EDUCATING CHILDREN - Whose Responsibility Is It? - Part 1

Educating children in modern day America, whose responsibility is it? Is it the government, the community, the church, the parent, the child? Does educating children really take a village, or just a family? Who is really responsible and why?

Well, for the Christian, the answer is really quite simple. According to scripture, the parents or the guardians of the children being educated are duty bound to God to carry out this task. It is a command that is repeated over and over in scripture, and it should not be ignored.

But the problem is, at least for the vast majority of Christian parents living in modern America, this biblical command is being ignored. Most Christian parents have given up their God given responsibility for a more passive approach to education; an approach that has been evolving for many years, so long in fact that most Christians never even give it a second thought. They never even realized that the educational process in this country was once completely different than it is today. But the sad truth is, sending a child away to a secular institution for their “education” has just become the normal thing to do.

For the majority of Christian parents, they believe that if they have their children in church once or twice a week, for an hour or two, and if they pray at meal times, and are generally good people, then they have fulfilled God’s plan for Christian education. But nothing could be further from the truth. While the time spent in church is no doubt helpful for many, it only begins to scratch the surface of what God expects from parents in the realm of education. If the truth were known, many of the modern day evangelistic methods that focus on children and teens likely do more to lead them away from the truth of the gospel rather than closer to it. But that is a topic for another discussion. For the most part, the education that the children receive while they are in church is not the primary problem; the real problem usually comes during the rest of the week. Because many parents have turned over this part of their child’s education to a mostly godless, government controlled system; a secular system known by many as “public education.”

So what is wrong with public education? A big problem with public education is that it is a system that has departed from its traditional role of teaching the fundamentals of reading, writing, and arithmetic; to one that teaches political correctness, tolerance, and universal citizenship. This is a system that, in many areas of our country, has become a tool for Satan and has led to the rise of situational ethics, and a decline in the mental, physical, and spiritual condition of many of America’s children. This system is also a major stumbling block that is preventing many of those inside it from becoming the responsible citizens and faithful Christians that God would prefer them to be.

Our nation’s first president, George Washington, in his farewell address on September 19, 1796 stated that:

“Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”

That is exactly what many are doing today. Christian parents are educating their children apart from the founding religious principle and they are expecting National morality to prevail, and it is not working, not even a little bit. The result has been, generation after generation of children who know little about God, and know even less about what He desires for their lives, and it is all because Christian parents have abdicated their educational responsibilities. They have chosen man’s model of education over God’s model, a model where man and his ideas have preeminence over those of Christ, a model where man decides truth apart from, and contrary to, that which has been revealed to us in God’s Word.

More Later...