Pajama Day. Skateboard Day. Athletic rallies. Just how do we teach students to grow up when we insist they act like fifth graders? Why was my public school experience decades ago so much more educational, so much better at teaching us to become young men and women, than the nonclassical Christian school experience of today? Sure, the public schools taught us evolution, but the real secular humanism of public schooling had not yet reached the magnitude it is today. And my town was a nice neighborhood, so we did not have the violence of the inner city schools.
During my first time teaching in a Christian school, I had wished they would have put the education back into Christian education. The pastor of the church ran the school because no one else would. It was his church, and he was stuck with the job of principal. Perhaps the majority of Christian schools these days are not run by churches; I do not have the statistics. But returning to teaching Christian school over 20 years later, I began to wish that they would put the Christian back into Christian education. Bob Jones University Press books and church-attending teachers are not enough to make a school truly Christian or to make it truly a school.
During that latter time, I heard how much better behaved and how much better the students were doing in some of the local public schools than in two of the schools in which I was teaching. This was not a unanimous opinion, but for it to be expressed at all revealed weakness in those particular Christian schools. And try talking to the administration or the board about this! They give lip service, but applying high academic and behavioral standards is career suicide. The parents are split on what they want. Some want academic and behavioral disciple, but there is a vocal group of complainers who does not. Christian schools are generally better than public schools, but they seem to be increasingly steeped in secular humanism, despite their use of Christian curricula. Discipline can be a joke. I do not mean beating the students, but a teacher was not even able to give out detention in one school where I taught, as discipline was the responsibility of the deans. I have had plenty of e?mails and one-on-one conversations to show me that this is a problem all over the country.
But the worst thing I have seen in Christian schools has been the lack of backbone the administrators have in dealing with disgruntled parents. The rule that a parent should go to the teacher first, and to the administration afterwards if a problem is not resolved, seems seldom enforced. It takes courage to tell parents, “Don’t come to me unless you’ve talked to the teacher first.” Instead, parents are treated like paying customers who need to be satisfied. Then there is the factor of the plethora of Christian schools which contribute to keep these schools too small. One parent pulling out a child or two can make next month’s payroll hard to meet, especially in a school where the administration is asking teachers to help figure out how to be able to afford trash liners when the current supply runs out.
Administrators sometimes defend their teachers, as they have done with me at times, but the parents write the checks, so they can exert tremendous pressure. I have heard too many times that “parents vote for us at the end of the month with their checkbooks”. So how many bosses does a teacher have? Who is really running the school? And are they really qualified to do so? Even if parents are well-educated, they can hardly be objective when it comes to their own children. That is one of the reasons that schools exist: to give children the opportunity to be socialized outside of the home. I have no problem with home-schooling or with home-schooling co-ops, but if the child is in an institutional school, the teacher cannot change teaching methods and classroom behavioral standards for each set of parents. Tutors are a great asset to home-schooling programs, but parents need to either home-school or let the teachers teach in peace. It is one way or the other. Parents cannot home-school through institutional teachers, unless the teachers are “monitors” who can supervise multi-grade classrooms with students working in various home-schooling systems. Except in very small classes, teachers who conduct lectures and give the same tests to all their students simply have too many students with different needs to accommodate every student.