School Choice: An Inalienable Right

Throughout the book of Proverbs, we are reminded of God’s view and purpose of education:

“Give instruction to a wise man and he will be still wiser,

Teach a righteous man and he will increase his learning.

Train up a child in the way he should go,

Even when he is old he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 9:9, 22:6 NASB).

For decades after our country’s founding, public education was virtually Judeo-Christian. With few exceptions, America’s earliest universities were closely associated with a faith group and were typically run by ministers from that denomination.  In fact, by 1860, 262 out of 288 college presidents were ministers of the Gospel— as were more than a third of all university faculty members.  Only seventeen colleges and universities at that time were state institutions. But even the state schools were not secular ... and others had self-declared purposes of Christian education and the inculcation of Christian character— over 90 percent conducted chapel services; at half of them, chapel attendance was compulsory; and a quarter of them even required regular church attendance in addition to chapel attendance.

But now as our country has sought to secularize education, parents are being removed from the decision process and children are being delegated to schools by zip code.  This secularization of education is, in the words of the late Billy Graham, “stumbling and floundering.”

Remembered as the “Father of Public Schools Under the Constitution,” Benjamin Rush observed:

“There is the most knowledge in those countries where there is the most Christianity … The only means of establishing and perpetuating our republican forms of government is the universal education of our youth in the principles of Christianity by means of the Bible.”

While returning our public education to Judeo-Christian values may be a foregone conclusion, the opportunity for families to choose their own form of education is not.  

Therefore, let us “bring [children] up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4 NASB).  As God commanded through Moses:

“These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart.  You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up” (Deuteronomy 6:6-7 NASB).

 

Rev. Dr. Kenneth L. Beale, Jr.

Chaplain (Colonel-Ret), U.S. Army

Pastor, Ft. Snelling Memorial Chapel