Government has been involved in education for just a little while. In proof of this, I cite Daniel 1:3-4, which reads, “Then the king commanded Ashpenaz, his chief eunuch, to bring some of the people of Israel… to stand in the king’s palace, and to teach them the literature and language of the Chaldeans.” The state has, as we see, long expressed an interest in what its citizens learn. Nowadays, it pleads the necessity of state education to ‘democracy,’ and I presume that Nebuchadnezzar pled its necessity to the smooth running of his government.¹ Today, let’s consider the morality and effects of state control over education.

For it is ‘state control.’ Whether it’s the federal government or the state government (let’s be honest, the Department of Education for a state will have the same genre of person as the federal department- Trump’s nominee for Deputy Secretary, Penny Schwinn, had an infamous run as an anti-freedom state Commissioner of Education here in Tennessee), the government has factual control of education in America. The government limits and prescribes the criteria for education. Even if you’re homeschooled, you have to report, if to a lesser extent, what you’re doing and how much; you have to comply with a variety of requirements. Further, compulsory attendance laws are standard, so much that we expect them. Control not fully exercised is still control.

But what is education?

Education is to “Train up a child in the way he should go,” so that “Even when he is old he will not depart from it” (Prov. 22:6). It is to “Teach [the words that I command you today] diligently to your children,” and to “talk of them when you sit in your house” (Deut. 6:6-7). To educate a child is to shape what they think, how they think, and who they trust.

Education is never merely factual, particularly not at the intensity prosecuted by government schools. Children (and adults, to a lesser extent) are malleable. They learn from what they see others do, by imitating adults and peers both. They don’t just learn that 2+2=4 but that the way the teacher solves the fight in class is the right way (or wrong way) to solve it. This learning isn’t even fully conscious. Children learn from their parents in ways nobody recognizes until decades later, and I make the same puns as my father despite no formal training or even attempt at imitation. Sure, some of that’s nature, but nurture is part of the process.

When a child spend hours every day under the care of any entity, they learn from their caretaker, whether parent or sibling or kidnapper or government school. It doesn’t matter if we partition the category of ‘education’ from the rest of their lives, saying that ‘Here they learn facts; there they learn everything else.’ The child will not and cannot segregate himself into a computer-style fact-recording machine for the duration of the school day. He will learn what it means to be a person, good or bad, in that time. If it’s half or a third of his waking life, that’s a half or third of his parenting accomplished by the educator.

Nor are facts truly separate from theology and behavior. When schools teach history, we all know that the bits they keep and the bits they leave out matter. If I come out of childhood thoroughly equipped to sketch out the timeline of the American Civil War and World War Two and Operation Desert Storm, but I have only the foggiest ideas of the Reformation, the English Civil War, and the Pilgrims, that bias shapes my worldview and my theology. Different facts assemble into different stories of the world. This is true, too, in less obvious places. Is math a tool to glorify God or to control the world? Is art about self-expression to the point of narcissism or about beauty to His glory and our joy? Different educations teach different answers.

What we must recognize as Christians is that parents are given the exclusive right and responsibility to educate their children. Deuteronomy 6:6-7 certainly indicates this, but the fifth commandment (Ex. 20:12) implies it as well, by giving children the injunction to heed their parents. Proverbs is, in large part, the work of a father teaching his son wisdom (1:8,10,15, 2:1, 3;1, 4:1), not to mention chapter 31, which is a king relating his mother’s instruction. The care of the child is given to his parent, adoptive or biological, including teaching (Deut. 4:10), physical care (Matt. 7:9), and discipline (Heb. 12:1-6).

Now, parents have this responsibility, but they do not have to do it alone; they are not called to isolate their children from all contact with others. That would be, to put it bluntly, wrong (under nearly all circumstances, at least). What parents are called to do is to apply wisdom. Parents are to have the aid of God’s people, the invisible church in the guise, hopefully, of the visible church; they are to have, too, the protecting arm of the state to keep away physical danger. They are to have the use of cultural tools, of books and media and art, of society, of institutions, of business. In all this, though, the parental responsibility remains not only central but predominant, the final veto. All right authority to educate is given to the parent by God, and it can be taken from them only by God.²

³Of all these aids, however, we must note that the government does not have the right to educate. Scripture does not make the state the child’s educator. Of the magistrate Paul says, “But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer” (Rom. 13:4), and (in obedience to the coherence of Scripture) we can turn to the Old Testament to find which parts of life the sword is to be applied to (for, if it applied indiscriminately, the state should use the sword against all ill speech, against the child maligning his sibling as against the murderer stalking his victim). In Scripture, however, we find that God never entrusts to the state the power to educate; He gives it many responsibilities, to protect life, liberty, and property from violence and certain sorts of fraud, but He does not give the state this right over children. The state, therefore, must not be entrusted by the parent with the child’s education, for God has not given the state that right, so that to ask a government official to act in such a way is to ask him to sin through tyranny.³

What are the consequences of state control over education? What issues from giving government the power to decide that children are going to be taught this material for this period, parents be damned?⁴ We don’t have time to get into the weeds, but we can look at the generalities.

We should expect government education to get worse and worse. Governments are notoriously corrupt and inefficient, for one, but that’s not the worst of it. “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain,” warns Psalm 127:1, and the ‘house’ of government education is a house built not only apart from the Lord but against His command (Mark 9:38-40). Therefore the quality of education, factually and morally, will deteriorate, and as each successive round feeds the next generation worse teachers than the last, the destruction will mount. Corruption, abuse, and malice will become more and more common, and even where these outright vices are not evident, the good done will get ever smaller.

We should also expect government schools to teach their students, parents, and teachers to rely on, trust, and like the state. Parents will be taught a habit of trusting their children to the schools, for one, and sunk cost fallacy (alongside the fear that to distrust the state makes them guilty of hurting their children, every good parent’s worst fear) will induce them to keep that trust going, even when the state doesn’t merit it. Habits help form worldview, and a stated distrust of government (as is healthy) is given the lie if I hand the government control over my children for much of each weekday.

Meanwhile, children are being taught to respect the authority of the state, in the teachers and school, and not to question it, not to know its limits. They are taught to spend their time, even when they are not in the government’s immediate custody, in trying to please that government entity (with their homework), and they learn that much of their future prospect depends on the grade the government gives them. There may be a legal fiction dividing their school from the government- but such legal fictions are often meaningless outside of law. Come time for college or other educational loans, too, and the government’s generosity, its approval, is again their concern.

Teachers and schools, meanwhile, have an inbuilt incentive to teach and promote the government as a beneficent, trustworthy authority. They operate, after all, on the government’s sufferance and by its institution, have their livelihood by the government’s hand. If they want more, they need to look to the government. So, while many individuals may retain healthy skepticism of state power, the system overall will be drawn inexorably to honor its lord, the state. After all, because the whole endeavor is unrighteous, they cannot turn to God for a base.

This all empowers the state, and it fosters in the state a possessiveness which allows them to say ‘the state’s children’ instead of ‘the children of our citizens.’ It’s this sort of proprietary interest, this kidnapping-in-principle, that can motivate people to make terrible arguments like those Rep. Slater made recently in the Tennessee legislature, wherein he quoted the danger of abusive parents as the reason for refusing to allow parents to opt out of education reporting (as if abusive parents can’t just lie on that reporting).⁵ What makes this more egregious is the testimony which preceded it by around ten minutes that public schools are hotbeds of abuse and flat out sex trafficking- which makes sense, as they’re concentrations of vulnerable, unwise children under the care of those whom the state, with its infinite capacity to choose the worst person for the job, has chosen.⁶

Because God gave the duty and right of education to parents, not to the state, parents may not and must not abdicate that role. If they do, they must expect evil results, as we see in the constantly deteriorating state of government education. Government education will not only decline in its ability to teach technical skills; it will also teach children a deleterious trust of government, a reliance on the state, which is contrary to the American tradition and to Christian righteousness.

God bless.

Footnotes

1. Actually, Daniel was being trained for government office, which makes Nebuchadnezzar’s educational initiative much less objectionable than America’s. ↩︎
2. God does not allot to parents the right to abuse their children, to put it bluntly, and sufficient abuse (for all parents err at times, which error is technically definable as abuse) disqualifies the parent from that parental role, God stripping them of their educative authority for their misuse of it. This loss of authority, in some cases, correlates with the state’s authority to protect the child from physical destruction, though not in all. ↩︎
3. Church aid in education, on the other hand, is likely condoned, though in a limited capacity. Having not made a particular study of this side of the problem, I offer no strong opinion. ↩︎
4. I believe the near-expletive is justifiable. Modernity tends to view the state in the same way that man has viewed its gods, as provider and protector and arbiter of right (as a matter of fact, pagan states throughout history have tended to be viewed the same way- except with explicit gods behind them or as explicit divinity (Rome)). Thus, when the government sidelines or condemns parents, this is analogous to damning them. ↩︎
5. This video at minute 41:00 ↩︎
6. No, not all school personnel are terrible. But some of them are- and consider this: what job is more attractive to a pedophile or trafficker than one which includes constant access to and authority over children? ↩︎