The End of Education

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

Well tonight we continue our discussion, our ongoing series of building and battling in the negative world and I get to talk tonight about something that I think about a lot that is education and I have in a lot of different contexts spoken about it and a lot of different contexts written about it and I I find myself returning to the same themes over and over again. And so much of what you’ll hear tonight will just be restated and repackaged versions of things that you may have heard me say before. The difference is that the program that I want running in the back of our minds is this. The end of education is to forge jealous of all laborers who will carry an advanced Christ honoring culture.

The talk tonight is entitled, The End of Education. And so what I’m trying to have us consider together is what is the ultimate point, the end, the telos, of all of our educational efforts. So that is what we’re looking for. What is the ultimate point? It is not daycare for mom and dad between the hours of eight and three, Monday to Friday. and free with a big fat asterisk beside it at that. It is not just helping them to get good grades so they can get a good job or get into a good college to then get a good job and make lots of money. No, there’s more to it than that. According to Pew researchers who examined the patterns of voters in 2022 against their education, their formal education, the results were unsurprising. The more formal education an individual has received, the more likely he is to vote Democrat. And of course, both the left and the right view this as a compliment.

A Democrat might say, well, right. Degree acquisition reflects intelligence, and the more intelligent a person is, the more likely he is to vote Democrat. A Republican might say, right. A person who has not been corrupted by the educational system is more likely to vote according to common sense, meaning he’ll vote Republican. Honestly, there is a degree of fairness to that, as there happens to be a higher concentration of PhDs who cannot discern boy from girl than there are three-year-olds who have the same problem. That is, a higher concentration of three-year-olds are likely to get it right than the same concentration of PhDs.

Hypothetically, a headmaster of a classical and Christian school might say, right. Degree acquisition reflects time spent hearing a particular narrative and ideologies. Of course, the voting pattern would reflect that. In other words, what if the educational system in America today is working just fine? at least insofar as it’s delivering and producing exactly what is intended. A dissolution of culture, a disdain for our heritage, and increased dependency upon the state. Of course, they’re outliers. Many of us survived public schools. And God is kind. Nevertheless, since most of the educational system tries hard to be godless, like they’re intentionally as neutral as possible at least, so they say, which their neutrality is a distinct negativity.

Well then, of course, the collective product is going to be as godless as well. We can do better and we must do better than this. Education is not just about the transfer of information, it is about the formation of character. So But once again, the argument, my thesis tonight, is that the end of education is to forge jealousable laborers who will carry and advance Christ-honoring culture. Real education is not a data dump. It’s not about the teacher just imparting information to a student or even skills to his students. Rather, it is about the shaping of students into certain kinds of people who will be able to carry and advance Christ-honoring culture.

curriculum and the pedagogy that is like the teaching methods themselves are tools in that shaping project. Just like the woodworker holds a lathe, so we hold math facts and the Odyssey and Latin chants and so on. There’s a world of difference, like a huge infinite almost difference between peddling ideologies and teaching somebody to think for himself. So telling him, in other words, what to think versus teaching him how to think. Pidea is not brainwashing. It’s enculturation. And an academic education is a huge part of it. What follows is the mission statement of Trinity Evangel Church. This is our mission statement.

We are laboring in joy to cultivate a Trinitarian community of worshipping, maturing disciples who acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord over all the world. Again, we are laboring in joy to cultivate a Trinitarian community of worshipping, maturing disciples who acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord over all the world. That is great and loaded and begs some questions. Let me start with just three quick ones. We’ll have more questions later on. I even gave you, there’s 50 of them, so some question sheets which you can doodle You can write your own questions or you can put one in the hopper for consideration in case I ask it of you in a little while from now. But one question is if we are laboring in joy, what exactly does that joyful labor look like?

Another question might be once it has actually been cultivated, what do the people comprising such a community look like? What do the people look like? A A third question might be then, where do people like this come from? And these are all the sorts of questions I want to consider as we’re discussing the end of education. What is the point? First, let me consider, if we are laboring in joy, what does that joyful labor look like? Well, I would suggest that it certainly involves joyful child rearing. The joyful labors of parents are essential in the development of such a community. And not just, I hesitate to use the word faithful because I would suggest that faithful child rearing must be itself joyful.

But faithful in the sense of continuing to be stalwart and show up and dependable. No, we need to go a step further than that and make our homes a delight and to make a place where our children want to be and our children want to be from, not because they want to leave but because they want to come back. It also involves joyful discipleship. Well, in fact, worshiping, maturing disciples are themselves disciples. It’s our joyful work to cultivate disciples of Christ and to do so as disciple makers ourselves. The older I get and the older my kids get, the more aware I am of how much discipleship happens in the in-between times.

Those car rides to school, those moments around the dinner table after all the food has been eaten and you’re just shooting the breeze. So much of it is as you are going and all the rest, but joyful discipleship. Laboring and joy also involves joyful and weekly corporate worship. And our disciple making assumes we make this a priority. We should work to make our times of corporate worship alluring for our kids. And not because there’s one illustration that was given by Pastor Rich Hamlin at the conference we were just at, was that America Evangelicalism is kind of like an old country buffet where the meat and potatoes section has been picked over and is slim now.

But the dessert section is robust. And so there’s a whole lot to offer that is a delight to the palate and of no real substantive, nutritional, spiritual value. And for our part, we want for our corporate worship to be a delight and not just because it’s cotton candy. To be a delight because it is satisfying. And laboring and joy must include joyful and careful education, which of course I’ll talk about more tonight. And then I asked what once it’s been cultivated. What do people comprising such community look like?

I’ll offer a few Identifiers among among them would be the following they love God If they’re mature worshiping maturing disciples, they’re disciples of Christ and lovers of God. They also love God’s Word The Word of God contains the information that we need to build a thriving society wherein people flourish and God is honored. If you had nothing about the Bible and you studied its principles and the teachings, the law of God, you could rebuild. You could rebuild. Our worshiping, maturing disciples must know and love the word of God. Also, they can speak and I do mean with their mouths. Though of course there are places for writing. Many people today speak only with their thumbs as they’re holding a smartphone. Being an effective and a winsome communicator involves nonverbal communication as well as words. Not only can they speak but they also have something to say. It’s because they know where they’ve come from, that they’re able to gauge where they’re going, and because they know those things, they understand the enemies and their opponents positions

perhaps better than they do themselves. They can reason. Reasoning and wisdom are cousins. Whether they learn it formally, as in from a logic class or a book, or informally, that’s not what my mom says, they are not easily bamboozled and they’re able to identify their own reasoning shortcomings as well as those around them. And last for now, they want to see. These disciples want to see the Lordship of Christ acknowledged in all the spheres. And that is because they love God and they know His Word, they know what is good. And it’s good for the world for Christ to be acknowledged as Lord overall. You get the idea, of course, there’s more. And I’ll get to some of those when I offer some suggestions for us collectively here in a little bit. But where do people like this come from? A community like this, like when we’re describing in our mission statement when it is fully realized, will have a degree of gravity of its It will draw people in and if people who are looking for something like that will find it

Or they’ll come if they can People who are looking for a community like that will come if they can find it. We’re not quite there yet It’s not like we are a destination where we have this this vortex for like-minded people We’re just drawing them in from four parts near and far You know, by God’s grace, if we continue, if we’re faithful and keep working, that gravity will intensify. But for now, we need to raise them up. If we want a community of worshiping, maturing disciples, at least for the present, we’re going to need to raise them up. And to do that, we must engage in real education, not the crippling counterfeit that is peddled by the state.

If we want to see our culture thriving under the Lordship of Christ, we need to raise up Christians who will operate faithfully in all those spheres. We need to give them an education that will give them the skills, the ability, and the interest in doing more than simply following orders. As important as that is, make no mistake, taking orders and flipping burgers are absolutely great and noble God-honoring work. I like burgers, and I’m glad there are people to flip them. It is good. But we would like to give them an education that will at least provide them an option to do more than this, if God should move them to do so.

They will be the best employees because they can do more than simply follow directions. They will be self-starters who can run the business. They will be free men. And they will require then a liberal education. And might I even add, a liberal arts education. And if this is a forging process, let me push an illustration just a little bit. I’m arguing that the end of education is to forge the jealousable laborers who will carry an advanced Christ-honoring culture. What does that forging look like? Well, the student, the pupil, is a lump of glowing red steel. The hammer is the curriculum, the anvil is the word of God, and the blacksmith is the attentive teacher who positions the steel against the immovable standard of God’s word and subjects the steel to blows of Latin grammar, math facts, spirited discussions, Bang, bang, bang.

The steel, though, is quickly cooling and hardening. So the blacksmith’s time is limited. When the steel is cooled, it’s no longer workable. And it then is placed in the forge once again to be heated to the proper temperature so it can be worked again. If I can push the illustration just a little bit further. The forge into which that, once again, hardened lump of steel is thrust, is corporate worship. The student is ready for his shaping once again by beholding Christ, locking arms with fellow believers, and submitting to God’s word. And then he undergoes the shaping process once again. Bang, bang, bang. This is all romantic enough, right?

Sounds simple. But it is often overlooked, especially in a lot of Christian school contexts. And it is part of why, for instance, the school that I’m a part of, we do only attempt to serve church families. Because if that student is not going back to the Forge week by week, what do we have? We’re banging against a horseshoe that’s already nailed to the horse’s foot. Since most educational efforts today, though, start from the wrong place, not surprisingly, they end up in the wrong place. Rather than looking at students as a, like into a lump of steel, that needs to be forged and shaped and molded, they look at them instead as more like empty vessels that need to be filled.

And if they are just empty vessels, then you can put anything in there. Rather than being an exercise, a muscle to be exercised, the brain is just a cup, as a word. And by then, the tireless work of the godless among us, and educational efforts like the one I just described, we’re losing culture. And we have instead very little to pass on to our children. So what are the features of the sort of education that we’re talking about here? What does it look like? What must we give our students? Let me offer a few suggestions regarding education in the negative world. These are some suggestions. If you wish to forge jealous of all laborers who will carry an advanced Christ-honoring culture, then here’s what I suggest.

wet their appetites. Which books make for the best discussions? Does Pride and Prejudice, romantic as it might be, have any more substance than a dime store novel or a harlequin romance? Is Percy Jackson an epic hero to rival Odysseus? Does Percy Jackson have his place? Sure. Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s actually pretty good for teaching kids mythology. But he’s not Odysseus, even if he does go into the underworld. I was going to say, is he a lycan to Polyphemus? Because they have the same dad. Right? They’re both Poseidon? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I’ll let you work that out. Many modern educators push young adult fictions just to get the kids reading something.

And how pathetic is that? Well, when we settle for easy because the only alternative is nothing, we have a loves problem. When we settle for easy because the only perceived alternative is nothing, we have a problem with loves. If you were to grow in them the right appetites, help them to love the right things, you give our students the keys of the kingdom. And they will no longer be satisfied with Dime Store novels and cotton candy going forward. They will be eating steak instead of drinking milk for the rest of their lives, if we can give them the right appetites. We must teach them to read the Bible.

As I mentioned earlier, the Bible is the handbook for Western civilization. It didn’t get here apart from Christian influence, which comes from the Bible. And if we would do what it says, we would do well. And we can build a society where humans flourish. And so many secularists today are themselves steeped in Judeo-Christian culture and customs and the rest that they can’t not think that way even though they hate it. They will use the categories that God has created to judge God and the rest. Truth is revealed both naturally and supernaturally. And we have it in the Word of God. If you study history, and not just Western history, you can see the examples of the potent influence of scripture.

And so it is silly to suppose that we can actually forge laborers who will carry an advanced Christ-honoring culture if they don’t know the Bible. They can’t do it. They may have some horsepower and nothing to push, nothing to pull. We must model for them lifelong learning. Learning is not over when you graduate, and neither is your education. Many of the students with the healthiest curiosity and appetite to learn have parents who modeled this for them. Conversely, many of us have been frustrated or even exasperated when our leaders, whether our parents or teachers or anyone else, have decided that they’ve arrived and they no longer need to keep on learning.

If you have a teacher who has taught, they said there’s a difference between teaching for 10 years and teaching the same thing, teaching the same year 10 times, you want your teachers to keep growing. And part of the reason for that is so that they can be effective teachers, a part of this is so that they can, so that they can properly model what it looks like to keep growing and to be lifelong learners. So be on the lookout for leaders who are committed to personal growth and follow their example. We must teach them to speak. In a culture where communication is terrible, we communicate and we do it terribly. We lie, we are uncharitable, and we’re just bad at it in just about every conceivable way.

In a culture where communication is terrible, those who have the ability to communicate effectively will emerge, and they’ll have the opportunity to lead and opportunity for influence. They will, in fact, be looked to to lead. Teach them to reason. If they can reason according to the truth, they’re less likely to be deceived. And if it’s according to the truth, they’re less likely to be deceptive themselves. Help them to see what they have.

Help them to see rightly what they have. Maybe if you want for your students to understand how privileged they are perhaps, give them a taste or a look at what it would be like if they didn’t have it. That’s a great way to grow gratefulness. Teach them to sing. Didn’t think I was going to go there, did you? This one may have been a bit of a surprise, but humor me. Singing is counter-cultural. I mean, our culture likes music, yet we idolize musical icons. And the quality of music that they’re actually producing is low, so our collective standards are low. But beyond that, in the Christian community, singing has particular benefits.

Singing is a great tool for learning and internalizing the truths of God. I don’t know how many times I’ve sung Psalm 68, but I probably could do the first six verses that we sang tonight without music with probably 70% accuracy. And not because I’ve worked at it, but through some reps. And is that not a pretty good thing to memorize whether accidentally or intentionally? Immerse them in good things and teach them to sing. Singing and worship is an act of warfare. God shall arise and by his might put all his enemies to flight. And doing so skillfully is better than doing so without skill and don’t call me a bigot.

Singing skillfully is better than singing badly. It just is. But if you’ve got no skills, sing anyway. And then get some skills. And we can help. But also singers are happier people, and they’re harder to defeat. Likewise, don’t just teach them to sing, train them to laugh. I’m saying train because most people know how to laugh, but they don’t do it. So train them when, why, to laugh. The world is full of very serious people with very serious problems. What is a short supply are people who can laugh in the face of adversity because they’re able to rest in the providence of God, namely, the reality that the world is ordered by a sovereign and good God who is for us.

And people who can laugh at the right times and for the right reasons are not just hard to beat, but they’re also compelling. So those are things that are worth pursuing, some suggestions that I have. And none of those is unique to one particular educational model. Those relate to, on a very high level, the sorts of people, the sort of program that will produce people who can carry an advanced Christ-honoring culture. And I can finish them with an actual proposal. This may land as actually discouraging, if you’re thinking, well then, how on earth would we do that? Is there an educational model or a curriculum that provides this?

Well, yes, and it’s closer than you think. I personally am a fan of classical and Christian education. so much so that I’m subjecting my own kids to it. And of course at an Evangel classical school we’re far from perfect, but the suggestions that I’ve listed are our actual aims. Like we think about and talk about these things.

Probably more than we talk about curriculum proper. We wish to offer a robust academic education as an ingredient in our culture shaping work among our students. It involves lots and lots of grammar, logic, rhetoric, singing, and laughter. Sure. But you also don’t need a school to do this. You need time, lots and lots and lots of time, and a kitchen table. You can absolutely homeschool with some dedicated ambition. But be encouraged, because far from reinventing the wheel, you just need to do something that was used before it was abandoned about 150 years ago. Methods used by generations of saints until they didn’t.

And so it is at your fingertips. It’s not hard to find your hands on these resources. But remember, the end of education, at the end of all of this, the end of education is to forge jealousable laborers who can carry and advance Christ-honoring culture. But then may God make that a reality among us. So let me pray and then we’re gonna ask some questions. Father, we pray for your grace and we need this. We want to do right by our kids, to be sure. And many of us are really ill equipped to do so. But we’re also grateful that you cover the gap of grace when we try to be faithful. So help us, then, to do that, to keep showing up and to be marked by joy in all of our efforts as we try to raise up such laborers.

So thank you. give us some even good, spirited conversation as we entertain these things together. We pray in Christ’s name, amen. Okay, so I have a microphone, and Shawn’s got his running shoes on. What sorts of questions do you have? And you are welcome to ask any of the ones that I handed out, or anything else that I can answer, or one of the other elders. What are some of your favorite stories to teach things through? What are some of my favorite stories to teach things through? Well, I mean, I’m not sure why the first one to jump to my mind is actually, my favorite movie is It’s a Wonderful Life. And It’s a Wonderful Life in the Family Man are two movies that actually use an idea that was, as far as I’m aware, first penned by Charles Dickens.

And I love A Christmas Carol for the same reason. But part of the reason, so I mean Scrooge is a, I hope you can see the connection there by the way, right? With Christmas Carol and so Dickens and then It’s Wonderful Life. Part of the reason why I like him is because he’s a jerk, but he’s a relatable character. He is absolutely sympathetic character and so is George Bailey. And for that matter, so is Elizabeth Bennet. So, you know, I like the stories where the characters are very well developed. And then if they’re well developed characters, then that, we do talk about this a lot, you know, flat versus round characters.

The ones that are the most relatable, sympathetic characters are the ones that actually sin. and then they grow and then the lessons that they learn are instructive for us, which is wisdom. So wisdom will learn from the example of others as readily as from experience. Experience is a very effective but cruel teacher, but part of the benefit of reading good fiction is that you can actually learn from the hard knocks, the lessons of made up people.

So I could rattle off a few. Then I do like, I actually, this is, I don’t know if there’s any really well developed characters in the Iliad, but I sure like that one. That’s a Homeric epic, so epic by Homer, that is chronologically before the Odyssey, but it’s a less accessible book, but man, it’s a good fun. What else? Yeah, I mean, those are a couple of that come to mind immediately. Ian, did you have a question? Yeah.

What would you say, what’s an element that is missing in just, let’s say, the average vanilla Christian education in America, like not in a specific vein necessarily, but as a whole, you’ve rubbed shoulders with many different organizations through the years. What would you say? It’s going to sound really uncharitable, I’m about to say, but it is lip service to the Christian part. So a lot of Christian schools today are sanctuaries from bullying. They’re schools that have an identical curriculum to the public schools that are across the street with Bible class added on. So some of the very best of them integrate the Bible into the curriculum, but it’s still integrated.

That is very different from teaching everything Christianly. So Doug Wilson has hopefully articulated it like this. Classical and Christian academies teach all the subjects as an integrated whole with the scriptures at the center. So our starting point is the word of God. And all of what we are trying to learn about the world that he has made is instructive because he made it. And like even the scientific revolution was born out of the idea that the laws that govern the universe are consistent and knowable because God is. Therefore, our task, the task is for us to discover those and learn about what God has made.

when a lot of incredible discoveries were made. That is very different from insisting that God does not exist, but there are laws of thermodynamics. Like, how does that work? That is wrong-headed. Or that two and two are for empirically. But why? Why? Why is that way every time?

You know, looking at all of history as the unfolding of God’s plan, then when you have those goggles on, you can rightly see it. And when you look at it as just as happenstance or the outcomes of men’s decisions, then it is like trying to appreciate a flower while thinking that instead of it being designed, It just happened.

History didn’t just happen. It doesn’t continue to just happen. God is doing it. So, blah, blah, blah. So it is actually a fundamental difference to have your starting point be the word of God versus having this subject is okay in its own right, this subject is good, this subject, and let’s put Bible verses on all of them. Because what you see is no problem. I can take that information and import it to university, and then I will take the Bible verses off. Because they didn’t need to be there in the first place. And then what do you have? You have people who are abandoning the faith before they receive their first worthless university report card.

So, I’ve actually seen that a lot and the product is bad. The best numbers are 75% apostasy. When people leave Christian schools and go off to secular universities, it’s probably closer to 90%. that, but yeah. So you brought up things like shooting the breeze after dinner or driving to and from school and having those in between, you know, as you walk by the way moments. What are your thoughts or ideas or even necessary talks that you would either intentionally have or ones that come up naturally that you think would be good for all parents to educate their kids in? Well, I would say a few things. Most of it comes up organically as, for one thing, listen to your kids.

So when they are talking, in my position, I remind myself often that people are the work, are on interruption to it. Well, in your parenting work, your children are not interruption. In your parenting work, your children are not interruption to your parenting work. So when they talk, listen. And you are going to get plenty of material to work with. I don’t, I mean, I very rarely, maybe my kids would contradict me or they’re welcome to. I don’t have very many agendas when I sit down with them. We sit down and what comes up actually provides plenty of material for navigating life. And it is, I mean, a lot of it’s school related.

OK, so this happened in the hallways. And then this teacher said this. And I didn’t know. I thought that was really, really interesting. What do you think, Dad? Or I wasn’t sure what he meant by blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, or even this afternoon it was Abby and Aquinas and what? Is he actually saying right here so that I can try and distill it?

Just making sure she understands the syntax of a sentence or You know they they hear conversations in the hallways or on the playground and You know, what do you think I should have said Well, what did you say? That was pretty good. I would that was fine or well, did you think about this? Oh, yeah, that would have been really good You know, so anyway, um, if you’re attentive to it and you’re happy to be interrupted, which again is not an interruption to this point, then you don’t, I don’t think you need to manufacture any of it. But manufacturing is totally worthwhile. Go on dates with your kids. Plan for unhurtied dinner time conversations.

And for the SAR family, we do our lows and highs at the end of the day without fail. With Weber’s presence, sometimes Ellie’s working late or whatever, but she’s 19 and still wants to do it. And so we come together and it means that we get to bed later than which is already late. And I have lost weeks worth of sleep over the last 19 years of doing this. And I’ll never get it back. And I never needed it in the first place. It is okay. Because what we get back in that, which is also informal and unstructured and something that they can depend upon.

They know that that time is coming and we’re going to get at least one touch point every night to hear what a maybe a low point of the day and a high point was for all of them and it’s never boom boom boom next boom boom boom next it’s more oh man guess what happened today so does that answer question at all yeah good all right how would you answer number nine number nine what do you say to a Christian who wants his children to be salt and light in the public schools It’s a failed experiment. That’s what I say. Okay, we’ve been trying that, we’ve been trying that gig for two generations now. And what have the results yielded?

They’ve yielded Christian kids who become like the world, not Christian kids who are able to actually have a potent influence in the world before they’re trained. So it is, is it, can Christian kids survive the public schools? Well sure, but I mean you can all survive a train wreck if you go and engage in one. I mean, maybe, but maybe not. And the odds are stacked against them. So I am very fond of likening the sort of training that our students are receiving as like boot camp. And when you send new recruits to the front lines and skip boot camp, I mean sheep to wolves, yeah, they might survive, but their odds are slim.

It’s hard when they’re fully trained. And that is precisely what we’re doing with a lot of our Christian kids when we insisted, okay, go out there and be salt and light. I know you have not been trained and you’re not ready for this, but you’ll figure it out.

or we’ll be here to help coach you through it around the dinner table and try, and we’ll be here to undo the work that your teacher did in the classroom and and give you encouragement when you know when you’re frustrated that all your friends are not believers yet. Yeah it is so I would say I would say a lot of things that among them it’s that’s failed experiment and there is absolutely a place for, I mean, call them what you want, raiding parties, sticking your toe outside the wire, whatever. I think, I love it when like the students of ECS engage in community sports, when they go play sports at other schools, when they are involved in clubs and you know whatever, from jiu-jitsu to dance to soccer to whatever, where they get an opportunity to export their lives for a little bit and then they get lots of input then they go back to the dinner table and they’re like okay this what the girls sit in the locker room mom and I did I didn’t know how to respond when she was bragging about sleeping with

her boyfriend so I so I was just really quiet what should I have done you know, we there there are hypotheticals that can come when you read a book and then there are then there are opportunities or so mom this uh you know my friend Jenny that I was talking to you about she was bragging about sleeping with her boyfriend I told her that’s really dumb and she said what do you mean it’s dumb and so we I don’t know my heart was beating really fast we had a we had a good conversation and blah blah blah so I mean that’s great That is different from doing that full-time without any training. So we’re trying to actually give some training for doing that when their training is complete, or even as it’s being completed, but sending them out there, sending them into machine gun fire without a bulletproof vest.

Which probably won’t stop machine gun round anyway. Yeah, that’s a failed experiment. Yeah, so then a follow up to that is, when is someone fully trained? So is that after they graduate high school? Because we’ve talked about what we want college education to look like, and how once again, some people survive that if they’re looking for something specific, but then generally, I would say you guys advise people to go to a Christian college. And so then when they graduate college, then are they just to have, I mean, maybe you’d say that the protection, the support bubble or supports, you need less of it, but you always need it.

What does that look like? When are you fully trained or are you never, I mean, you’d probably say you’re never going to survive well on your own if you’re in isolation with everyone against you? Like what does that look like? Yeah, it is different for every person. There is a time when their training at our school, for instance, comes to a close, but that doesn’t mean they’re fully trained. Just because they leave the school doesn’t mean they’re done. And we talked about the value of modeling for our young people, lifelong learning. So there’s a sense in which we’ll want to keep being trained and keep growing as long as we’re alive.

But when is a person ready to go and engage the culture without the support of his parents or his teachers? And that is different for every person, and it takes wisdom to know when it is. But generally speaking, it kind of happens by default when a person leaves home. So that is. But even then, remember too that the New Testament presupposes mutual dependence, not independence. So even then, the expectation is that you’ll return to the pale of the church, at least on a weekly basis, and be reoriented, recalibrated, and reenergized. So that support shifts from the parents to just the church community, but it never stops.

That support never stops. But when is a person fully trained? Yeah, that depends on the person. That’s a non-helpful answer, but when’s the age of accountability? Is a good Christian education necessarily rigorous for the student, whether they’re receiving their education at home or at a school? Does it have to be academically rigorous for every student if they want to grow? Yes, so It can be loosey-goosey and soft But you will get the results that you would expect from a loosey-goosey and soft Educational experience if you do so it is like so many things you’ll get out of it what you put in but if we I mean, I just really don’t want to think about a loosey-goosey soft and comfortable bootcamp experience for the people who are supposed to be protecting us.

Like, I hope that they’re being handled roughly and they’re working with live rounds and it is absolutely in a safe environment by people who love them. Are handling them roughly because they love them because the next people who are going to handle them roughly don’t. So yes, it has to be rigorous if it is going to be worthwhile or effective. But rigor is not as consistently fun as easy, and that is true. But man, is it satisfying. You think about what’s more satisfying? Gutting through a hard workout that you wanted to stop 10% in, but you did the whole thing anyway. a casual walk. Which is more satisfying? Both have their place and both are absolutely better than nothing. But the more rigorous, the more it actually prepares for that, prepares them to do hard things going forward and the more fruit you expect for that to yield. Those last two questions are great. It’s fired off all kinds of ideas in my head. So this will be a little bit jumbled, but hopefully add to the discussion.

Regarding how best to educate your child, what options are out there, we got to remember that as parents, we are called to train our children in the pidea of the Lord, which is a very large bucket of things to educate them. And it’s, you know, modern education is just focused on a very tiny piece of the pidea. It’s just the read, read, and arithmetic. if you’re old school like I was, raised that kind of a school. And so as you think about what that’s involved in that, and certainly Christian training in the faith is a major component of that. When I look at the options out there available to me, sadly, the public education system has become a little bit more of a case of dumpster diving.

I can walk by any random dumpster and probably find something useful and good in there. But how much garbage do I have to wade through to get to that? You know, it’s maybe a little bit of a harsh critique of it, but I think it’s not too far off the mark of what’s happened to our public education system. And so you really are gambling that your kid is going to walk out of there with something useful. Maybe he’ll get a job with what they learn, but what kind of garbage will they also have been exposed to? And why would I expose my kid to the garbage looking for a little bit of good when there’s so many other better options out there, including homeschooling.

And Maggie, remind me again your question was… Yeah, so go back to even our purpose statement in the school. Part of it is to carry and advance Christ-honoring culture. And I would suggest that to do that, especially to advance, We have to have better ideas than the world has. And we know we do. We know the Word of God gives us better answers. But if we’re not well versed in those answers and also well versed in the world’s ideas, we’re competing with their ideas. So there’s a real need. And this recent conference we went to, one of the themes they really beat was in many cases, Christians cannot really compete intellectually with the sharpest thinkers of the world.

And to be able to play in that arena, to be able to speak to that, we have to be able to become much more intellectual. And I’m not putting all of my marbles in that bag just because we might be the smartest people in the room, it’s not gonna win the spiritual war. But it certainly is a component of what it would mean, I think, to advance Christ on our culture, is that we come up with the better ideas, the better logic, the better reasons. But that also means we need to know the history of the past, all the big ideas, what worked, what didn’t work, why it doesn’t work, and again, come up with better ideas. So I think it is important to the best of that student’s ability that they become as highly educated as they can be, and not just simply say, I know all my Bible verses, And that’s good enough, and I’m going to go to heaven.

So as somebody who is, I have come out of a classical education, and I’m continuing it at comfort. But I got to go to the teacher training that a bunch of the teachers from ECS, I think all the teachers from ECS got to go to. One of the obvious factors of the people that were there there was a lot of women and the men that were there, a lot of them felt kind of soft or very obviously were soft men rather than seeming masculine. And there is kind of a stereotype within education now where the men are soft. It’s kind of weak. But since Since there is still good education happening in certain places, that means that the men who run their families are sending their children to those places.

But why are none of the men teaching? Obviously it’s not none, but the majority seems to be women. Our school is blessed with a lot of male teachers and women have their place in teaching, But it seems like there’s a strange lack of men of any age who want to teach. There are a lot of college professors. I feel like there’s the grouchy old man stereotype of a college professor. And I don’t think that that’s what we’re shooting for either. And obviously jobs are harder and harder to come by that help you support a family in an environment that’s not super-indusive to cheap living. So I can see why maybe money is important.

But why do you think that’s, is that a problem? Why do you think it’s a problem, and how do we fix that? That’s a really good question. And there’s a lot to it. It’s not putting too fine a point on it to say, I guess I’ll just start with the last piece. We fix it by charging more money. There is a dearth of male educators, particularly in private schools, because they have to provide for their families. And what a lot of private schools are able to pay cannot compete with the prevailing wages outside of education. The typical teacher in the public sector makes more money than a typical teacher in the private sector.

And then there are, of course, outliers. You know, there are prep schools where they charge $20,000 to $40,000 a year for tuition. those have a higher percentage of male teachers. I mean, look at the stats. So some of it is because they can’t afford, like men who provide for families who are the, I mean, the ideal teaching candidates, like the ones you’d want investing in your children, can’t afford to do it. And those who are, more often than not, making a tremendous sacrifice to do so. So when you can find them, that is actually really awesome to see because you know that they are giving a lot to be there. Then a fair question to ask is, what is it about, I mean like at ECS, 50% of our teachers are men and that is like off the charts, awesome, different from the norm.

And they could make more money doing other things, but are choosing to lock ours with us and be spent here. And I like to think that that is because there is something they believe in that they are willing to make those sacrifices as a family in order to advance the mission with us where we are. That is not something, that’s a kindness from the Lord to our school, and it is not something that is a characteristic of a lot of schools, and you were witness to that.

So again, it’s just a kindness. Then what happens is it, is when the schools are predominantly led and run by women, then it not surprisingly cultivates an environment that men are less inclined to want to be excited, or are excited to be a part of. So at the risk of sounding uncharitable, I think that is the situation. So did I hit all three parts of your question? Yeah. And so, but then how do you fix that? And why is it so pervasive? Because collectively if our schools charged what it would take to attract male teachers in the numbers that we would like to see for the sake of cultural transformation, We just need to charge a lot more money.

And culturally, we’re not that invested in education. Far more attractive is the free option, which of course, he knows anything but free. It’s very costly. And if we were, I mean, man, if we were getting what Marysville Piltchite gets per kid, we wouldn’t be in this building. One more follow up to that. So there are entrepreneurs in our community, which that also takes a lot of time. But if you’re entrepreneurial-minded and your idea pans out and it works, and you make money but you’re still busy doing that, do you see a way where, okay, because I agree also that we would lose a lot of families. I mean, we lost some families having to raise our tuition and we’re still way underneath the next guy.

But if we kept it where it was at, is there a way for you to be a business owner who’s busy doing that and also be busy doing teaching? Probably not full time, but part time teaching while being an entrepreneur without killing yourself, Because a lot of the people who are who have spearheaded a lot of things in our community Are dying to self sometimes physically Which To one degree where I’m super thankful for and I’m looking to see how I can fix that for a bunch of them So what are your thoughts on that? When that dying to self happens that is that yields fruit. We know that that’s straight gospel and And that is the sort of thing that God loves to bless.

When it is costly, then it is fruitful. But yeah, we are fortunate here to have some of our part time teachers have. So your grandfather runs a business in San Diego and comes in every day and teaches logic. Mr. Vanderbeck has a remodeling business. He comes in on Wednesdays and teaches art. I can go on. So we’ve got some part-timers who are busy with small businesses and then they come in.

That is good, but you have to have just the right kind of people in order to have them being busy elsewhere, being fruitful and faithful elsewhere and then coming in here without any sort of dissolution of the local culture that you’re trying to cultivate here. So one of the things that is, So we particularly depend on our full-timers for sake of a lot of the cultural things we’re trying to create as a school that give it the right kind of gravity, that it make it the right sort of, you know, tea water for the students to be steeped in. And it absolutely can be done when you strategically bring in the right part-timers from outside.

Some of our profound cultural influencers as a teaching staff do not teach with us full time. Mr. Giddings isn’t here all the time. Mr. Olson, your dad’s not here all the time. But generally speaking, if you have some people, if you have a core group of people who are able to devote 100 percent of their professional attention this direction, you can do a lot with that. You’ve got to have that core group in order to have the right kind of momentum and stability. So entrepreneurs So let’s go the other way with it If you had a full if you if you populated, you know Like like the Nike store over at the Outland Mall does they they have all they have like maybe three or four full-time people and their managers all the rest of the labors are part-time and they can save money on You know benefits and all the rest by paying part-timers you could do that with a school in your culture would look like it It would look like a piecemeal group of Christians who may or may not be on the same page.

It’s hard enough, and I love our teachers, and it’s hard enough to keep everybody on the same page, just knowing what’s happening tomorrow. How much more so having been on the same page philosophically and from a mission standpoint. So it can be done, but it has to be the right people and it’s hard, but it can be done.

Yes ma’am. Okay, so what she said is that school choice would be a solution for at least part of the problem the ECS faces. By school choice you mean like a voucher system? Well, so yeah, vouchers are basically feeling like maybe a tax credit or something. I would say yes and no because even even there, well I mean I guess if the numbers actually drove it, if you know in their benevolence the state allows you to spend up to $4,000 of your own would-be tax dollars toward the education of your own children. Would that help? A lot? Yeah, yeah it would. Would that fix everything? I don’t know. Would it be better than what we have now? Most certainly. Yes, Brent? Sorry, the microphone’s coming. Here you go. So, um, studying independently, right? Reading history, theological, theological history, just any, well history, a lot of that, well let’s take that for instance, right?

Church history, reading stuff from other points of views, some not exactly to based, right? What’s a great way to stay based in sound theology while also reading history and backgrounds from people who have important history, but not the most. That’s a good question. So reading, yeah, like what resources are safe?

And it takes the simple answers. It takes wisdom. I think reading broadly, you’ll get a pretty good idea. Like when the hairs go up in the back of your neck, like something doesn’t sit right. And if you read broadly enough, then you’ll see what squares with reality and what you understand about scripture. So of course, reading, being well versed in the Bible will then tune you to be able to discern truth and error. But yeah, it is a good question. So then it comes down to, I’m fond of recommendations from people that I trust, people who are versed in history and well-read say, hey, I think you’d enjoy this one. And I usually find that my book list is pretty long on things I haven’t read yet, just with things that people that I know and respect are recommending.

Not about you, but I’m hardly ever looking for something to read. All right, Mr. Harsh. Am I the last one? Oh, OK. Two quick thoughts, based on what Brent just said, the idea of a bank teller handling as much legit currency so as to be able to detect a foreign article, I think is definitely a good paradigm in terms of reading obviously God’s word and then seeing how something else would square with it. Another thing, years ago, I think 10 years ago, when we were checking out the school, you may or may not remember this conversation, but I saw a Mein Kampf on a desk and I said, what is that doing here?

And you just said the most poignant, response. You said, well we believe Hitler discredits himself by his own hand way better than any of us could. So sometimes you kind of got to let it play out in the light of Scripture, right? So like this idea of being steeped in Scripture, being steeped in culture, bringing these ideas and these books into the conversation carefully, but then evaluating them in what I consider to be a safe forum where we’re all sharing the same worldview because, you know, as the movie Inception says, you know, an idea is like a virus. You know what I mean? Like, you gotta be careful with ideas, obviously, right?

But like this idea of just basically saying, hey, this completely falls apart, let’s talk about why. Let’s talk about why it is not in line with scripture, but let’s engage with the text, rather than, well, that was written by a secular author, so we can’t give it any credibility. You know what I mean? Like, because God totally moves and uses who he may. So, anyway, not so much a question, just an affirmation of what you were just saying, Anna, thank you. Do you remember that conversation by the way? I do remember it. You do? OK. Yeah, because didn’t you, I think you visited, we were doing presentations on concentration camps, didn’t you?

You have an incredible memory. Yes, I did. Yes. That was like the year that the ban on Mein Kampf had been lifted in Germany. And that’s why I was so amazed to see it in print at the school. Yeah. It wasn’t banned in the US, it was banned in Germany. But yeah. Yeah. I do remember that. You drawed my memory, I had forgotten that. So it’s just that the idea that he would discredit himself, the more he speaks, the worse it gets. Yeah, he’s crazy.

When you read it, he’s like, wow. Okay. Yes. Well, minecomf doesn’t mean my struggle, but I don’t think it’s what, yeah, so good. So good, I wanna give this to Pastor Sean. Unless, yeah. Or we can just, where you stand and seeing doxology and go home. Okay. All right, Ellie.