Raising Knights

For a long time it has seemed as if the church has been pretty good at dispensing information. By that I mean that most churches have had a pretty good system of trying to inform their people about what they believe. Churches have long had "Sunday School", a plan to teach children more about the Bible than may have otherwise been available without the system of Sunday School. Most churches have adult classes and sermons and Bible studies and all sorts of things to provide the facts of Christianity. Now, in our modern day, there is a decline in this fact-giving system, I'm afraid. More and more churches are succumbing to cultural pressure to just make people feel better and to societal pressure to work toward the least common denominator (which, I'm afraid, is likely a term too many people today haven't learned thanks to a declining educational system). So they've "dumbed down" their teaching and worked harder at making things less informative and more entertaining because, after all, if we're going to compete in this modern market of entertainment and electronics, we're going to have to be much more like them, right? So, we are. Modern education is declining, and so is the church's education.

The sad effect of this decline is, obviously, a decline in the education of Christians in all matters spiritual. Worse, there is a watering down of anything substantial for the next generation, leaving them very little substance to work with as they grow into adults. Fortunately, for any conscientious, loving parent, there is a solution. Interestingly, perhaps sadly, it is the same solution that has always been the solution. "Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it" (Prov 22:6). Perhaps I need to be more pointed. "Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord" (Eph 6:4). Yes, historically and biblically it is the job of the parents to teach their children and specifically the responsibility of the father to see that it is done. Always has been.

Note that the command is not merely to educate your children. Yes, that is in there. But the primary command is to "discipline" them. (No, this is not another "you need to beat your kids" post.) The word in that verse is paideia and refers not to punishment, but to training. We need to instruct them -- absolutely -- but we need to teach them how to function. And that's a horse of a different color. You see, we can tell them information pretty easily, but teaching them how to manage themselves is much more difficult. Americans are, in general, no longer taught how to think. As a result, neither are our children.

I wanted something different for my sons. In a world taught to feel, not think, I wanted to teach my sons to reason, to examine, to think things through. In a world delighted to raise jesters, I wanted to train knights. So I set out to teach my sons the information they would need to be good, responsible men and the ability to think through things when they encountered, as they surely would, things that I hadn't told them.

First, I made their education my responsibility. Yes, I sent them to school, both for general education and for spiritual education, but I didn't abandon them to school, either general or at church. I monitored, discussed, followed up, assisted, generally made myself a part of all that process. They went to public schools for part of the time (which I'm no longer convinced is a good idea in today's society), and I had to counter some of what they were taught there. They went to private schools part of the time and I had to augment some of what they were taught there. They had decent input from church groups, but I always found myself either correcting or adding to that information as well.

In my view, though, the most important process was what I came to view as "jousting". These boys were "squires" and I needed to give them information, to be sure, but I also needed to teach them how to handle themselves once they had the information and faced their environment. So, appropriate to their current age and information, I would "spar" with them in a safe and controlled atmosphere. I would take on the role of antagonist and argue against what I had taught them to be true in order to teach them the methods of thinking things through rather than simply calling on the data bits they were given. I wanted to teach them to think, not merely to know. I wanted to add a "why" to what they believed and to help them see when error occurred.

A friend of mine had a practice that well illustrated this idea. He told his boys, "You can listen to any music you want ... as long as I've heard it first and we've discussed it." This took effort on his part. They would bring home a CD a friend lent them and on more than one occasion he would throw it away simply because they didn't let him hear it first. "But, Dad," they would complain, "that wasn't mine!" "Well," he would respond, "I guess you're going to have to buy your friend a replacement, aren't you?" So they developed a system of letting him hear it before they made it their own and then discussing what they heard. Eventually his boys would tell him, "I had planned to buy this CD, but I heard the words and decided it wasn't a good idea." Because, you see, they had learned more than "Here are the rules." They had learned to think, to evaluate, to look at things from a Christian worldview beyond the simple information a church group or a classroom or even a parent could give them.

The biblical command is that parents in general and fathers in particular are to be responsible for the training and education of their children. Not schools. Not churches. Not youth groups or clubs. Parents. Fathers. We need to teach them the discipline and instruction of the Lord. We need to disciple them, to teach them to obey all that Christ commands. It is our responsibility. We can use other means, but we are the final responsibility for this process. We're raising children in a hostile world; we need to prepare them with more than mere information. We need to prepare them for life.