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We must do more than rail against guideless education. We must identify a distinctively Christian curriculum--one that takes its identity, its motion from the reality of our redeemed condition--one that begins with the authority of the risen Christ speaking through His Word. It is not enough to know what we are against; we must know what we are for. Dismantling the world is one work; building the kingdom is another. If we fail to make a positive contribution to education, if we keep the same old public-school agenda packaged in Christian dress, our children will not prosper as they should. Without fundamental changes, we are only straining at a gnat while we are swallowing a camel. We cannot let the wolf of anti-Christian values in just because he is wearing sheep's clothing.

The task of re-examining our beliefs and attitudes about education is particularly difficult. We have to somehow rise above the culture and the age we live in. We need to point out what the philosopher Herman Duevy Reed called an Arkemenian Point, something that transcends our own insight and experience. We have this point in Holy Scripture. As regards education, the Scriptures have barely been touched. That is the task before us.

The question of education cuts across the whole field of human experience: the way we see our world, the values we hold important, the skills we deem necessary, our view of the past, the present, and the future. All these and more are made or developed by our education and educational assumptions. Education is one of the basic contours of the fabric of our lives.

How do we proceed to forge a distinctively Christian format? Because education is the sole foundation of our culture, even our spiritual life, we fear to take a step until we can see the end of the road. Considering the inter-relatedness of knowledge, one step in a new direction is truly the beginning of a journey. We would like, for security's sake, to put life on hold until we have everything figured out; but life doesn't stop, does it? The children continue to grow up.

Life is a process of learning. Some things we learn at home, and some things we learn at school. Some things we learn on purpose, others by accident. Some things we learn to our benefit, others nearly kill us. But the stream of life, the tour of learning moves on. Having been granted the role of dominion over this earth, which is the crown of our nature, and having been blessed in this role, we now have the right and the power to take hold of this stream of learning and turn it this way or that. We cannot have absolute control?we are not gods?but we can have much control, and we are responsible for that much. That portion of our learning that we can take in our hands we must turn (for the survival of our children) in the right direction. We desire to teach our children the pure truth that, in the whole, beckons us from beyond, but we experience an inability to start the learning process until we are sure what know-how pushes us from behind. We are between the anvil and the hammer, a perfect place, though a painful one, to forge a Christian Philosophy for Education.

Today, tomorrow, and the day following, our children will be learning. Will you be teaching them? Will you be teaching them correctly? You may think if parents had any suspicion of being on the wrong road, we would just pull over, take out the road map, and get our bearings; but it doesn't work that way, it can't work that way. We have the gut feeling that even wrong school is preferable to no school. (Even the state feels this way. That's why it tolerates private schools!) It is not only learning but the very form of learning that is inevitable. Ask the truant officer. The whole weight of the western tradition and the democratic process is behind the inevitable schooling process. So is our conscience.

But stop or not, there is a lot of wrong schooling out there. The whole post-traditional humanist experiment is a fizzle. No one has to kill it; it's committing suicide. Man cannot accept complete secularization.

The reaction against modernist educational failure gives birth to an interest in "traditional" schooling, but which tradition? The modern educational failures should turn us back?back to a biblical model of education.

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