Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Speaker A: Welcome to the Truth Exchange podcast. This is a weekly program with Doctor Jeffrey J. Ventrella where he answers questions from subscribers around the globe, answering questions about worldview, cultural apologetics, and other miscellaneous items. I'm your host, Joshua Guillotine, and this is another edition of the director's Bag.
This is the Truth Exchange podcast, a preliminary symposium edition where we discuss the upcoming event, every square inch, taking Christ's lordship to the streets with our speakers and giving a glimpse into the theme of that symposium as well as the subject of their talk. I'm your host, Joshua Gilo, along with Doctor Jeffrey J. Ventrella. And today's guest is Doctor Joseph Boot, who is a pastor educator, a truth exchange scholar, as well as fellow. He is a pastor educator, founder of a number of christian schools, and he's been invited to talk about christian education.
So please join us with Truth exchange on the 30th through the 31 August in Pasadena, California at Providence Christian College, where you will explore, you'll be equipped and challenged to take Christ's lordship to the streets where everyday life is lived. Every square inch of creation is Christ. Let's live like it, and let's do it together.
Doctor Boot, welcome to the program.
[00:01:34] Speaker B: Thanks for having me on. Josh. Jeffrey, great to be with you. Looking forward to this exciting conference coming up in August.
[00:01:41] Speaker A: Doctor Boot, you have been tasked with the subject of christian education, and I wondered if you could take our listeners through kind of an overview of what is christian education versus regular education or secular education? Or is there an antithesis to christian education like pagan education?
Many listeners would probably think, well, didn't education exist beyond the christian church or Christendom? And didn't the great pagans bring us things like the pythagorean theorem, a squared plus b squared equals c squared without the, the involvement of the church?
[00:02:22] Speaker B: Sure. Well, there's a lot of questions there, and they're all really important ones. They're good ones.
My work has been not just to reflect on these questions academically, but I've actually had the privilege of being involved in setting up christian schools. So in Toronto, I was the founding chancellor of Westminster Classical Christianity Academy, and I've helped a number of other classical christian schools get off the ground in Canada and beyond.
And I'm also the founder and president of the Ezra Institute, which is an educational and worldview training organization and christian think tank. I mention that because the question really of world and life view is at the root of the issue of education.
So this is a, if I can introduce the idea of structure and direction, this is a structure and direction question. When we think about education, it's impossible. For as the apostle Paul makes clear, actually, in Romans chapter one, which I know is a very important text for truth exchange, that there is the worship of the creator and there is the worship of the creature at the root of every worldview. There's a fundamental antithesis there that the apostle Paul talks about. And of course, that is built in inescapably to the idea of education. Now, it's true that the structure of education may look very similar between the Christian and the non Christian.
Non Christians have schools, they have universities. Although the university is really a christian development, they. They're run today and often dominated by non Christians. Non Christians pursue, of course, education.
And when it comes to, I think you mentioned pythagoras, which is an interesting illustrator issue, actually, the area of math, which is often thought of as the most neutral of subjects, because, you know, you could talk about history or literature, the humanities, you know, the various subjects within the humanities especially, and see very clear worldview ish religious antithesis in the way they're taught and addressed. Math is often thought of as well. You know, two plus two is four for the Christian as well as the non Christian. But actually, the Pythagoreans believe that all of reality itself was rooted in creation itself was rooted in number, not. Not the living God. So the fact the Pythagoreans worshipped numbers, they composed hymns to the number ten.
It's interesting you can read their hymns to numbers. It was literally, numbers were their divine per se. That was their numbers were their divinity concept. So at the root of education is the question of world and life view, the ultimacy of one concept of the divine or another. And so though the structure of mathematics will look similar in a christian and a non christian school, the times tables are going to look the same.
Much of the structure of what's being done will look the same. But the most fundamental question, what are numbers?
The direction of education in mathematics will be different. I think it was Cornelius van Till, certainly one of my favorite christian apologists, who said the non believer can count, but he cannot account for counting the law of mathematics. The laws for the arithmetical aspect of created reality can be used to cut in different directions. Van Til would say, you can try and you use math to get further away from God, or you can use mathematics to deepen your understanding of God's order and structure for reality. And the reality is Josh, the philosophers and the mathematicians, there are different schools of mathematics.
The intuitionist school and the rationalist school and so on. And the philosophers aren't agreed about what numbers are, because that is a worldview question. So there, in this most neutral of subjects, you have actually a very clear religious difference, of religious starting point that is going to affect how you think about the subject of math, how you deal with numbers, and, of course, with critical theory. Now, in the western university, we're constantly being told that western math is colonial and oppressive and that it actually needs to be overturned for something a little different. So, no, there's a very, very clear reason why we need christian institutions, christian schools founded upon the lordship of Jesus Christ and rooted in a biblical world and life view. It affects every subject area.
[00:07:41] Speaker A: Jeff, did you want to add anything to that? Because I do have a question for the two of you, but I wanted to give you that time to jump in.
[00:07:49] Speaker C: Well, Joe is, of course, correct on that particular point. The very notion of differentiation presupposes a worldview. Can you have differentiation? Are there, in fact, true solutions to mathematical problems? And would those solutions be true the next day? Those are all metaphysical claims and cannot be answered by simply, you know, the addition and subtraction tables or the multiplication and division tables. And so every application to an academic topic presupposes a world and life view.
[00:08:28] Speaker A: Joe and Jeff, both of you are in the education business, as it were, in training young minds, shaping young minds. What are the goals today of contemporary educators? When I think of educating my own children, I'm thinking that there's an end goal of what. I'd like them to be contributors to society. I would like them to be contributors into the local church and so on. What are the goals of contemporary educators, specifically outside of, well, the christian west or outside of the church?
[00:09:06] Speaker C: I'll address that. Since I taught law students for many, many decades. The actual goal is very transactional.
Instead of asking the question, what does the education do for me?
They should be asking what the education does to them, not for them. In other words, formation and transformation of the individual versus what is this going to get me? What are you going to do with the education? So it becomes very transactional. Put it in retail terms. I can get a job, I can get a clerkship. I can get this and that or the other thing. So it becomes very an instrumentalist view of education, which, of course, is the philosophy of John Dewey, who was an educator, among other things, and gave us this instrumentalist view of education, which does not fit the nature of the human person. In contrast to that, it was J. Gresham Macham who said, uniformity and similarity are great if you're making Ford cars, but humans aren't Ford cars. Rather, there needs to be a formation and a shaping of people according to God's calling and purpose. And so I would say that the proper goal of education at the 30,000 foot level is to do what is to take a every thought captive to the obedience of Christ and proceed from there. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, not the end point of it.
[00:10:40] Speaker A: Joe, any thoughts?
[00:10:42] Speaker B: Yeah, I think one of the helpful ways to articulate what actually Jeff has just explained effectively is that education is a plan for the future, and it's helpful for us to think about it in those terms.
Squirrels have a plan for the future in my garden around sort of September, October, and they do it by instinct, but human beings intentionally develop a plan for the future.
Education is the vehicle by which we pass on our values to the next generation.
It's the vehicle through which we communicate to the next generation what we believe is important.
And because it's a plan for the future, education is fundamentally a battle for the future of culture. Culture cultus worship. Cult worship. Culture is really the public expression of the worship of a people.
And education is the means by which we pass on those things that are most important to our culture and civilization. And when we look at public education today, it has this transactional element, as Jeff talked about, which is to make education fundamentally superficial thing.
But the modern educator is, in my judgment, concerned with creating compliant citizens for the modern state. It's not concerned with creating critical thinkers who are learning to be able to educate themselves throughout their lives.
It's about the passing on of certain kinds of information so that we shape and we form a compliant individual for the modern state. And so the western universities in particular are notorious for this now.
And, you know, in some respects, in many in Britain, you know, increasingly, the jig is up. I was reading an article in the paper just today about students beginning to abandon the universities. The numbers are dropping year on year, who want to bother with tipping money into these institutions because they recognize that increasingly much of it is just a process of indoctrination.
And we're seeing that reflected culturally and politically. So there is a concerted effort in modern public education and in the university to undermine the christian world and life view, because there's an alternate plan for the future there. And so the reason why God is so committed to charging his people to train up our children in the fear and admonition of the Lord is because God is concerned with the future. And one of the things I say to parents like you, Josh, when I'm appealing to parents and talking to parents to send their children to christian schools or our own christian school, when I would address parents is that when you take your child to a teacher, when you take your, think about when you take your child, when a parent takes their child to school in a morning and you get out of the car or you walk across the car park, you take them to the school doors, you don't say, question everything, rebel, challenge your teacher.
Don't believe what you hear. No, what you say to them is listen to your teachers, respect your teacher, listen carefully, work hard, be diligent. You're essentially saying to your child when you drop them off, receive the teacher's authority, you receive mine.
It's a process of delegation. So you're saying to the child, I'm putting this teacher because the parents are responsible biblically for education. Now you can delegate that to a trusted person or institution, but it's the parents responsibility biblically. So you're saying to the child, treat the teacher's authority as you would receive my authority. And when we think about education in schools that way and what we're trying to pass on for the future, to shape the future, that will often change a parent's perspective on what's actually happening when they drop a child off at a school.
[00:15:13] Speaker A: Regarding children and youth, who should educate? Who is the primary role of the educator? Is it the state? Is it the parents of? Is it the community? Is it the church?
[00:15:25] Speaker B: Okay, I'll take a stab at that first.
Well, the, I would here invoke the principle of sphere sovereignty in the sense that all of those institutions to some degree have an educational function. There's an educational element to what they're doing. So let's take the church for example. The church is required to teach and to preach the word of God. That's the preaching of the word of God is one of the marks of the church. And of course there's discipline in the life of the church too, associated with what's communicated, what's taught. So the church has an educating function in all of our lives and including in the, in the life of children. The state is certainly not an educator as such. It's not the state's responsibility to teach my children. But of course, there is an element of education that goes on through the state when the state makes law. And this would be Jeff's wheelhouse, of course. But legislation is teaching values all of the time. So there is an educational element to what the state is actually doing, of course, in terms of teaching and raising and training our children.
The ultimate responsibility and obligation there lies with the family. So it is the family's task to educate our children. As I said in the previous question, some people choose to do that in the home, and that's a very valid way to educate our children. If we've got those capacities, we've got that capability, we've got the context in which that's possible, then home education is one way of the family taking responsibility. Another way is that as part of a community, a christian community, we delegate that to christian educators. And this, of course, happened very early in the life of the Jews, in the history of the nation of Israel. The synagogue became a place of education after the babylonian exile. And so the christian school, sometimes these are church schools, sometimes they're independent schools. But it's the christian community saying, we're going to partner together with parents, with christian parents to educate the child.
But ultimately, the responsibility, the obligation for the education of children lies with the parents and churches and the christian community should be supporting that. And the state should certainly not stand in the way of parents educating their children in the home or in christian private institutions. And sometimes the state is actively trying to prevent that now. And that goes back to the reasons we talked about earlier.
They have different religious worldview objectives, and so they want to keep these children in state institutions, government schools, as long as they can.
[00:18:29] Speaker C: That's exactly the case. I mean, 90 years ago, the newly elected leader of Germany, Adolf Hitler, made it very clear that he was going to interfere with the parents and the churches, those two communities, and instead make the children the future of Germany and compliant with the needs of the state. I would say a couple of other footnotes there. Joe's 100% correct law is pedagogical. It has a teaching function. The apostle Paul tells us in Romans chapter seven, for example. It informs us, and it helps inform us as well. I would say that the state, in terms of kind of a base education, would probably be proper with respect to things like military academies, because that would serve the proper role of the state in protecting the nation, in creating military leaders and that sort of thing. But I would also say this, that I make a distinction the way people hear education today, they make it seem as if, and this gets the transactional point, that education is simply the transmission of data. We feel humans are brains on a stick, and we fill that brain with stuff, with.
Of course, there's always philosophy smuggled into that but it's mostly about the transmission of data. I make the distinction between that kind of education and training. Today we are called to train. Education transfers data. Training transforms people, and it's people that change cultures. Which gets to Joe's point about education, biblically considered, is really about shaping the future. Well, all education does that. And so this idea of training, and we see this both in the text of scripture, but also in the examples of scripture, day by day, little by little, when you rise up, all these sorts of things indicate that it's not simply a, hey, go study something. And in the same way, christian parents need to recognize that it is their responsibilities to rear their own children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Now, can they delegate that? Yes, through communities, through writing tuition checks and so on and so forth, to christian educational institutions. They can transfer or delegate the responsibility. They can never abdicate it. So in other words, simply writing a check does not fulfill or satisfy the parents obligation to rear their own children in the nurture and admission of the Lord. So in every situation, the parents need to be involved with respect to that, even when you have transferred authority, which I certainly believe is a valid way of doing things.
[00:21:29] Speaker A: I'm hearing also one thing between both of you is that in christian education, there is a broad or a wide berth of ways that education can be disseminated. So you could do public or not public school, but education through the church, at a church gathering, or a co op or christian home school or a christian charter school. It sounds like there's all kinds of options here. It doesn't just constrict to one view. This is how everyone should do it in terms of christian education.
[00:22:04] Speaker B: Yeah, I think fundamentally correct.
[00:22:06] Speaker C: Yeah, go ahead, Joe.
[00:22:07] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, I was going to say, I think that's exactly what we're both saying.
I might stretch it even a tiny bit further and say that there have certainly been times historically where even the state has delivered a christian education.
In England, for example, in Scotland, even in the early years of public education in Canada, I think it was a strategic mistake.
I think it was a confusion of the spheres of authority. And I think it's proven in the end to have been a strategic mistake, because the state is the organ of coercion, and wherever you bring the state, you bring the coercive element, which is why I think Jeff's very insightful point there about military academies, for example. The state has an obligation to defend its citizens. And if you go to a military school, it's got military order to it.
That's the nature of it. It's got a certain coercive character to it. So that's always the thing, is to remember that wherever you bring the state, it brings its own nature, which is coercion, a particular kind of coercion. Now, the church has its church discipline, the family has its discipline, but it's a very different kind. And so making sure that we don't muddle those fears. But yes, absolutely. What we're not saying is there's not a one size fits all. I think we have to be mindful that different families are in different circumstances.
I sometimes get irritated with christian school advocates who sort of dismiss or pooh pooh homeschooling, and I sometimes get frustrated when I go to a homeschool conference and I hear homeschoolers pooh poohing christian institutions and christian schools. No, these are all valid ways of ensuring that our children receive the right kind of christian education.
And I think that kind of ecumenicity in advancing christian education is what we should be looking for right now.
[00:24:18] Speaker C: Amen. Joe, let me ask you this. I'm going to pitch you this question because this is a very common understanding in swaths of us evangelicalism. We categorically, as christian parents committed to the church, send our little johnnies and susies to the public schools who be salt and light. And so therefore, we are being faithful christians in doing so. How would you graciously respond to that? Because I think it's an erroneous notion, but you can say it better than.
[00:24:51] Speaker B: I. I don't know whether I can do that, Jeff, but I'll certainly have a stab.
I think that you don't send a child to do a man's job. And the notion that, you know, children are their sponges, their critical faculties have not fully awakened or developed when they're in school.
And the notion that we are going to put the burden of responsibility on our own children, our little ones, to transform the classroom by teaching the teacher and somehow therefore being sort of a transformative agent there in changing the education is delusional. I mean, I would say, Geoff, given that that has been the posture of probably the last, you're absolutely right to identify it, certainly the last 60 or 70 years or so. How's that working for us? That would be my first question, because we've singularly failed to be salt and light in the public sector, in the government sector of education.
And so you don't send, Jesus never sends, and the word of God never sends our infants and our children to do the tasks of men and women, to do the tasks that we're sent out to do. Our children are to be nurtured, to be brought up in the fear and admonition of the Lord, not send out as sheep to be slaughtered. And I think that's clearly indicated when Jesus himself says, anyone who causes one of these little ones who believes in me to stumble, that word stumble there in the greek is scandalizo, and it literally means to be thrown toward ruin. To stumble. Be better that a millstone would be tied around his neck and he'd be thrown into the sea. And placing our children today in these government schools of godless indoctrinate, indoctrination certainly risks scandalizo of throwing our children toward ruin. So it isn't the obligation of children to transform teachers and transform the classroom and transform the school.
Certainly, you know, we can. We can say all christians are called to share their faith and be salt and light children. I'm not saying children can't be salt and light, but surely they can do that at the soccer club, at the football club, at the hockey club, at the basketball club. You know, there are plenty of opportunities for our children to, in an appropriate context and setting with non Christians, where appropriate. It doesn't need to be Monday through Friday, nine through three, under the tutelage of godless people. It would have been unthinkable to the Jews or to the early church, or actually, for most of christian history, until state education even began at the end of the 19th century, it would have been unthinkable to send christian children to pagans to educate them. You know, if you send your children to Caesar to be educated, don't be surprised if they come back as Romans. And it would have been absolutely unthinkable for Christians in previous generations to do that. I think, graciously, I would say to those parents, look, I think we're making an excuse there that actually, it's not, our children aren't in the government school because, because we're passionate about evangelism.
They're there because of convenience, because of financial choices and decisions, and we need to honor. We need to put him first in the lives of our.
[00:28:40] Speaker C: That's. That's. That's exactly right. You know, they. But I need that Tesla. I can't afford the school tuition. Oh, you know, the, the other thing I would just point on that, and that was just an excellent response. I appreciate it, is the proverbs say that you should not be part of a companion of fools, one of the translation says, and the reality is that's exactly what's going on in most of these. I would say all, but I don't have infinite knowledge. These government, state funded state things. It's a companion of fools. And God says very clearly, do not be deceived.
Bad company corrupts good morals. So, you know, little Johnny's Sunday school flannel board lesson for 30 minutes on Sunday is insufficient immunization against 45 hours of being on a drip line in the, in the government schools. I mean, it's, it's a matter of quantitative and qualitative analysis at that point. And wisdom says come out from among them, I think.
[00:29:52] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:29:53] Speaker A: It does seem counter to the work that should be done for little Johnny. Johnny's to go and to get an education to learn something, not scream against his teachers that there are actually four lights. The carvers in Star Trek.
[00:30:08] Speaker B: Hey, that's a Star Trek reference. Yep. It's a good double good double episode.
There are four lights.
[00:30:16] Speaker C: It's all about Kurbagashi maru. That's how you deal with the educational system. You change the program.
That's how you do it.
[00:30:24] Speaker A: Well, Doctor Moot, thank you for your time for being on the podcast again. The dates for the upcoming symposium is August 30 through the 31st in Pasadena, California. Every square inch taking the lordship of Christ to the streets. We'll see you there.
This concludes the recording of the director's bag. For more resources from Truth Exchange, please visit us online at www.truthexchange.com. you can follow us on X as well as Facebook for more updates and content related to Truth exchange. Be sure to join us next week for more questions from the director's bag. I'm your host, Joshua Gulo, and this is the Truth Exchange podcast.
