Years ago, a parent said something to me that I have never forgotten.
“Jared, why would we wait to invest for college? These are the investment years.”
Her child was six, by the way.
In one sentence, this mom basically gave me the ROI for Christian education.
We tend to think about the major educational investment coming later. We build those 529 plans. We prepare for college. We sacrifice financially for college. We make a really big deal out of the college experience, although some of those dynamics are certainly changing.
But her point was simple: Why wait until they are 18 to make the big investment?
Before going any further, an important concession: Christian education does not guarantee a particular outcome.
A child can attend a Christian school from preschool through graduation and walk away from his or her faith or engage in destructive behaviors. I’ve seen it many times. The same can happen to a homeschooled child or a child attending a charter school, public school, or any other educational environment.
There are remarkable young adults who emerge from every one of these settings. There are also heartbreaking stories from every one of them.
There may be no guarantees, but there are probabilities.
As parents, we make decisions around probabilities all the time. We cannot guarantee our children will become healthy adults, but we establish healthy habits. We cannot guarantee they will make wise financial decisions, but we teach them about money. We cannot guarantee they will choose good friends, but we care deeply about the relationships surrounding them.
Why?
Because while we cannot determine the outcome, we can influence the conditions.
Education should be viewed similarly.
From preschool through high school graduation, our children may spend 15 years in an educational environment. Yet we often focus enormous financial attention on four years of college while giving comparatively less consideration to the 15 years that precede it.
Those are incredibly formative years.
Research from Barna Group has found that a person’s worldview is primarily shaped and largely in place by around age 13, with those beliefs continuing to be refined through the teenage and early adult years.
In other words, the years before college aren’t simply preparation for the important years. They are some of the most important years.
During those 15 years, our children are not merely learning math, science, literature, and history. They are developing assumptions about what is true, what is good, what gives life meaning, what human beings are for, and ultimately, whether Jesus Christ has anything to do with any of it.
And they are being shaped by relationships.
Teachers. Coaches. Administrators. Friends. Teammates.
None of those people can guarantee who our children will eventually become. Neither can we as parents. But they matter.
The question, then, is not whether Christian education can guarantee that a child will follow Christ and become a productive citizen.
It cannot.
The better question is whether placing a child in an environment where the Christian faith is reinforced through relationships, curriculum, conversations, correction, encouragement, and community can increase the probability of the kind of formation we hope to see.
And worldview formation is only one way to think about the return on that investment. In a future post, we’ll look at what the research says about other long-term outcomes for graduates of different educational settings, including academic, family, faith, and economic outcomes.