You cannot get the graduates of Christian Oxford with the Pedagogy of Bob Jones

The outcome was community (hopefully) and not a set of outcomes that could be tested on a Scantron.

We did not even use “Christian textbooks.” We used real books and were allowed to think about them before being told what to think about them. This wasn’t ignoring learning truth . . . it was a teacher patiently helping us to learn truth ourselves and learning with us.

Our little school was classical without being reactionary. To quote Phillip E. Johnson, it knew that “asking the right questions was the safest road to the right answers.” This much I know after thirty years of teaching: you cannot have a classical school that predetermines the answers that students will find. If you try, students will surely resent it or become less than human.

My school wanted to see the Image of God completed in me, not to make me an image of the Image of God in the teachers.

To strip the possibility of failure from students is to make us animals and not people. God help me, but the teachers who would eat with us, argue with us, think with us, change their minds with us left us human.  School let us fail. They knew Christian liberty is so great that when the world was perfect, God Almighty was willing to let His children choose badly. He did not force outward conformity.

Liberty is exhilarating, but discombobulating!

We lived out this reality with our teachers because they were Christians and not just giving a party line. Oddly, this increased appropriate authority of grownups over kids because it did not demand outward conformity, but real relationships.

We loved our teachers and obeyed them . . . even when we did not like them. People will do for love what power and authority could never make them do.

Our school had a lot of “different” kids and Dad and Mom not only let us stay, they let us be different. They knew you can never get a CS Lewis by stamping out the imagination or a Dorothy Sayers by putting everyone in an intellectual box. You cannot get Christian Oxford’s product by Bob Jones’ methods. 

I meet so many “Christian school burnouts” who went to places that majored on answers and not asking the right questions. If you keep thinking, you simply cannot learn enough by twelfth grade to last your whole life! Propaganda fails the life test, but truth found in a community for oneself, but not by oneself, endures.

Obviously, nobody (whatever we might hope) can guarantee that anyone who learns to think will think “correctly.” I am not sure it would be good if we could! We can do our best to teach people the skills of educating people (including the arts!) within the context of lived orthodox Christianity (or Orthodox Christianity!).

I still admire my Christian school teachers because I never found them hypocrites (do what I say not what I do!) or authoritarians. They lived life with us. We were allowed (as one former student said) to be quirky and who isn’t a bit quirky?

Parents would get frustrated with Dad and Mom because they refused to shine up the outside with conformity. At one point, I got frustrated with Dad because he tolerated wrong answers . . . I wanted him to use power quickly. He was wise, prudent, patient and used the power only when all else failed.

He knew that in education, authority used is true power lost. “Something,” he told me, “has already gone wrong with things if you end up firing people or expelling students.” And so it was and is.

Nobody likes it when education fails. The perfect teacher with the best curriculum was Jesus, but Jesus lost a disciple and the rich young ruler, a person he loved, walked away. We want the best for our children and we have found it in Christ. When some educational grifter, or an authoritarian looking for a meal, promises us that he will intellectually get the kids to fall into line, then we are tempted.

But do we really want unthinking mind numbed robots parroting right answers? If that is the goal, then we may be reading CS Lewis, but we are educating like Stalin.

This does not mean a failure of discipline or not saying what we believe. Read my stuff. Our school wasn’t afraid of teaching us to have strong opinions, but we had to support them with arguments. We were told that is was better to die than to tell a lie . . .even in a noble cause.

Dad and the teachers would expel a student who would not cooperate, he was no pushover, but he hated doing it. Students came first and not the school. The students who couldn’t make it would not make it. They refused to work, stop bullying, or were so dysfunctional that even our school could not help. They needed more . . .

I remember my teachers and the administration apologizing to us when a decision (which was not such a big deal) went poorly. They were wrong and admitted it. They did not hide making the sausage (too messy for kids!), but invited us into the room to help.

My teachers believed in the power of the Holy Spirit to do the primary job of teaching! They gave me a better education than I was fit to receive and I look back and know once there, at least once, there was a place where the Lordship of Jesus was acknowledged, human dignity was celebrated, and education happened.

Best they could.

It is true . . . it happened. I saw it. Maybe such things cannot last, but every place I have been and here just now, we try to follow that good example.

God, have mercy on us.