Crosstalk: June 16, 2017

​Israel Wayne is a best-selling author and conference speaker who has a passion for defending the Christian faith and promoting a biblical worldview. He's the site author for Christianworldview.net. He's authored several books such as 'Questions God Asks, Questions Jesus Asks', 'Pitchin a Fit: Overcoming Angry and Stressed-Out Parenting' and his latest book, 'Education: Does God Have an Opinion?'

Many people would say that the Bible is silent on the issue of education. What about Israel Wayne? He says that 25 years ago he would have agreed, but what he's found in studying the issue over that time is that Scripture has a lot to say on this topic. Many of us haven't taken the time to systematically search it out. So what happens is that people make assumptions that are based upon a lack of due diligence to study.

What are some of the assumptions and preconceived ideas that people have? Israel said to pretend you're on a deserted island where you suggest to others that everyone goes to the Bible (assuming it's the only reference you have) to find out what God says about education. He suspects that what would come to mind for many in terms of what education is or should be would be radically different. Things like school buildings, desks, chalk boards, recess, playgrounds, sports teams, band and prom; all those things aren't in the Bible. In other words, almost everything that we believe about education has come to us via our experience and culture rather than Scripture. So if we just looked at the Bible to find out what God says, that would radically change the way we understand what education should look like.

Israel's book is split into two parts, the apologetic and the core subjects. In the first part he wanted to explain what a biblical philosophy of education might look like. If we were to think 'Christianly' about education, what paradigms would we be utilizing to think about the topic. So the apologetic is about arguing for a distinctively biblical way of viewing education.

The section about core subjects is saying that there really is no such thing as religious neutrality; that there are no religiously neutral subjects. Even a subject such as math will be taught from a distinctly biblical philosophy or from a humanistic one.

This is an important topic because many people have given their kids over to a system that has them busy for 10,800 hours and in that time what they learn undermines the Christian faith. There's also the entertainment industry that for about another 15,000 hours (between grades K-12) pumps them full of all kinds of anti-Christian information. That's a total of over 25,000 hours of anti-Christian influence before they even graduate from high school and yet some think an hour of Sunday school each week is going to fix it.

As the program moved along, Israel explained the purpose of education, why families should develop a mission statement, the educational philosophies of Horace Mann and Karl Marx, why government schooling defies God's order for government, the 'salt and light' argument for keeping kids in public school, should we let our children determine where they go to school, and much more.