It seems to be a bit of a nin thing these days to begin talks like this or studies of themes like this from the point of view of a personal experience. and people seem to be more interested in people's relationship to the topic, sometimes more so than the topic itself. And just for tonight, I'm going to fall in line with that, and I'm going to approach it with you from a personal perspective. Now, a lot of what I will say will be theoretical, there's no doubt about that, but I hope by weaving personal experience into it, it should make it a little more real to us as parents or prospective parents in the school. I'd like to look with you at three things. First of all, how I came to understand the concept of Christian education and to believe in it. So, that's the first thing, because it did take me a while to understand it and certainly to believe in it. Second, why I think it vitally important. And third, how I found it to be a blessing in my own experience and in the experience of my family. Now, these three will be of uneven lengths. The first will be of medium length, how I came to understand it. The second will be the bulk of the talk, and that is why it is vitally important. and then briefly at the end how I found it to be a blessing in my experience and the experience of my family. So first then how I came to understand it and to believe in it that will require just a very brief overview of my own experience in education so please just bear with it it's not going to be very detailed and I hope it's not going to be too boring but My primary school I would have categorised certainly as a Christian school and would still do. Now, that's not just because I learned the Catechism there and I learned the Bible there. Being a Christian school is far more than just learning the Bible or the Catechism. But certainly I did learn both. In my day school, in my primary school, we had at least half an hour of solid Bible instruction every day, as well as learning the Catechism. But when I say that my primary school was a Christian school, I mean more than that. I mean that the Word of God really permeated the whole school, the ethos of the school, and particularly the discipline of the school. Everything was very much guided by the Word of God. And just as a matter of plain fact, I owe my own knowledge of the Bible as a book in terms of its contents to the whole in which I was brought up, and especially to the school. not really to the church. Now, in saying that, I am not actually accusing the church of any kind of neglect. Please don't misunderstand what I'm saying. The fact is that the church knew what the school was doing, and the school knew what the church was doing. And the Church was perfectly happy for me to be taught Bible and Catechism every single day of my school life in church. So, the Church was not neglecting my upbringing or my nurturing in the Lord. The Church knew that the school had a vital, pivotal role in that, and left it to the school. A minister would visit the school periodically, but that was just to keep a connection. If the visit of the minister is more important than that, then that's a sign that your school is not really a Christian school at all. The presence of a minister is not necessary to make a school a Christian school. In fact, the more of a Christian school it is, like I say, the less required is the minister's presence. In fact, the only reason really for His presence was just to deepen the link between the church and the school, and indeed, the home and the community. These things were working together. So, when I say that I owe my knowledge of the Bible to the school more than the home and the church, I'm not criticizing either my home or my church. I think that should help us to understand how important the school actually is. That's 30 hours in a child's life in the week, not the fleeting moments sometimes that parents have with their children, and certainly the two hours to three hours perhaps that the church has with the children. Now, there was a dramatic shift in my education when it came to secondary, and I was conscious of that. the ethos of the school was different religious education was in it and the odd assembly but like i say when you need these there's something wrong in the school So I was conscious of a change. And the fact is, many people perhaps in the islands don't believe this, but let me say it again. I know I've said it on a public forum before, but let me say it again. I was taught the evolution of the human species from primates as a fact in the history department in 1978 in North Uist. So I want you to process that. We would consider, and I would have considered North Uist then very much conservative in its approach to education and so on. But the fact of the matter is that I was taught, as a fact, the evolution of the human species from primitive primates. I was taught that in 1978. That's a reminder to us, by the way, that the philosophy of materialism can permanate every subject in the school. You don't necessarily have to look to the science department to find something wrong in terms of evolutionary thinking. The history department will do fine. The fact of the matter is that all kinds of anti-Christian forms of thinking can seep into the curriculum in any single part of that curriculum. And of course, it can eventually pervade the whole curriculum, which we'll see in a moment. Now, not surprisingly, perhaps, I drifted away from the faith, which I was very attached to in my childhood, and the worldview that I formed gradually had no place really for God in it by the time I had left school, until I was converted at 18. And from 18 to 30, I had no thought of Christian education. even though by 30 I had been a minister for three to four years. So I passed through my ministerial training and three years in my first congregation without thinking about Christian education at all. Or, if I did, to the extent that I did, I opposed it. I wasn't in favour of it. if you had pinned me to the wall and asked me. If you had asked me why I wasn't in favour of it, I wouldn't have been able to give you very intelligent or coherent answers. The fact of the matter is that I probably thought Christian education to be unnecessary. To be honest, I possibly thought it was a little weird, and I probably thought that it was divisive. Now, I was as wrong as I could possibly be on at least two of these things anyway, because, as we'll see, it's very necessary, and it's not at all weird. But it is, of course, to some extent divisive, to the extent that the gospel is itself divisive. Whenever the gospel comes into our community, it creates division. The Lord himself reminded us of that. Do not think, he says, that I came to bring peace. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. And then he speaks about how that sword will begin to divide even families themselves. Two against three, three against two. So if you have a Muslim village somewhere that's living quite at peace, and a Christian missionary goes in there with the gospel, he is absolutely being divisive. Because that's what the gospel is. That's what the gospel does. From another perspective, it brings peace, but let's be clear, it brings a sword. And of course, if that missionary's worth is solved, he will try to somehow establish some form of education. So to the extent that the gospel he brings is divisive, so will the education that he brings. But we need to be ready for that. We're not here to be thought well of by everybody. We're here to do the kingdom's work, to serve the Lord Jesus Christ for ourselves and for our children and for the children of others too, who are perishing like our own unless they have the Lord Jesus Christ as their saviour in their hearts. Now, three factors changed my thinking. And my thinking changed when I was a minister in Canada. I was a minister there for a few years and three things happened there that helped to change my mind radically. The first was that I was compelled to think through baptism more thoroughly. Now, it so happens that I had given Baptism a lot of thought when I was training for the ministry, but what happened in Toronto was that a lot of Baptists began to attend our church. There were various reasons for that, but anyway, they did, and of course, they had their children coming with them who were unbaptized. So, we had to begin to deal with that situation. And apologies to Baptist friends here who wonder what it is that we're dealing with. But anyway, you understand what I mean. It meant that I had to think thoroughly about who our children actually are and what they are. In what relationship do they stand to God, to us? What does it really mean? to raise our children, which means to feed them, to nurture them, nourish them. What does it mean to raise them for the Lord and in the Lord? So, I began to think that through, and I began to be worried. I'll say more about that later. The second thing that changed my thinking was that I began with the Lord's help, in the Lord's grace, to come to a fuller and a better understanding of the Lordship of Jesus Christ over everything in life. everything in my life and everything in everybody else's life, including education. I began to see that he is Lord of the state, as well as Lord of the church. He's Lord of work, as well as Lord of recreation. He's Lord of marriage. He's Lord of the home. He is the Lord of the believer. He is also, whether the unbeliever likes it or not, he is Lord of the unbeliever, because every knee shall bow, and every tongue shall confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. And, of course, it follows from that that you can't really know anything properly unless you know it as God knows it and sees it. And that's a huge step forward in your own understanding when you come to that understanding. There is not a fact in the universe that can't be understood properly unless it's understood as God's fact first. It's first and foremost that. And until you see that, you're going to be wrong about that fact and the place that that fact has in the universe of God. That's why, and I, whenever I'm asked to speak on this theme generally, I always refer to the fact that if you were going to study in the old universities in Oxford and Cambridge, it didn't matter what you studied, you had to do theology first. So if you were going to do natural philosophy, for example, if you were going to study physics in the 13th century, you do theology first. Your first year is theology. If you were going to do medicine, your first year is theology. Why was your first year theology? Because The understanding of those who taught in these universities was just that, that you wouldn't understand your subject properly unless you saw it as God's subject. Once you saw it in that light, then you could really grow and make progress. So that's the second thing. First, thinking through baptism, then realizing that Christ was Lord of everything, including education. But the third thing that changed my thinking, and this is interesting in a lot of ways, was not so much an argument as experience. Now, I suppose we all know how powerful experience can be in moving our thinking along. Christian education can be like that for a lot of people. It's not the theory that actually convinces them. It's something they see, something that works or something that doesn't work. I suppose to some extent, even tonight, we are trying to persuade people that something is wrong with the system of education that prevails nationally. There is something wrong with it. That doesn't mean that we are reactionary, because what is done in the Lord's name is never reactionary. The Lord has priority. The Lord's education is education. Every other form of education is the deviant form of education. So, nothing here is reactionary, but the fact is sometimes that you see a thing wrong before you begin to think about, well, how can it be right, or what does it look like when it is actually right? And that's what clinched the argument for myself. I saw it work. Now, what I mean by that is not that I saw it work in my own family as such. What really happened, just very briefly, was this, that when I was in Canada, I was asked to preach in quite a lot of Dutch churches, some different denominations. But I was immediately struck by the fact that the pews were full of young people. Large families. Some of you know Dutch Christians will know that that's characteristic of them. Very large families all the way from the front right up to the back. And I was staggered by this, particularly when I preached for the Canadian Reformed Church. who had established themselves in Canada after the Second World War, sorry, between the two wars, around the same time as my own church had established itself in Canada. Our church shrank, their church grew rapidly. And I remember asking the elders, I said, well, this is really impressive. I said, I have never seen so many young people of all ages in a church. I've never seen it. And I started to speak with them and ask why it was. And the answer lay in a massive secondary school that was more or less beside the church, which had hundreds upon hundreds of pupils, and which had become the school of choice for the community in which this church was located. That was the answer. Of course, sometimes we can look for other answers, other reasons why churches grow and why churches shrink. But sometimes we overlook the obvious ones. The obvious ones. They took me on a tour of the school, and I was quite taken aback at how modern, attractive the school was, how positive it was, and the effect that it had on the community. To the point, like I said, if someone was thinking of sending their child to school, that was the go-to school to send your child. That was the reason why this church was full of young people. So, there was a Christ-centered, God-honouring philosophy which pervaded the curriculum that was taught, the discipline that was enforced. I don't mean discipline in the narrow sense of punishment. I mean the general sense of what you fear and what you respect. The general ethos. Working for the benefit of the Kingdom of God. And it was at that point for me that the penny dropped. You know yourself how in issues like this sometimes it just comes to a moment. I mean, conversion is like that. Maybe many of you can say that you learnt this and you learnt that and you went this way and that way and then a penny dropped. Well, that's what happened. The penny dropped. It all clicked. And from that point I was, well, you could say converted. I was converted to Christian education. Then I began to read and to think and to pray while I was still in Canada, on my last year in Canada, and I made a few discoveries. I was situated, the internet wasn't an in thing then, I don't know if it was a thing at all then, it possibly was, but it certainly wasn't an in thing. But I was located right beside the Ontario Theological Seminary. And it was easy for me to study these things. I discovered first the importance of education in the Scottish Reformation and Christian mission and Christian discipleship generally, all across the world. Education was always central to the work of the church. The second thing I discovered, even over there, was the rich educational heritage that Scotland actually had. I was staggered to discover that both Moray House and Jordan Hill were teacher training institutions for Christian teachers. That's what they were established for. In fact, at the time, it was for free church teachers who were not allowed to teach once the disruption had taken place. So the answer to that was not just to pull out, but actually to set up something new. So these vast institutions were set up to train Christian teachers. And Jordan Hill School, which is located beside Jordan Hill College. was just a model school, so that the teaching regarding teaching that was going on in the college would be modeled out in Jordan Hills School. That's the function of that school. So there was a rich Scottish educational heritage of Christian teaching. I discovered that. I discovered that prior to the education act in 1872 most schools in Scotland were run by the church and certainly the best schools were run by the church. That was why states said you can keep running them and we'll pay you for doing so. It sounded good, but the devil was in the detail. And he was in the detail. When the church handed over these schools, and we're talking, I don't know how many schools, certainly at the time when I was studying it, the free church to which I belonged to then had over 600 schools in Scotland. There were other parish schools run by parish church too. But when the churches handed these over, I discovered that that was in parallel with the church beginning to abdicate her own real interest and involvement in her children. And increasingly, the church started to rely on the Sabbath school as an institution to teach and equip her own children. Big mistake. It's a big mistake because the Sabbath school meets for at most an hour a week. That doesn't compete with 30 hours a week. The Sabbath school as an institution was really reluctantly accepted in Scotland. Really reluctantly. It was of English origin. The fear in the Scottish churches was that if you began Sabbath school, parents would lose the incentive and the motivation to teach their own children. And, well, I suppose you could say that, interestingly, that's what happened. In fact, when these Sunday schools began, they were for the unchurched children. That was their mission, to reach children that were not in church and were not even in school, so that they were getting no education. If you had told our forefathers then that we would have this situation now, they wouldn't have believed it. Believe me, they would not have believed it. Fifth thing I discovered was that most people drift away from church at around the time they are nearly coming out of the education system. Now, you may say, well, that's just coincidence. That's just due to the fact that they're teenagers. Nothing is due to the fact that they're teenagers. The Bible doesn't speak about expecting teenage rebellion. It just doesn't. Society conditions us into accepting these things. But the fact of the matter is that once a child has moved from the age of five to the age of 18, in a system that is humanistic in its philosophy, relativistic in its ethics, and not Christian in its ethos and discipline, that child, which has now become a man or a woman, feels that there's a fundamental disconnect between their Sunday life and their weekday life. There's a fundamental disconnect between the church and the real world out there, and there's a fundamental disconnect between the minister, perhaps, and the elders, who are really Sunday people, and their own parents, who maybe don't know enough compared to the teachers and the system that have been training them to think like this. And surprise, surprise, when they're trained to think like that, they do. They do. But sometimes I may say, no, I'm teaching nothing automatic. I'm not saying that if you do the right thing, that it's like pressing the buttons and you get the right outcome. For a host of reasons that I don't have time to go into, it's not like that. But there is nothing in the world as surprising as Christians who are surprised that their children reject Christian teaching when they have exposed them to non-Christian teaching for most of their lives. There's nothing as surprising as that. When we think about it, does it not really stand to reason? So the drift away from church occurs just about when the education system is finishing. The sixth thing that I discovered was that the worse the situation got, the less the church seemed to care. When I think back myself, there was far more interest in the church, in the state of education, 40 years ago, than there has been in the last 10 years. Far more interest. I was minister here 25 odd years ago, in the free church in Stornoway at the turn of the century which makes it sound a long time ago. My predecessor was a minister called Murdo Alec MacLeod but his predecessor was a man called Murdo MacRitchie who was there mainly in the late 60s and in the 70s. He chose as his theme for his motivatorial address the need for Christian education, which was well received in the assembly. I would think that was in the 70s at some time. Maybe there's one or two here who know better. It was well received. It was widely discussed. And he then thought it was time for Christians to be mobilized because of what has happened in Christian education. We're talking about 70s. Far more concern then And it seems to me that five to ten years ago it was almost impossible to get a Christian to think seriously about an alternative approach to education. a real approach to education and a biblical and genuine approach to Christianity, to Christian education. So it's amazing really, but the worse the situation got, the less the church seemed to care. And I suppose that's got something to do with the effect that compromise has on us generally. If you just learn to accept things, well, you make a habit of accepting the things. And at the end of the day, it almost doesn't really matter what it is you're accepting, because you've made a habit of accepting it. And you accept the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing. And even in the 1970s, significantly, when Professor John Murray came over, who was a famous theologian in Princeton first and then Westminster, he tried to establish a Christian school which ran for a while in the north of Scotland. He immediately recognised the shocking difference in the state of education from when he had left in I think 29 and came back in 1975. He just thought this has completely changed in its ethos, in its approach, and of course he had been used to something different in American. But the church was difficult to mobilise. And it seems to me over the last 30 years, I've been a minister for 33 years now, but every time something collapses in the national system, There's a brief outrage on the part of the Krishna community. How can this happen? And how can they do this? And then, oh, well, we need to do something soon. And then there's an acceptance of it. That's just the way it goes. Now, in Canada, we homeschooled for a while. It was difficult to do. I'm not at all opposed to homeschooling. How can I be? But it's difficult to do, and I admire those who do it. In Stornowy here, we were involved with setting up this school. And in Glasgow, there is a Christian school which is thriving now and flourishing, because it itself reached that point, I think, a difficult point, but got through it, and now there's a waiting list. The Tron as a church have come on board, and it seems to be spreading a bit. So, that's just how I came to be convinced of Christian education myself. second now you're saying second well he said that was the biggest point so well it is probably just going to be a wee bit longer but anyway we'll see how that goes the second thing is why it is vitally important and i mean that um strictly speaking taking the word vitally to do with vitae to do with life why it is important for life for the life of our children for our own life too And I think we need to look first at what the situation should be, and then when we see what it should be, we're better able to see what's wrong, what's really gone wrong. Because when you look around and think something's wrong, sometimes you don't realise what actually is wrong, or the reason that it's wrong. Some people are surprised at what's going on in school today. Well, speaking personally, I'm not at all surprised at what's going on in school today. the confusion of the sexes, the confusion of the gender, transgenderism, all that. None of that is a surprise to me. The philosophical groundwork for that has been laid in schools over many, many years. Many, many years. There was an inevitability to this. I suppose in some ways the only thing that is a surprise is the speed of it. But that shouldn't really be a surprise because the groundwork was done a long time ago. Now all this takes us back to basics. What is Christian education? And again that sounds as though I'm going to start a huge topic. What is Christian education? We need to define our terms. What is it? I don't even know if Christian education is the best term to describe what we're doing, but in any case, what is it? Let's begin with education. Now, I always say that you learn a lot simply by looking at a word, seeing where it comes from, and how it was made up in the first place. Most words are built up with other smaller words, and when you look at the history of a word or its etymology, it can sometimes tell you an awful lot, and that's true with education. It comes from the Latin, a compound, ex, which means out of, and docere, which means to lead. So, education is leading out or guiding out. Now, where are you leading to? Good question. You're leading out of somewhere, obviously to somewhere, yes. You're guiding out of something to something, yes. Leading and guiding. And that reminds us right away that the ideas of leading and guiding are at the heart of education. If you think, or if I think of education as simply being a process of imparting facts, we don't understand education at all. And if you think all that a school should do is simply impart facts, then you are not educating your child in that school. Your vision is truncated. Your conception of education is wrong. It's not to do simply with teaching facts. It's to do with leading and guiding the child. And that's why in the Latin, educare or educatio meant train. Train, which is really what we are trying to do with our children, training them. And that's why teachers are so important. They are undervalued in society generally. There's a whole host of reasons for that. But as Christians, we should absolutely value the concept of a teacher very, very highly. They are training your children, not simply teaching them. We've got to understand that. Leading out and guiding them out. But like I said, leading them out of what? Or, flip side of that, leading them into what? Well, educare, or education, is to lead from one state into another. Now, please make the effort to follow this, because it's very important. To educate your child is to lead them from one state into another. What states from childhood to adulthood, from immaturity to maturity? That's why it was called the training of a child. Now people sometimes speak about lifelong learning and lifelong education. That's fine. These concepts are okay and there's nothing wrong with the word education used in that general sense. Lifelong training, lifelong education. But originally it had a very defined range of meaning. To educate your child was to bring them from the state of childhood to adulthood. In other words, there was an arrival point in their educational process. where they had reached their majority or their maturity. They were now adults, well-established, well able to think, to reason, to work things out, to come to conclusions, to have convictions, to apply these convictions to their own lives, to apply them to the lives of others, and to apply them to the world around them. They have arrived. They are educated. The process begins early and it stops there, at the arrival of adulthood. Like I said, we all know what goes on, but in the sense of education, it stops there. You've done it. They have matured. They have attained to adulthood. Now, of course, When we think of this process of leading our children from immaturity to maturity, or childhood to adulthood, we immediately think, well, that's the role of the parents. Well, of course, absolutely it is. In fact, the Bible places the responsibility of it squarely upon the fathers. Historically, for various reasons, When delegated it, or a lot of it, we delegate it to tutors, we delegate it to teachers, but the responsibility always remains yours as a parent. You will give account to God, as I will, as parents, for how we have led and guided our children from childhood to adulthood, from immaturity to maturity. They're yours, the children, yours. They are not the state's. And although I'm not going to go into this in any great detail, in fact, in any detail at all, it's still worth mentioning that ever since ancient Greece and the days of Plato, there has been a competing school of thought that sees children as under the ownership of the state, and that their education is the responsibility of the state and the privilege of the state. Plato was quite explicit. I mean, in Plato's ideal world, in Plato's ideal republic, there would be certain women consecrated to childbearing, the others would be working for tax dollars for the government, of course, but there would be a certain number of women who were fit women who would be dedicated to childbearing, the children would be taken off them, raised professionally, by the state so that they would think the way the state wants them to think, act the way the state believes they would act, vote the way the state believes that they should vote if they eventually have a vote at all. They belong to the state. As a Christian, you need to fight that thinking all the time. The responsibility for teaching your child is not the government. It's yours. Yours. If you delegate it, you do so at your choice. But the real question for all parents, not just those who are here today, but those who may be watching another time, who will you entrust the leading and guidance of your child to? If you entrusted to the state, who in the state, under what philosophy, under what teaching, under what form of guidance. Now, let me back up a little bit. If that's what education is, the leading and guiding of your child, It immediately follows, and we all know this deep down, it follows that education is about the whole child. The whole child. Not the brain. But the brain and the heart. Their whole being. Their personality. Who they are. as individuals created by God. Education is about leading and guiding the whole child. Doesn't that make the school an important institution? If that's where you are actually going to send your child, whatever school it is, doesn't that make it an important institution? It will lead and guide your child. their thought process, in their decisions, and so on, from childhood to adulthood. Education, in other words, is about values and ethics, as well as about facts. You can't separate facts from the value system in which these facts exist. You'll always be telling the children what to do with the facts that you're actually teaching them. You can't help it. Every fact, like I said earlier, has its context. You've got to see it inside some kind of framework. And by the way, the teacher will help that child to construct that framework into which they place every act. The teacher forms the child's worldview as well as filling it up with individual facts. This is important. And the more we understand of this, the more important it gets. So the teacher, first of all, let's say just teaches a fact. He or she then teaches the child how to understand or interpret that fact inside a worldview. The teacher then will help the child evaluate that fact as something that is good or bad or neutral, and the teacher will help that child to apply the fact to his own or her own life and to the lives of others. Let me take really basic stuff, and I mean really, really basic things. Your child goes to school. He's a boy. He's introduced to a girl. The teacher will be, under your care, responsible for the most basic stuff in the world, for telling that boy what that girl is, what his responsibilities should be towards that girl, what her responsibilities are towards the boy. Do you see right away that the simple act of introducing one sex to another immediately finds a space in a value system? And that value system will either be Christian or it will be anti-Christian. Because there is no neutrality. There never was any neutrality. There can't be any neutrality. It is a philosophical impossibility. Immediately it's inside a value system. So a teacher wants to teach your child about animals. Immediately questions arise about how you treat the animal. What is the animal? Is it a thing or is it a creation of God? Is it okay to kill it or is it wrong to eat meat or to eat animals? or perish the thought are these animals maybe equal to us of equal value to us you'll notice the increasing tendency in our cultures not to kill animals that are responsible for the death of people even though the bible makes it plain that that should be done and increasingly the voices are heard well it's just their nature and they can't help it god's word says no but here you are you see you can't even talk about an animal without an ethical worldview It's got to permeate. It has to. Because that's, like I said earlier, what teaching is called. And the teacher knows that. Teachers know that. The leading and guiding of a child to adulthood, from immaturity to maturity. That's the business of a real teacher. When I say every teacher knows that, every teacher worth his or her salt knows that. Salt, by the way, comes from the Latin word which is related to your salary. Every teacher worth their salary knows that. Salary and salt are the same thing. Roman soldiers used to be paid in salt because it was so highly valued. That's why your salary is called your salary. Any teacher worthy of their salary knows that that's how they view your child. Not as a computer to be programmed, but a soul, soul to be shaped and formed and guided to be what God wants that child to be. That's a school. That's how a school should function. There lies the importance of a teacher's calling. There lies the opportunity that a teacher has to be a missionary and a disciple of her children. And there lies the danger of having the wrong teacher. And the less a teacher, if you've got a really conscientious teacher, and we're thankful to have known them, if you've got a really conscientious teacher with a genuine view of their calling under God, two children, they will be increasingly frustrated, they will have a sense of hopelessness, a sense of real deep frustration with the way things are in the system, because they're not able to educate the child, at least not properly. And when I say that every teacher worth their salt or their salary knows that, those who design systems of education know that too. They know that education is a big broad thing. They know that they're concerned with the development of the whole child. Now let's just take our own country for example. Scotland has its own separate education system. As far as I'm concerned, in many respects, it's in a far less healthy state than the English system. Far less healthy. But these educators, and the people who devise curricula, they know that they are educating the whole child. The worldview of the child, the guidance of the child, and the overall discipline of the child. And that's why the current system of education in Scotland is so successful. Now if you wonder what I mean by being successful, what I mean by being successful is that it's achieving exactly what they intended it to achieve. Those who devised our curricula and those who have set up what we have now are people who wanted our children to be humanistic in their philosophy. They wanted them to be relativistic in their ethics. which means that they are tolerant of everything except intolerance. And the only thing that is sinful and wrong is a bigot. Otherwise, it's open season. That's what they wanted. They also wanted agnosticism in religion. That's the design of the curriculum. It's not an accident, it's the design, that's what they want. And the myth is that all this is done from a position of neutrality, so that you can look at the whole world from a kind of neutral position. And when I say that the system is successful, what I mean is that the education system in Scotland has produced thousands upon thousands upon thousands of humanistic, relativistic and agnostic teenagers. Because that's what they were intended to be. It's a success. And you have to say, however much through gritted teeth, well done, And it's no wonder there are educationalists in other countries who admire Scotland for their success in making their education system thoroughly humanistic and thoroughly sick. And there are still people who think that if there's something called RNA, everything's okay. No, it's not. They have actually led ill children from immaturity to maturity in the way that they wanted to. Now, this kind of picture that I'm giving you of education is reflected in the Bible. The Bible, of course, is the foundation of every subject we study, every discipline within education itself. It's the foundation of it. If you think that it's not, that's because you've had a secular education. And you think, oh, the Bible belongs to that compartment there. The Bible belongs to Bible study. The Bible belongs to religion. It belongs to the study of religion. That's a sign that not only that you've gone through the wrong system, but that you've been moulded by that wrong system. The Bible is the foundation of all knowledge and all study, because it is the revelation of our Creator God of Himself, and His revelation to you of who you are yourself. All knowledge begins there and flows from there. If you haven't got that right, you've got nothing right. Back to Oxford and Cambridge again. So the Bible teaches the same way. Paul tells us when he's dealing with the fifth commandment, we tend to, which actually we're looking at in our own church at the moment, But we tend very much to view it from the bottom up, our children to honour or respect their fathers and their mothers. Of course, like every other commandment, it has its flip side. And Paul says to the parents that if you're going to raise children who know how to respect and honour and obey, then you've got to raise these children in a particular way. You mustn't provoke them to anger or provoke them to frustration. which leads to hopelessness and despair, which a lot of our children are gradually moving into, even from Christian homes. Don't, he says, raise them like that, he says, but raise them up in the Lord's throne. Now, the word raise up in the Greek language means, surprise, surprise, the same as educare in the Latin. It means to lead from one stage to another. It's not familiar. Raise up your child, bring your child from one stage to the other. I'll tell you something interesting about it. Another interesting thing about the Greek word, therefore, raise up your child, not only does it mean to move your child from one stage to the next, but it also inside it has the Greek word for feeding. Feeding. And isn't that interesting? It means that to raise your child from childhood to adulthood, or from immaturity to maturity, or from their minority to their majority, you have got to feed them. In here and in here. Feed their hearts. Feed their minds. If you just feed their minds, they're going to be in trouble. You've got to feed their minds. You've got to feed their hearts. We're familiar, of course, with the fact that we all nourish our children with ordinary food physically. We feed our children what is good and what is needful. We have ways of making sure that we don't just feed them what they like. We think their nutrition is important. To grow in their bodies, their skeletal structure, just grow physically from childhood to adulthood, we feed them with proper food. And we balance out that diet. Well, Paul says, that's what you've got to do with their souls and their minds. You feed them. Feed them with what? Well, he says, with the Lord's training. What is the Lord's training? Well, what's any training? Training is knowledge plus discipline. Again, I don't mean discipline in the narrow sense of a smack. I mean discipline in the wider sense of knowing what's right or wrong. fearing the wrong thing, loving the right thing, respecting that which should be respected, and respecting those who deserve respect, and abhorring those who are leading in a wrong direction. you're feeding them feeding them to assess to think to evaluate to make judgments critically all the time now that's happening to children wherever they're being educated it's happening to them sometimes you've got the unfortunate experience perhaps of seeing your child just being fed the wrong thing and you see it happening and you're saying how's this happening All they're learning in the school surely is two and two is four. No, it's not, because their educators are far wiser than that. They are cultivating their entire personality in the direction that they wish it to go. The Lord's teaching and discipline is so much, so much more different in every way than that. We mustn't separate, like I said, facts and values and the ethics system. God says, this is my world, and it's governed by my standards. And you must teach your children that. You must teach them that solidly so that they grow stable and certain and sure of the world they live in and who they are from a Christian worldview when their education is finished. And if they arrive at that, their education has been a success. If you're not feeding your children, someone else is. Someone else is. And when I said earlier that Christian education is, in some ways, a strange term, of course, in most ways, it's the right term. But what I want to understand by it is that it's the only show in town. When it comes to the education of our children, it's the only one that's actually valid. Any form of education that does not have a Christ at its centre is defective, and it's fundamentally defective, and the defect will reach your child's heart as well as your child's mind. It has to, because God doesn't have its place in it. So Paul says, raise your children like that. Now in the light of that, What's gone wrong and why? I'm aiming for maybe 10 more minutes. I hope that's it. If anybody has to leave, by all means, just leave before that. But I'm aiming for 10 more minutes. What's gone wrong and why? Well, you sometimes hear bulletins, you know, you'll hear them on Radio Scotland, you'll hear them on the BBC, falling standards, poor literacy, poor numeracy and increasingly, of course, poor discipline. You hear stories of teachers being put up against a wall and there's nothing much that can be done because the entire disciplinary system has broken down. But why has it broken down? Why is there poor literacy? Why is there poor numeracy? And why are things increasingly out of control? Well, all these things are symptoms, and I hope we understand that now. They're symptoms, and they are inevitable symptoms. They're bound to appear when the patient has the particular sickness that it's got. The problem in the schools is it's got to do with bad teachers. There always have been bad teachers, and there probably always will be. Ministers are not exempt from that either. Neither is any other class of people. But the problem is the philosophy being applied by the state to the running of the schools. The aims and objectives that these educators are trying to achieve. That's where it's all wrong. And because it's wrong there, everything is going to be wrong. Except now and again something's right, just like a broken clock is right twice in the day. The philosophy that reveals, of course, is materialism, that this world is all that there is. and therefore the educational system will have underlying it the philosophy of evolution. And I mean evolution as a philosophy. I'm not talking about the adaptation of species, which is something that as Christians we're always happy with. Every Christian who is a thinking Christian has always been happy with the idea that every species evolves and that there is considerable latitude in its evolution. Adam and Eve, I'm sure, were both the same colour, but from that genetic pool you've got the wide diversity that we have today. When I speak about evolution here, I'm talking about materialistic evolution, the philosophy of evolution, which means that we came from nothing to goo to you. That's how it's sometimes described. From nothing to goob, a mess, to you. Which means no beginning, no design and no purpose. And children can't help but detect that. Can't help but detect that. It doesn't matter how often they're told you are important and you are special. The whole philosophy of education they're receiving teaches them that they're not important and that they're not special. Who are you kidding? After all, if it is nothing to goo to you, I'm not special. I'm no more special than a dog. And as well as being evolutionary, it is humanistic. And by humanistic, I mean that man is at the centre. And in the current system of education, man is at the centre. Man, male, female is at the centre. Whatever that means today, by the way. But man, male and female is at the centre. In other words, it's all about us, our achievement, what you can earn, what status that you have, and even when it's not supposed to be about men and women, it always actually is. And even religion is to be seen as from our viewpoint and how man has viewed religion. It's never a case of what God has said. It's what we think And that's how they are taught to think. And of course, because these things are true, the ethic that prevails in the school is one of relatives. You know that. You know sometimes you're dealing with children who have been brought up in Christian homes, but they don't get enough teaching in the church, they don't get enough teaching at home. Because the bulk of their teachings in the school, and you just discover all the time, they're so relativistic in their thinking. Everything is relative. Like I said, they've got tolerance for everything and everyone except the intolerant. There's no place for bigots. Now this philosophy, like a virus, has been working in schools for generations. It's now taken over the system. The virus has taken over the system and it has disabled it. And the worldview of nearly all our children has been destroyed. It's actually been destroyed. And the system has fostered characters that are secularized. absolutely so, and they have less and less patience for our worldview, which is God's worldview, and the true worldview. And it's now increasingly the case, and I don't mean to be unnecessarily stark or whatever by saying this, but if you're now going to choose a system of education that prioritises ethical relativism, humanism and evolutionary thinking, you must not be surprised if your child turns out that way. And you will discover that on our Sunday School, and the best that you can give after a day's work or a week's work, you'll be surprised if it is not able to counteract what they've absorbed from their peers and from their official educators to whom you have entrusted them. And I suppose it's a fair enough conclusion for them to draw eventually that if you thought they were okay to educate you, they are probably right. And it's amazing how many children, when they grow up, they end up saying things like, well, you know, my parents believed this all right, but I know more than they do. And the system has moved on since they went through the system. And I'll try and respect what they hold to, but I don't really hold to it. Well, you asked for it. You did ask for it. That's the deal we made when we sent them. That's the deal you made. Now, this is an old problem, of course. I mentioned already that Christian education was deeply entrenched in this country, as in many of Reformed countries obviously, 1872 was a watershed moment because it was at that point that the Church said, okay, to the state, you take control, but take control on condition that that you respect the religious character of our education. By the way, notice they didn't say respect our RE. RE's a red herring when it comes to Christian schools. Please drop RME and RE. These things are red herrings. What the church leader said to the state at the time was keep the religious character of our education. Make sure that right across the board it is seen in the light of God and his word. That was the bargain. Well you all know what happened with that bargain. At least it's quite evident or it should be quite evident today what's happened with that bargain. And I've seen for years and years, just what I referred to earlier, people thinking that if there's an assembly in the school, then the school's okay. If the school needs an assembly, it's not okay. That's the point. Of course, it's good when the school has it. Of course, that's right. But if it needs it to make it somehow a Christian school, that's a guarantee that it's not a Christian school. So the school should be pervaded. by the Word of God and the standard of God's Word in its curriculum, in its ethos, and in its discipline. And as Christians and churches, We've done too little, and we've done it too late. And I, long ago, became weary of these anecdotes about a child who mentioned Jesus in the playground, or a minister who came in and mentioned Jesus, or something like this. And I'm saying, are we supposed to think that this is wonderful? You know, when God is calling us to do something so great, and we think these little things are somehow Christianizing our schools or justifying the system, they're not. There have been heads who have tried to hold out, Christian teachers who have tried hard to do something in the system, but I think sometimes Christian teachers meet the front up here and say, look, the truth is we actually can't do much. we want to do something, we know we should be doing something, we want to tell these children, we want to educate these children, we want to train these children, but we can't do it. We can't do it. And in fact, we just become channels of this system coming through us even when we don't want to do that. And that's why Christian education is a call to teachers as well as to parents. I'm not saying that you can't try and do what you can do. We all do that wherever we are. But look, there's so much more to be done. So much more to be done. And you can only, I mean, if a Christian teacher is starting out on half his or her salary, but is starting out with the absolute freedom to take a child and to mould that child for God under the blessing of the parent, wow, I'll take that. That's the job for me. That's the job for me, where I can actually be a teacher, where I can educate, where I can nurture and nourish. teacher has the privilege of being a missionary and a discipler. That's huge. Let's say your Christian school is inclusive in the best sense of the term. It's funny how prevailing philosophies make words that we all liked very objectionable. But we want to make a school genuinely inclusive for unbelievers, rich and for poor, going back to what I said in Canada you you want to be in the place where somebody let's say let's say you can say a single mother who's having difficulty with a child say well that that school does something different that school has a genuine holistic approach to a child which actually changes the child changes the child let's say you have that well you become a missionary And when you've got Christian parents who say, please, will you take my child? And will you transition them from childhood to adulthood in their minds and in their hearts and in their souls? That teacher says, this is my calling. This is my calling. And teachers who see their calling like that are blessed. blessed to be able to live it out, and the parents who know teachers who take their task like that are really blessed parents too. Now, I had a lot more to say. It's not going to be said, well, that's that, I just have to leave it. As always with these things, the problem is knowing what to leave out. But in any case, I want to conclude with one and a half minutes about my experience of Krishna Yudhi Kilsha, and I can put it into one and a half minutes. When we established with other friends who, like I said earlier, did most of the work, there was a group of us as concerned parents. And that's all it takes, by the way. That's all it takes. Concerned parents and other people, too, who are willing to help. When we established the school, I have no difficulty and no hesitation in saying to people that they were the best educational years in our family's lives. That's just a fact. And that's in spite of the fact that we couldn't get a school functioning in Glasgow for a long time. Our children attended schools that would be considered amongst the best in Glasgow, not as good as here. That's a fact, and I just say that as a fact. Not as good as here. One person in our own family, because I'm a peripatetic minister going around the place, One child in our family was in five primary schools, a secondary school, and went pretty far in further education. His best teacher and favourite teacher is Mrs McDonnell, who is here this evening. I think that says a lot, because that person who's now an adult knows very well who was reaching the mind and the heart and bringing them up in the best possible way. Mrs Macdonald I remember the meeting, forgive me addressing you personally, but at which you heard really the call yourself to dedicate yourself in your 50th year and I know how much your wage must have been slashed but you did it for the Lord. And I don't know where that's acknowledged, but I want to say publicly tonight that it was acknowledged by many people, very much so. What did our children notice? And I'm closing with this. And if you're listening to this at any point as a prospective parent, hear me. What happens to the children when they go to a Christian school? Number one, if they transition that's another word that's being abused but anyway they first of all become happier you'll notice it right away second thing you'll notice is that they become genuinely more interested in the bible you'll notice it right away Third, you'll notice that they become more interested in learning generally. You'll notice it right away. They look forward to school more. You'll notice it right away. They take more interest in your worship in the house. You'll notice it right away. And they'll have a sense, even in their younger stages, of wholeness between the home and the church and the school. It's as though your children are saying, at last, Everything's right. And the stool is sitting on its three legs, not wobbling around on two. And really, tonight, the ball is very much in your own court. I really want you to understand that. Most of the influence on your child will be from their peers and from their teachers. Process that. And don't look to the church I'd like to be able to see to you to look to the church but the church is miles behind on this kind of thing. Has been for years and years and years. Churches today think they're cutting edge if they put TV screens up and chairs everywhere. That doesn't address the problems. Not at all. Who is going to lead and guide your child from five to 18? Which philosophy, which ethic, and which discipline? Somebody is feeding your child. The question is, who is it going to be? Your child, your choice. And when you stand before the judgment seat, it's your responsibility. Thank you for listening.