Our Christian School and the "Real World"

An inquiring parent asked me a question over the phone recently.

“How do your students do when they enter the real world?”

The assumption implied in the way in which that question was asked was that what we do at LCES isn’t linked in a direct way to what happens outside of the school day for our students. I firmly believe it does.

Christian education has as its goal not to isolate students from life, but to enable them to fully understand what they are actually seeing around them: God’s amazing world! We seek to have students be able to peel back the confusion and distortion of that good creation caused by sin in order to see creation as it was originally meant to be, and one day what it will become again. The “real world” without the story of the mighty acts of God isn’t real at all, since it tells an incomplete story of what life is really all about. As C.S. Lewis said through one of his characters, we seek to provide students ample opportunity to “…go further in and go further up” as they deepen and widen their understanding of all things. Mixed in between math facts and poetry, gym class and art, Christian education grounds students growing knowledge with the ability to figure what is real, true, valuable, honorable, and worthwhile.

It is always fascinating to see how students summarize what they have been learning when I talk with them about what they are doing in their classrooms. Walking down the back hallway on the way outside for recess, I heard a student sharing the contents of a lesson with a friend in a different grade.  “I wish the world was the way God made it – like in the Garden of Eden. It sounds like it was pretty good.” I hear a seed planted in God’s kingdom.

SJ