Posted on 09/11/2006 7:10:26 PM PDT by sionnsar
Largely from my years of involvement in youth ministry, I’ve seen several Christian schools in action. And more often than not, I don’t like what I see.
The problem with Christian schools (and I’m referring to the K through 12 variety) is that they commit too many of the same prevalent sins against students and families as secular schools. And since those sins now have a “Christian” label stamped on them, they often drive students away from Christianity.
For now, I’ll tackle one of those sins: excessive homework, particularly when given over weekends. Few things angered me as a student than being assigned a lot of homework on Friday due Monday. That practice can still make me get a good rant on too many years later.
My current anger stems largely from seeing one family’s experience years ago. They had a two high school kids at my church -- the main reason I knew this family – and a good-natured 5th grade little brother. This good family often took me into their home on Sunday afternoons.
But more often than not on these visits, the 5th grade boy, who went to a prominent Christian school, had busywork homework taking up most of his Sunday afternoon . . . in 5th grade. And it was indeed busywork. I often saw little point to it.
What this homework did accomplish was make it more difficult for him to interact with family and friends and just have some relaxed weekend time that everyone needs.
The kid took it well, but I thought that something was very wrong.
There’s a girl in my current youth group that goes to another Christian school. She couldn’t go to her brother’s football game today because she had two essays due Monday, one of which was assigned Friday!
These are supposedly Christian schools. But what happened to the Judeo-Christian concept of Sabbath? What happened to respecting families and their time? Instead, most of the “Christian” schools I know engage in a one-sided competition with family time and weekends with their homework.
The typical school, Christian or otherwise, has their students for 7 hours a day, 5 days a week. If they aren’t using that time well enough that they feel they must take up multiple hours of a kid’s and family’s evenings and weekends with homework . . . . Well any school that tries to pull that on any kid and family of mine is going to hear about it.
And that’s goes double for Christian schools. They should know better. Christian schools more than others should know enough to respect family time and the need for Sabbath. Excessive homework does neither.
My husband taught at a Christian school. He had a different problem with them - at least, with the one that was associated with a church. These kids were with the same people all the time. No break. If they were the fat kid or the dumb kid at school, it carried over in church, and the other way round. They could never escape. Kids should be taught to work hard, but there are extremes all right. They should learn how to write research papers and to be careful with their work and to be responsible, but busy work? Frustrating.
Hearing of that sort of thing is one of the MANY reasons we homeschooled. The amount of time some kids spend on homework is just about the amount of time it took us to complete the days lesson for that subject, so it wasn't sitting in school all day and then doing the paperwork. It was just the paperwork time.
This ping list is for the "other" articles of interest to homeschoolers about education and public school. If you want on/off this list, please freepmail me. The main Homeschool Ping List by DaveLoneRanger handles the homeschool-specific articles.
Well, the other side of the coin would be in a public school that they are with different people sometimes; giving them a healthy (sic) dose of things like gangsta culture, "Heather has 2 Mommies", NEA leftist style indoctrination, and the like.
The people who founded the Christian schools were well-intentioned. Their idea was to give kids an education with a Christian perspective while avoiding trouble with the feds by patterning their structures after the public schools. What they didn't realize was that the structures of the public schools WERE the problem in and of themselves.
And they are continuing to imitate public schools by burying the kids under busywork.
I know a few homeschoolers who once had their children in Christian schools, too, and they said they were disappointed by the curriculum and the "busywork" there. Still, if I decided to send my kids to school, I probably would prefer a small, private, Christian school over a public school.
Well said.
I went to Catholic school through ninth grade. I'm sorry to say that the nuns in our grade school didn't teach much about science, and we never studied a foreign language. But they did give us - many of us - a strong moral foundation. That doesn't mean we didn't stray later... But, outside of English and math, some of the best learning opportunities in Catholic school were studying the life of a saint, singing in the choir, and "cleaning" the convent. (Not much to clean - it was spotless - some of us were "selected" to "clean" the convent, now I realize as a way to introduce us to the sisterhood). ;-)
The private school paradigm is modeled after the public school paradigm. That is: the "best" way to educate children is to teach them in same aged groups of 20-30.
I disagree with the paradigm. It works fine in an economy where you need workers who can show up to work on time and not much more. It's obsolete in a knowledge economy where your value is determined based on what you know and your ability to use it.
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