both parents could share the educational responsibility, with total parental control over what is taught? What if you could get paid to teach your own children as you see fit, free from the influence of those in the church or elsewhere who would stand in your way? You can.
This book is about that possibility: the Grace Community School model of education. You can earn a wonderful living, providing for your family, while also fulfilling God’s command to raise up your children in the covenant. Your children can get an academic education while also learning practical business skills. In this system, both mother and father work together teaching the family’s children. At the same time, you can be a powerful witness in your community, spreading the gospel to those abandoned by their parents and other ministries, particularly the institutional church. I am talking about doing something just as momentous as when the early Christians rescued abandoned Roman babies, and just as worthy of reward. Let others fill barns with hay and stubble, you can earn a full reward that “neither moth nor rust doth corrupt.”
The Christian family does not need the public school or its baggage.
