Ben

Education in the New World

November 17, 2015 by Ben

I remember my parents being criticized by many family members for taking us out of the public schools. But just like thousands of other Christian families today, my parents didn’t want their kids influenced by the agenda of modern society. Today’s exodus of Christian families from the secular public schools is reminiscent of another pilgrimage.

When the Pilgrims came to America, they left Europe so that they could be the primary influence on their own children. It was a difficult first year, but the Lord provided. As they offered up thanksgiving, other deeply committed Christians who wanted the same opportunity for their children started pilgrimages to North America. Soon other communities popped up in the Massachusetts Bay Colony with the intent of establishing “a city on a hill.” These parents wanted to be governed by God’s law and to train their children to live the same way. It was their desire that future townships could be shining examples of communities committed to serving God.

Committed to Education

These Puritan parents and leaders were committed to godly learning. They believed that reading was critical to knowing God through His Word and to following the laws of their townships. So parents took the time to teach their children how to read in spite of the difficulties of frontier life.

However, the commitment to education began to diminish within twenty-five years. Parents were beginning to be negligent in teaching their children reading and Christian doctrine. So in 1642, the Puritan leaders in the Massachusetts Bay Colony gathered to establish a law requiring that parents teach their children to read and “that all masters of families do once a week (at the least) catechize their children . . . in the grounds & principles of Religion.” [text of Massachusetts Act of 1642]

More Challenges

Five years later, the Puritan leaders gathered again and outlined a plan to provide assistance to parents for the education of their children. They believed that “one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, [was] to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures” by preventing children from learning to read. [text of Massachusetts 1647 “Old Deluder, Satan” Act]

So the Puritans provided a teacher for every township with fifty families to help them in teaching their children to read and write. If the township had a hundred families, they made provision for constructing a school building. Parents made a nominal contribution to pay the salaries of the teachers, but they were still responsible for their children’s education. All of this learning was motivated by a desire that children know the Lord through reading His Word.

Startling Changes

Imagine what the Puritans would think if they walked through the halls of today’s schools. How would they respond to the discovery that education has been ripped from its intended purpose—service to God? I think the Puritans would do what many Christian parents are doing today and take their children away from the evil influences. After all, they were willing to take their families into the wilderness of Massachusetts to give their children a thoroughly Christian education.

But even after that arduous journey, Puritan parents still faced challenges in providing education for their children. Yet they were willing to make the sacrifices they believed were necessary to ensure their children received that biblical education.

Providing our children with Bible-based education is vital, and BJU Press supports families like yours and mine in making this kind of commitment to Christian education by creating textbooks that present every academic subject and every aspect of life through the lens of what God has to say about it.

Are you ready to make the commitment?

Serving God and Studying Salamanders

November 5, 2015 by Ben

After we finished family worship, my wife asked me to work with our first grader on a science project. The assignment, from the BJU Press Science 1 Teacher’s Edition (page 92) instructed her to make an informative poster about a wild animal. The week before, we’d found a salamander on a camping trip, so my daughter wanted to do a project on salamanders. She’d gotten a couple of books from the library, and we set out to find a few pictures.

I must confess that it was easy for me to fall into the trap of secularism that evening. Instead of remembering that God is relevant in all areas of life, I initially bought into the idea that this activity could be approached without involving Him.

It seems to me that Christians too often buy into this secular approach. We think certain activities are holy service to God, such as our family worship time, church attendance, or personal devotions. Other activities, such as cooking and cleaning, marketing, or finance are things we have to get through. They aren’t service to God. They have to be done, and we should obey God while we do them, but there isn’t a “Christian” way to do them.

The image in this blog post helps me understand this wrong way of thinking. The first story of the “house” is a typical suburban home. The second story is a church. Everything in the top story is “redeemable.” Everything in the bottom is “unredeemable.” Sometimes we wrongly assume that the people who work on the upper floor in “full-time Christian service” are doing God’s work and the rest of us working down on the lower floor are second-class Christians who only serve the Lord when we participate in spiritual tasks.

But God doesn’t teach this way of thinking, secularism does. God says that everything belongs to Him, and He has something to say about it.

As I helped my daughter with her project, my mind at first fell into the trap of thinking we’d moved from God’s things to earthly things, but thankfully my daughter’s textbook didn’t take that approach. On page 68, the BJU Press Science 1 textbook teaches:

“God gives animals what they need. But He also wants people to care for animals. In Proverbs [12:10] the Bible tells people to take care of animals. A good man takes proper care of his animals. We give glory to God when we take care of the animals He made.”

This kind of teaching helps my daughter understand that everything should be service to God.

So that evening as I helped my daughter with her salamander project after family worship, we were really moving from one service to God to another. My daughter and I learned what salamanders eat and where they live. On a small, first grader level, we were learning how to obey God’s command to take care of the world.

What kind of teaching are your children receiving?

Why Teach History From a Textbook, Even at Home?

October 22, 2015 by Ben

I love standing in the history section of the library and scanning the titles that line the shelves. Historical narratives tell true stories that are far more captivating than fictional stories. That’s why I head for that section of the library most often. Here are a few history narratives I’ve read recently.

City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas by Roger Crowley
The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan by Russell Shorto
Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World by Margaret MacMillan

These and other well-written historical narratives grip my attention as well as providing analysis and insight on the past. As a history enthusiast, I’m tempted to share these books with my daughters as soon as they’re capable of reading at that level. The founding and development of Dutch Manhattan is fascinating, but most textbooks only give it one or two paragraphs!

Can’t children just skip the history textbooks and get straight to these gripping stories?

I don’t believe they should. History textbooks play a vital role in children learning about the past. There are two reasons I want my girls to learn about history through textbooks before they read books like the ones I listed above.

The first reason is related to helping children learn about history the best way—through organized units of information that are balanced and chronological. History textbook authors put information into digestible portions, making it easier for children to master. But the real key is balance when it comes to historical figures and events. That way, children begin to grasp the comparative significance, for example, of the Teapot Dome Scandal and the Great Depression. The textbook also provides clarity on sequence in a narrative form.

As you can see from the titles I’ve mentioned, if my daughters’ history education focused on my favorite historical narratives (or even their favorites) it could create problems in their understanding of the past. They might be confused about the order of certain events. Their knowledge of the past would skew towards my interests. Just as a building’s framework provides structural form and support to everything that comes next, a historical framework (provided by history textbooks) will provide form and support for my daughters’ understanding of the past.

The second reason I want to use history textbooks relates to the worldview I want to teach my children. History is not just an account of events, actors, and places. It is an interpretation of the historical data. And all historians have a perspective that shapes their interpretation of the past.

Take for example Nixon and Mao, a fascinating account of skirmishes on the Russia-China border, ping-pong diplomacy, and Kissinger’s trip to China—a trip so secret that even the State Department didn’t know about it. MacMillan’s book would interest anyone intrigued by the Cold War. But her book isn’t without worldview implications. She makes this point in The Uses and Abuses of History, another one of her books on writing history:

In a secular world, which is what most of us in Europe and North America live in, history takes on the role of showing us good and evil, virtues and vices. Religion no longer plays as important a part as it once did in setting moral standards and transmitting values.

In Margaret MacMillian’s assessment, religion no longer gives us our worldview—history does. I enjoy this author’s work, but I don’t want her works of history to shape my children’s worldview. Instead, my family uses a tool that provides an organized and biblical worldview of the past. That tool is a BJU Press Heritage Studies textbook written from a biblical worldview.

One day, I want my daughters to enjoy learning about Nixon’s Chinese diplomacy and other historical narratives. But before they learn about these places and events, I want them to have a framework for these events. And that framework needs to be constructed on the foundation of a biblical worldview. After that framework is in place, my daughters can learn about the past from varied historians and correctly evaluate the worldview of those historians.

God’s Providence, Columbus’s Mistake

October 8, 2015 by Ben

Perspective matters in all of education, but it’s particularly clear that perspective impacts teaching about the past. The scene of an accident illustrates on a miniature scale how perspective influences the retelling of an event. Where a witness was standing and what he was doing at the time of the accident will dramatically affect his view of the event. Most historians aren’t eyewitnesses of the events they record, but they do have perspectives that color their narratives.

Christopher Columbus provides an excellent example since historians have many different perspectives about this world figure. My friend Wes wrote a blog post that questioned the morality of Columbus’s actions. But I’d like to discuss two different perspectives taught about Columbus’s scientific knowledge.

Columbus—Heroic Individualist

One educational television show teaches children about Columbus by having an “interview” with him. The man playing the part of the explorer explains that most people in his day thought that the world was flat and that anyone who sailed far enough west would fall off the edge. Columbus, however, believed the world was round and therefore thought he could reach the East Indies by sailing west.

In this widely held perspective, Columbus is seen as a heroic individualist, bucking the religious, intellectual, and political establishments of his time by boldly charting a path based on scientific fact. Secularists like this story because it pits the rationality of science against irrational notions of religion. But those details aren’t accurate. This common perspective on Columbus is one that professional historians are trying to dissuade popular culture from believing.

Columbus—Mistaken Merchant

Actually, the scientific controversy in Columbus’s day wasn’t about the shape of the earth but its size. Most people during that time knew the earth was round but thought it was a little smaller than it really is. Since Columbus was convinced that the earth was much smaller than it is, he believed Asia could be reached faster by sailing west.

The religious/intellectual establishment actually had a more accurate estimate of Earth’s size than Columbus did, but nobody at that time knew there was a large landmass in between Europe and Asia.

I appreciate how BJU Press concludes this historical account in Heritage Studies 1 (page 121):

Columbus did not reach Asia by sailing west. Though Columbus did not know where he landed, God did. Columbus did not know he had found new lands to explore. God used the voyage to change the world.

In this telling, Columbus is a mistaken merchant, but God changes the course of human events in a striking way.

Perspective really matters. Some historians want to make people the heroes and ignore what God says and does. As a Christian father, I want my daughters to develop a biblical perspective on the past. This statement from the same textbook (page 123) sums up the perspective I want them to have this holiday.

Columbus Day is celebrated on the second Monday of October. It is a day to remember Christopher Columbus and the land he found. It is a day to remember what God did long ago.

Storytelling and Worldview

September 10, 2015 by Ben

At times the challenge of developing a biblical worldview in my three little girls, five and under, overwhelms me. How can I equip these young minds with something as complex as a worldview? The writings of Paul David Tripp encourage me. In particular, Paul’s simple explanations and illustrations demonstrate that I can develop my daughters’ worldview.

I love Paul’s story about his three-year-old son, who after falling down the stairs exclaimed, “Thank you!” When Paul asked his son who he was talking to, the boy responded, “The angels. And I know how they did it.”

“Who did what?”

“The angels! One stands on this side, and the other stands on that side. They both hold beach balls. When you start to fall, they put the beach ball out to keep you safe.”

Tripp observes that even three-year-olds interpret what’s happening. In this case, the conclusion was immature, and it confused Sunday school lessons with family vacations. But even very young children are capable of understanding stories, synthesizing them, and using them to explain daily occurrences.

Thankfully, our heavenly Father has given us His perspective in terms of a story. It’s a story that even toddlers and preschoolers can learn and use to interpret everyday life. It’s a true story with a beginning, middle, and end. It’s a story that dramatically affects the way we interpret the learning that makes up education. It’s the story of Creation, Fall, and Redemption.

Creation

The story begins with “God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). But when the story reaches Genesis 1:26–28, we learn that we’re special. God creates man and woman in His own image. God tells them to fill the world with little image-bearers and to take care of the world. Then He gives the first man a home (Eden), a wife (Eve), and a job (to name the animals and to work the garden).

Fall

Then Adam rebels and everything breaks. Death, sadness, and fighting come because of Adam’s wrong choice. His sin means that our hearts have been broken and our minds have been polluted. Adam and Eve make clothes out of fig leaves and then hide from God. Adam blames his wife for the sin, and Eve blames the serpent (Genesis 3:7–12).

Redemption

Next, we see that God immediately sets in motion His plan to redeem His fallen creation (Genesis 3:15). He promises that there will be conflict between the anointed one and the serpent. He promises that the anointed one will win and redeem God’s creation. This redemption plan is fulfilled in Christ’s death on the cross, His burial, and His resurrection from the dead.

The story applied to . . . math?

I share this story, not because it’s new or insightful, but because it’s simple and familiar. This is a story I share with my girls during family devotions. It’s a story they hear in Sunday school, and it affects the way they interpret learning, even math!

Math is a powerful tool to help us take care of the world (Genesis 1:28)
Because of the fall, some people use math to deny God (Romans 1:21–23)
The people of God can live in light of redemption by using math to love their neighbors (Luke 10:27–28)

The Creation-Fall-Redemption story doesn’t make worldview shaping easy, but it does make it attainable for my precious little ones. Using this story to interpret learning is critical for providing my children a thoroughly Christian education.

Ben