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.
What was I thinking…..?
This episode nudged me to ponder back to my childhood while asking: How far back in childhood do I even have a memory of learning spiritual truth and what was I believing in my mind ?
I do believe attending a Faith based school from K-4th Grade definitely “ downloaded” my worldview regarding main doctrine of Orthodox Christianity : Trinity, Jesus death, son of God, sinless savior, resurrection, do good to honor God, 10 commandments are God’s standard, saved from sins, and what we know comes from the Bible because it’s Gods word from the Holy Spirit.
I do not remember “ learning” about them, they were embedded into my pre-reflective concousness as reality, so much so that when I emerged developmentally from “ fantasy thinking” stage to “ concrete thinking” stage, I do remember assuming these doctrines were the whole world’s common knowledge of being human. These basic truths were reinforced with church attendance, and an asumption that my parents believe this too if they have sent me to places that teach this.
There is of course the factor of nature vs nurture, however a specific isolated Sunday school lesson does not create embedded formational beliefs regardless of naturally being born with a mild temperment. Neroscience supports that experiences, paired with meaning-making, contribute to spiritual formation ( or lack of), by reinforcing patterns of thought, emotion, response, and behavior ( especially during a stage in life when we can’t consciously analyze our interpretations) Science and Scripture actually support each other in this fact, which reflects God’s truth as to why the Bible says in Deuteronomy 6:6-7, “ … teach them diligently to your children, and you shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.” — Deuteronomy 6:6–7 (ESV).
Repetition in all our faith practices, including familiarity in faith based relationships, is so important for the process of renewing the mind. Formation does not happen in isolation. As such, as children we are essentially having a software program of what we will perceive as valuable and real, downloaded into our beings. An important question for parents is then: What truth are we going to want little ones to trust is real and valuable even though they can’t see it? By what means will they be formed to trust?
The neuroscience fact that belief ( meaning making) will be internalized ( one way or the other) into the pre-reflective consciousness of early childhood stages, further supports that faith based experiences in a young child’s regular everyday life will increase their capacity to consider being a disciple when they are an older child capable of critically thinking about other belief systems and choices in life that move toward thriving and not just surviving. Since factors of nature and nurture do not not guarantee a particular outcome, I appreciate the strong point presented in this episode that investment in Christian Education during formative years influence a greater probability of a child developing the formation we hope to see.