I went to hear that excellent preacher, David Pawson, speak some 20 years ago and he attacked Christian education. He used the traditional Christian argument that children from Christian homes should be 'salt and light' to the children around them.Having experienced the horrors of the comprehensive system [or was that APPprehensive?] I can declare with some authority that he was mistaken, and emphatically so. The Christian children are simply swamped and the overwhelming majority keep a very low profile in mainstream schools.
I am astonished that evangelicals can ever choose to place their children into the probable care of: bigots, atheists, agnostics, faith-destroyers, marxists and the certain influence of the morally neutral.
Their children - in order to be 'part of the real world' - are placed alongside the disfunctional, the criminal, the drug taker, the sexually precocious, the degenerate and the morally corrupt.
A huge percentage of their teachers are also very poor moral examples. Am I overstating my case? - Indeed not!
I would have stuck pins in my eyes rather than have my children educated thus - in the system which put bread on our table.
Apparently, the Spartans used to leave boy babies out on a mountainside, naked for a night, in the cold, to see if they were tough enough to be worthy of survival.
With no thoughts of nurture as an option, is that not precisely what Christian parents are doing when they choose the local comp in preference to a Christian School? - Provided of course, that they do have one in their area.
Photo: Handsworth Christian School, Sheffield.
