My Christian School Horror Story

The Lingering Effects of a Poor Education

By and large, the public education system is, to use a technical term, a dumpster fire. High-brow conservatives sometimes speak of it as “social engineering.” But that expression fails because it could be interpreted in a charitable light to mean something positive, giving the impression that, once completed, students could actually build something–like a civilized society. 

But in reality, Public Education is conversion therapy. “Education” has actually become a form of bawdy exhibitionism. Every wild idea imaginable is paraded in front of students. Children are transformed into voyeurs. Turned into victims. They aren’t being educated, they are being assaulted.

The sad reality is that moms and dads now send their little boys and girls to places that don’t even know what boys and girls are. Public schools are sexually conditioning children towards biological insanity while parents think their kids are just spending the day reading “Charlotte’s Web” and learning long division. 

These days kids are taught to list every injustice in society, but can scarcely name a single justice on the Supreme Court. They can tell you all about Martin Luther King Jr., but think that Martin Luther was his dear old dottering daddy. I suspect that they believe that Alexander Hamilton wrote musicals. And they wouldn’t know Adam Smith from Adam’s housecat. So when students know neither the basics of biology nor the rudimentary facts necessary to pass a citizenship test, we can safely call that a bad education.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am the product of a poor education, but poor education of another sort. I think pi is something that pairs well with ice cream, and I don’t know a hypotenuse from a hippopotamus. Even so, there was precious little that I had to unlearn from my time in the classroom. Not once was I ever encouraged to trade my boot cut Wranglers for a prom dress so I could woo the quarterback. 

When our local public school introduced “sex ed” in the 7th grade, my folks pulled me out and enrolled me in a Christian school. “It isn’t rocket science anyway,” my Grandaddy said. “People have been doing it with successful results for centuries without charts and graphs.” Learning on the job seems to have worked fine until now.

I remember being ridiculed by former peers (and their parents). “You will be socially awkward,” they said. “You will be out of step with the rest of the world.” As I look around at what passes for education (and society) these days, I say, “Thank God.”

Others, more malevolent in their pronouncements about my new school, said that we were abandoning the sphere of critical education for thoughtless indoctrination. They were told that I would likely become an “extremist.” However, my parents didn’t necessarily disagree; they simply believed that being indoctrinated with Christian doctrine was preferable to the progressive catechism on offer down at the civic temple.

But the naysayers were correct. I wasn’t properly socialized, and the religious institution did not care one whit for the ideal of democratic homogenization. 

The Christian school in which I was raised was so extreme that it summed up the entirety of human ethics in Two Commandments; so authoritarian that it required positive confession that Jesus is Lord and a simultaneous affirmation that the State didn’t own children like chattel. We didn’t get the best “real world education” at our Christian school. By that I mean I couldn’t identify a marijuana plant until I made it to college, and what little we knew about fornicating we learned elsewhere.

Trinity Academy was so extreme that it affirmed absolutes in both math and morality. While it may be regrettable that I wasn’t encouraged to read LGBTQ (letters without end, amen) poetry, I was expected to commit at least one third of the Psalter to memory. 

We had gun racks in our trucks and knives in our pockets, but never a school shooting or stabbing. 

We prayed before class, before meals, before tests, during chapel, at games, and after all sorts of failures and successes.

I graduated in a senior class of three from a Christian school tacked on to the tail-end of a country church and then went on to receive three degrees, including a PhD from one of Great Britain’s ancient universities. All in all, I am quite thankful to have been the recipient of a poor education.