Parents want the best for their children. As Christians, we define “best” differently than the rest of the world. Above all else, we want our children to embrace and live out their faith for themselves, both now and as adults. To that end, we want to equip them with a biblical worldview so they can understand how to live in a world that is hostile to Jesus Christ. And the area that often has the most significant impact on a child’s worldview is the 7+ hours they spend in public school.
No, this isn’t where I say, “Pull your kids out and homeschool them!” While I think there’s great wisdom and value in homeschooling children, I also recognize that it’s not an option for some people. So, how can parents be good stewards of the young lives God has given them to guide and grow into spiritual maturity while trusting them to a public school? What can they do to help their child not join the statistical ⅔ of students who leave the church after graduation?
If I had to give a parent a single piece of advice when they send a child to public school, it would be this: Pretend you’re sending your child to a Muslim school.
Why? Let me explain.
Religious schools in disguise
We often think of public schools as secular institutions that are either indifferent or hostile to other religions. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Public schools instill their students with as much of a belief system as any religious school. Whether secular or religious, a school is led by individuals and groups that begin with assumptions about the nature of the world, society, and where we find truth. Through that framework, their goal is to instill those beliefs in the children entrusted to the school so they can produce an adult they think is best for the world.
In other words, all schools are about training a child to adopt the school’s belief system. A public school may not teach about a deity or use a religious text, but that doesn’t stop them from teaching something about our origins, morality, truth, identity, sexuality, and everything else a child would learn about in a religious school. A public school isn’t neutral – it wants to foster a set of beliefs in your child just as much as a Muslim school would try to.
So imagine you have no choice but to send your child to a Muslim school for thirteen years, knowing they’ll spend at least 7 hours every day immersed in that belief system.
What safeguards would you establish?
How often would you have intentional conversations about what they’re learning and what they believe?
How well would you want to know their friends?
What hesitations would you have about sending them there?
What steps would you take to prevent your child from becoming the ideal person according to a Muslim school’s worldview?
Compare what a Christian child would encounter throughout their 13 years at a Muslim school and an American public school. I will be intentionally brief in my comparisons, but readers should pause to consider more of what both Muslims and secular worldviews would promote during a child’s school years. If we’d devote daily time to protecting them from a Muslim worldview, why would we spend any less time protecting them from a secular, anti-God worldview?
Worldview, truth, and authority
Muslim and public schools each teach from distinct worldviews. Muslim schools base their teachings on the Quran and other Islamic traditions, training their students to embrace Muslim values. Influenced by secular culture, public schools base their teachings on societal values, which have shifted over time and are presently guided by Critical Theory. These worldviews shape what teachers they hire, the curriculum they teach, and what they condition students to value and reject.
Science
Muslim schools integrate scientific concepts like evolution and the Big Bang within Islamic traditions, aligning them with the belief that Allah created the universe. Public schools, grounded in naturalism, teach science without supernatural elements, reflecting the belief in a purely physical universe. Both approaches aim to analyze the world through these beliefs, creating a foundation for how they teach students to interpret the rest of life.
History
Muslim schools emphasize Islamic history to shape cultural pride and identity. Public schools’ portrayal of history shifts with societal values, which today focus on oppression and injustice (as defined by Critical Theory) while encouraging them not to be on the “wrong side of history” today. Both approaches aim to instill their respective worldviews in students so they can correctly interpret the past and think about who they should be in the future.
Books and other media
Muslim schools avoid content that contradicts Islamic principles. Public schools promote literature that aligns with current cultural values, including diverse lifestyles and identities. A school assigns literature to reinforce one particular worldview or teach students to be critical of beliefs the school wants them to reject.
Sexual Education
Muslim schools teach sexual ethics based on Islamic beliefs, forbidding sex outside marriage and promoting modesty and chastity so they can earn Allah’s favor (Quran 17:32). Public schools emphasize safe sex practices and acceptance of a range of sexual behaviors, reflecting societal values on sexual freedom and diversity. Both schools want their students to view sex through a certain moral standard, either as one that contributes to salvation or as something that no one should be ashamed to enjoy if it doesn’t violate society’s current standards.
Identity, purpose, and society
Muslim schools guide students to live according to Islamic teachings, focusing on the Five Pillars of Islam and living a good life so they may find favor with Allah after they die. Public schools promote the values of a secular society, encouraging acceptance and fighting injustice as defined by secular ethics and Critical Theory. Both schools aim to create individuals who find their identity in being a good person (as their worldview describes it) while encouraging them to reject beliefs, behaviors, and individuals who are detrimental to their group.
Peers and their influence
Muslim school students are likely to uphold Islamic virtues, practices, and beliefs about their purpose in life. Public school students reflect a range of societal values but will generally reflect the culture’s belief that our greatest goal in life is to be happy. Though any school will have different subcultures, the core elements of the school’s worldview will significantly impact how different groups of friends function and how an individual must compromise or perform to be accepted by their group.
Learning about Christianity
Tracing themselves back to Abraham’s son Ishmael, Muslims see the Old and New Testaments as corrupted. Though they give some credit to Jesus as a prophet, the Christian Jesus is lesser than Mohammad himself. Thus, students should expect to hear many reasons why Islam is the true religion while offering many reasons why Christianity is a perversion of the truth.
A public school will also be bold in its dismissal of Christianity. While Christian teachers wouldn’t, they also shouldn’t expect support from their school if they want to teach Christianity as a valid worldview option, let alone as actual truth. Instead, most students will encounter Christianity as an outdated worldview that denies the science of evolution, naturalism, and human psychology as it regards mental health, sexuality, and gender identity. A Christian student may not be outright persecuted, but they will hear many reasons why their beliefs are foolish when compared to the truth of what the broader culture “knows” is true.
Any sound belief system will have compelling reasons why it’s correct. Muslim and secular worldviews promise truth, and through that truth, a guarantee that following them will lead to the most fulfilling way of life. After seven hours a day for thirteen years, Christian students should expect to hear many reasons to follow the path of their school’s worldview, with their Christian convictions being either ignored, critiqued, or outright condemned.
What would you do?
A Muslim school wants to convert students into good followers of Islam. A public school wants to convert students into good followers of modern secular belief. Because biblical Christianity violates the beliefs of both, students are encouraged to compromise or outright abandon what God says is true to conform to a particular worldview.
If we recognize that a public school wants to train our child to follow the religion of the culture, we must consider how diligent we are when sending them to a religious school that wants to undermine their faith.
What safeguards would you establish?
How often would you have intentional conversations about what they’re learning and what they believe?
How well would you want to know their friends?
What hesitations would you have about sending them there?
What steps would you take to prevent your child from becoming the ideal person according to a public school’s worldview?
These aren’t easy questions, and they aren’t designed to make a parent feel guilty. For those who must send a child to a religious school, it’s vital to consider what kind of adult is being formed in their household. Parenting is a serious task given by God, and we cannot abandon our responsibility and trust another to do it for us. Sending a child to school for 7+ hours every day means we must be more diligent in intentionally training them to think biblically.
Practical advice
So what can a parent do? Over the course of 13 years, it’s impossible to list every single thing we must consider when sending a child to public school. This is especially true today when moral standards, and even the definition of words, are constantly changing. Instead, here are a few things worth keeping in mind that, I trust, will help parents be more intentional as they raise their child to the glory of God.
Recognize the path they’re trained to follow
Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it. (Proverbs 22:6 ESV)
We often think this verse promises that putting our kids in church every Sunday will keep them in the Christian faith. But this verse is just as much a warning as a promise. In fact, it’s precisely what we’ve been talking about in this article.
If a Muslim school trains a child, we shouldn’t surprised when that child becomes a good Muslim. If a public school trains a child, it’s no wonder that the child grows up to think and act like the culture. After all, if that’s what a child is taught about the world, we shouldn’t expect them to depart from it when they’re older.
A parent’s job isn’t to survive for 18 years until they regain their freedom. God doesn’t primarily call us to provide food and rides to activities. If we don’t take the lead in training our child, we invite someone else to do it in our place. Thus, we ensure that our child’s greatest influence is a solid, mature, biblical worldview taught by their parents. It’s not easy, but it’s how we glorify our God with the young life He’s given us.
To better understand how Proverbs 22:6 shapes our parenting, check out The Number One Parenting Question I Ask Myself.
Be as spiritually mature as you’d like them to be
Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ. (1 Corinthians 11:1 ESV)
Because parents are pace-setters, a child raised in a Christian home will only rise to the level their parents train them at. If we’re fighting a public school for our child’s worldview, it’s critical that we pass on the spiritual maturity they need to survive in an environment that encourages them to be their own god. Just as we cannot farm out parental responsibility to a public school, we likewise can’t give the task of equipping our child with a biblical worldview to a pastor or youth group leader.
This may be a terrifying reality for some parents. We may be content with where we are in our own spiritual walk, but would our child survive the daily pressure of a secular worldview if they had our walk with Christ? Do we want them to model how much time we spend reading and studying God’s word? Is our prayer life worth imitating? Do we know why we believe what we believe, or do we just believe things because we were told to?
Asking our child to imitate us as we imitate Christ is about far more than just going to church, reading a few Bible verses daily, and praying at meals. If we spend the bulk of our time living and thinking like the world, then our child won’t see much difference between what they see at home and what they’re exposed to in the rest of the world. They will see that their parents’ Christianity is just worldly living with some of the fun and social acceptance removed.
Let that be a motivator to strengthen our own walk with Jesus Christ. Pass on the spiritual maturity our child needs to survive in the world. Consider areas where we would be ashamed to say, “Imitate me.” Repent, then press into Jesus Christ to grow us into who our God wants us to be.
Build trust, be intentional, ask meaningful questions, and invest in their lives
Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. (Ephesians 6:4)
A parent is not a baby sitter, best friend, housekeeper, taskmaster, live-in roommate, or personal chauffeur. They are disciple-makers. They have a unique ministry to their children to train them to think and live biblically.
Trust is a key element of making disciples. By telling someone to follow our spiritual walk, they must not only want it for themselves, but trust us to lead them through joy and difficulties. If Christianity is an all-encompassing way of life, then raising our children well requires us to have access to every area of their lives. Thus, the bedrock of raising a mature disciple is working with someone who trusts us enough to invite us into the most sensitive, personal, and even shameful areas of their life.
This isn’t something that happens automatically, nor will it happen easily. A parent must be intentional every day, seeking opportunities to not only teach their child, but also ask meaningful questions, listen to the answers, and create a meaningful discussion with them. They must show their child that revealing a personal doubt or struggle won’t result in a lecture, and that their parent really is interested in not only what their child thinks, but wants to help guide them through areas of difficulty.
I cannot emphasize this enough: this requires daily investment in their lives. A child must see a consistent pattern that gets them accustomed to having meaningful discussions, rather than sporadic questions once or twice a week where they can keep their guard up. Daily investment not only allows the parent to know their child, but through frequent conversation a child will also get to know their parent. When a parent intentionally sets out to build a relationship where a child can confess they doubt God or struggle with porn, true and genuine discipleship will happen.
As the first part of this article made clear, part of this discipleship is helping them navigate what they experience in public school. Some things will take time for a child to open up about, like romantic or sexual questions, compromising for peer acceptance, regularly interacting with people of different belief systems, or wondering if a secular worldview has better answers than Christianity. However, parents can (and should) create conversations by seeing what a child is exposed to. Remember that if we sent them to a Muslim school, we’d want to be very informed about the various homework assignments, textbooks, and in-class discussions they had. Taking time to familiarize ourselves with what a public school exposes them to is a great way to establish early conversations with a child (even if it requires extra time on our part).
A child will seek someone to confide in and guide them, and that someone will gladly disciple our child if we will not.
(Note: Building this kind of relationship will be unique to each parent-child relationship. This is especially true for parents of older kids where this relationship hasn’t yet been built. If you aren’t sure what to do, consider just sitting them down and directly telling them your conviction to disciple them and discuss steps you can take together to make it happen every day. If you find that days go by where you are distant, or if you react poorly to something they say, repent, ask them for forgiveness, and keep going. Remember that your consistent actions are critical to showing them you aren’t perfect, but you are invested in being their biggest influence.)
Identify time thieves
And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. (Deuteronomy 6:6-7 ESV)
Equipping a child with a biblical worldview demands intentional, daily investment. We cannot do it on a busy Saturday or on the way home from church. We must be part of their daily lives and invite them to be part of ours.
How much time does a family have for this? According to one study, grades K-5 spend about 17.8 hours per week on non-school leisure time, while grades 6-12 have about 20.2 weekly hours of unscheduled time. As we consider this, two things are worth noting. First, this doesn’t include after-school activities like sports, band, etc. Second, this is the total throughout the week, meaning that most of these 18-20 hours of free time are likely on the weekends. So while kids statistically have almost 3 hours of free time every day, the reality is that it will be more like 1 hour after school and far more on the weekend.
I say all that to point out just how little time a family has with their kids when they follow the typical public school pattern. Parents see little of their children in the morning if they don’t drop them off at school. After 7 hours in school, kids typically attend an after-school program until dinner time. We must also factor in homework, chores, relaxation, weekly events (competitions, extra practice, hanging out with friends), not to mention the rest of the family’s schedule. How much time does a parent get to meaningfully invest in their child’s spiritual health? What influence do they have compared to everything else that gets their child’s time?
To a degree, this is the world we live in. Parents must work and kids must sleep. But how much time do we choose to surrender because we assume that we must? How many small things rob us of time throughout the day or week that might be enjoyable now but ultimately have no lasting value to the state of our child’s soul?
How much time do we need every day to raise and guide our kids compared to how much we actually invest in it?
Not only that, but we must also consider what a busy schedule with minimal family contact teaches them about life. How meaningful is their church if they can skip it for a baseball game? How important is their family if they can’t even sit together for dinner? How much should they confide in their parents when their conversations center around lectures or surface-level questions like “How was school?”
A parent with kids in public school fights two battles. We’ve discussed the battle against religious conversion, but they must also battle time itself. If we take our child’s faith seriously, we must jealously guard the time we have and fight for more. We cannot compromise how much time we require to honor God by living with our children daily. Whether that means ending their sports or our hour of TV, time is a precious treasure that we must spend on the most important things before we allow lesser activities to steal it from us.
Establish their identity in the local church
And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near. (Hebrews 10:24-25 ESV)
Although Christ saved us into a global body of believers, He also established the local church for the good of His people. Church isn’t just a social club for the happy or a hospital for the hurting. It’s no more optional than any other spiritual discipline. It’s the Christ-ordained gathering of God’s former enemies where they serve one another, weep together, receive training from their pastors, build one another up, and protect each other. All to the glory of God.
A danger in the American church is how we teach kids to think of church. Youth groups are often completely detached from the church itself, being more like a teen hangout than a place with serious teaching. Parents and pastors may have good intentions in trying to make the church feel fun and relevant to keep the interest of an entertainment-driven demographic, but it’s often at the expense of teaching kids that they are part of a multi-generational body of believers. They don’t take church seriously because it doesn’t take them seriously as full human beings with meaningful questions and sleep-stealing thoughts that they need help navigating.
And while it’s a parent’s primary responsibility to handle these things, they aren’t alone in their child’s walk anymore than the parent themselves are alone in their own walk. A family who belongs to a faithful and biblical local church is part of something that affects their life beyond just a Sunday morning. They are part of an extended family, bound together by the Holy Spirit who fills every single one of them. Individuals and entire families were brought together by a sovereign God who ordained that this group of messy and imperfect people would meet regularly and seek to live out the various “one anothers” in Scripture throughout the week.
Children must see themselves as part of this group as they navigate an individualistic culture that trains them to find their truth and identity within themselves. Get involved in the people part of the church, not just activities. Lead by example and show them how to have meaningful discussions with individuals and groups. Let them see that their beliefs aren’t unique to them, but that they are part of a greater tradition of people who are hated by the world.
One of many benefits to this is that it combats the feeling of being alone in their beliefs when attending a school that gives them reasons to doubt their faith. They can see they aren’t weirdos going against the grain, but that they truly are foreigners in a hostile land. They will see they aren’t outsiders who need to fit in to the culture, but instead that they are part of a family who pursues the truth of God without compromise. Whatever doubts they have, they can find someone in their local church who has had similar doubts and would love to strengthen our child’s faith right alongside us.
We make the church valuable to them by making it valuable to us.
Closing thoughts
Public education is costly to any Christian family involved in it. For some, it costs a child’s faith and convictions as the school converts them to the religion of the culture. For others, it costs them a great deal of time, energy, and fun experiences as parents jealously guard the time required to be the greatest influence in their young disciple’s life.
What we’ve discussed isn’t easy. It’s far too tempting to trust our children to the experts, going with the culture’s belief that we aren’t equipped to give them the best life possible. Yet if we take our God-given job as parents seriously, we must embrace God’s charge to teach them regularly through intentional discipleship.
All children need someone to teach them how to think about themselves and the world around them. If we surrender our children to a religious institution that wants to convert them into good members of a secular society, we cannot be surprised when they become what they’ve been trained to become. If we want to build a solid faith in them, we must help them fight against the constant exposure
Sending a child to public school isn’t sinful. However, it demands more from a parent than they may assume. They must devote themselves to growing into a mature faith they want to pass on to their child. They must constantly be aware of what a child is learning and prepared to explain why Christianity isn’t just an alternative option, but the only source of truth. They must maximize every moment that isn’t given over to necessary activities, often forgoing opportunities for themselves or their children because they care more about the adult they’re raising than experiencing what culture tells them they need. They must use this time to both enjoy their child while also honoring Christ by being a serious disciple-maker.
Parents with kids in public school, please don’t be discouraged. God didn’t make a mistake by entrusting this young life to you. Those who take their role seriously will experience great joy as they realize how much they must truly rest in Christ as they pursue spiritual maturity for themselves and their children. When they see the work of the Holy Spirit growing and guiding their child from adolescence into an adult who faithfully follows their Savior, they will shout praises.
Parents who take their job seriously will also find great comfort when a child still leaves the faith, knowing that they were faithful in their task and trusting that their good God knows what He’s doing.
There are no guarantees. A child abandoned to the public school system can graduate with a strong faith. One whose parents invested everything in guiding them may still wander. We aren’t looking for the perfect system with the best results. Instead, we seek to faithfully serve our God by understanding what He calls parents to do, then doing it.
If you take nothing else from this article, understand that the public school is a religious system trying to convert your child. Think about how you’d guide your child if you had to send them to a Muslim school and exercise the same amount of diligence and faithfulness every single day. It won’t be easy, but there is always immeasurable joy when we surrender our lives to serving our God as He calls us to.
