Two of our children are still in the public school system, yet our son is attending a Christian college. A reader wrote and asked us about that decision. Here is my answer.
Transcript
As you know, I get lots of questions in and love to answer some of the ones that come from people who read my articles or who watch my videos. I got one recently I thought was actually quite interesting. Someone was saying, why is it that you’ve enrolled your son in Christian college? There’s a little background to the question, I’ll give that to you just as soon as we roll the intro.
The question today is, why did we enroll our son in Christian college? So let me back up a little bit. Over the years I’ve made it pretty clear, pretty public that our kids have been in public schools up to this point. And so, we’ve got one child right now who’s finished school, in college. We’ve got one who’s in high school, one who’s still in primary school. All three have been in public schools from the get-go. That’s a decision we made as a family. I don’t want to talk about that now, I’ve talked about it many times in the past. And the decision, we think, has been right for our family based on who we are and where we are, our location, all of those good things. We think it’s been a good decision for our family. Now we’ve got a son who’s gone off to college and somebody was asking, why did you enroll him in Christian college if you believe in public schooling?
Well, there’s quite a bit wrapped up in this, but let me see if I can approach it from a couple of different angles. The first angle would be, we didn’t choose, he did. Or at least, we didn’t choose independently of him. Put it this way, if your child is in first grade and making his own decisions about education, you know, you’re probably not parenting your child awful well if at that young age they’re making these big decisions. On the other hand, if your child is going off to college and hasn’t made that decision, you’ve made it on his behalf, again, you’re probably not doing a great job of teaching and training your children in an appropriate way. So when it came to college, we really made that decision with our son, based on what he wanted, where he wanted to go and why. So, there’s one thing. It wasn’t our decision, it was his as well.
Second, it fit what he wanted to study. And so, he wasn’t interested in studying engineering or advanced biology or those sorts of things. He had an interest in theology, in topics related to the Christian faith. And so in that sense, well of course then, he had to go to a Christian school. But there’s something else I think, was I think really, possibly the most important factor of all. Which is, we had talked to some friends, they have a daughter who’s a little bit older than our oldest child. She also had gone through public schools and they had said to her when she was about to graduate, they said, next year we want to give you two options. If you want to go to a mainstream, a non-Christian university that’s fine, but we’d like you first to take a year of Christian college. We’ll support you in that, we’ll help you with that, but that would be very important to us and we think it would be very wise to you. Or, you can go off to a Christian college right away.
So those were the options they wanted her to think through. We thought that sounded really, really good. As happy as we’ve been with our children in public schooling, we do think there’s value in having that year of, what really comes down to worldview training. That year of being in an environment that’s a little bit safer, a little bit contentious than we’ll experience in public school and public college and of course in the wider world as we graduate out and enter into a vocation. So we wanted to help our son think through that and they had sent their daughter to Boyce College and so that was on our list of places to check out.
So, my son wasn’t really that interested in it, he didn’t love the idea of doing a one year gap year kind of program. But we thought, let’s just go to Boyce, we’ll just take a look. You can come down with us and we’ll give it a fair shot and he was up for that. And really we went for their preview weekend and I think that for all three of us, for Aileen, for myself, and for our son, we just came away from that thinking, now this is the right place for him. He was very convinced of that. In fact, he was so convinced, he said, let’s forget the one year, I want to enroll here as a full-time student to get a degree. And so he’s entered into a full four-year program there.
So, that was a decision we made as a family. Our next child is two years away from deciding and we’re going to offer those same options, go off to a Christian college or at least take that one year of Christian training that will hopefully set you, set you straight in life and really be a good experience for you, a time for you to be, just kind of step back and get some Christian training and meet some Christian kids. So, that’s the decision we made for our family. By no means am I saying that’s the decision you ought to make, by no means am I saying it’s the only decision to make, but that’s at least how we thought this through. So far my son’s been doing great at Boyce, he’s thriving there. We really believe that so far, through one term, or not even quite one full term yet, it’s proven to be a good decision. Hope that’s helpful, talk to you again soon.
