THE NATURE OF LEARNING

All questions of inquiry must begin with or presuppose the answers to three basic questions:

• What is real?
• What is true and how do you know?
• What is right?

How one answers these questions influences how they will answer all other inquiries. The Christian view of reality, knowledge and ethics is as follows:

God, having created the universe by His own free will is absolute, autonomous and self-sufficient. He is not dependent in any way upon the created, whereas the created are utterly dependent upon Him. In creation, He brought all things into being and causes all things to function together in the manner in which He decrees, by His design. These decrees are irrevocable; He alone is in control. While transcending all things, His providential oversight is not distant, but immanent and personal. He is at all times, intimately acquainted with and relates to everything in His universe.
These doctrines of creation and providence clearly set forth the relationship of the created to the Creator. Neither creation as a whole nor any part thereof is autonomous. Only God is autonomous and all creation is wholly dependent upon and subject to Him. God and God alone is the ultimate reality and determiner of what is and what is not real.

God is self-referential. He knows himself completely without reference to any standard alongside or outside of Himself. Furthermore, God knows all things because He originally conceived all things. In contrast, man does not conceive things originally, but discovers what God has eternally known. Therefore, man cannot truly know anything unless he understands it in reference to the God who originally conceived it. Thus man comes to know only by revelation from God. All revelation comes to man through Christ and all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Him (Col. 2:3).

God alone is the standard of what is right and wrong, true and false. There is no ethical standard that is above or alongside God. His character is the basis for all ethical judgments. Therefore, man is only able to determine ethical standards and judgments according to His word alone.
Therefore, every area of true learning must find its completeness as it converges on God. If Christ is excluded from our study, every process of thought will be arrested before it reaches its proper goal.

THE NATURE OF CHILDREN

Children are made in the image of God. Because they bear His image, they have a duty to do so in a manner that honors and glorifies Him. Children are created by God and given to parents. They are not the property of the state to work and serve its will. Rather they are to be educated to fulfill the creation mandate.
Children inherit the sinful nature of Adam at birth and no amount of education can change their hearts. Their only hope is Jesus Christ, the only Savior and Redeemer of God's people. Accordingly, children need to be:

• admonished for sins common to fallen man (especially those that pertain to the educational process: i.e. laziness, disrespect, complaining and disputing)
• taught the necessity and sufficiency of Christ as Savior, and
• equipped to love and serve Him as Lord with all of their heart, mind, soul and strength.

THE NATURE OF SCHOOLS

God, in His word, has clearly charged parents with the responsibility of training their own children. It is not the job of the church or the state to assume this obligation. Parents may lawfully assign specific tasks to godly surrogates, but they may never relinquish the overall responsibility and oversight of their children's education.
Schools must therefore operate from the legal notion of in loco parentis, that is, the God-given authority to instruct and discipline the children is temporarily delegated from the parents to the schools. Schools are to operate as the agent of parents, with their initial and ongoing authority derived from the parents.

SUMMARY

True education flourishes when parents, teachers and administrators properly understand the nature of learning, of children, and of schools. In order for education to succeed it must proceed according to how God made the world, otherwise education will be ineffective and inefficient at best, and destructive and immoral at worst.