A biblical view of education holds parents, and particularly fathers responsible for the training of children. At the end of the day, fathers will stand before God and have to give an account of how their children were trained. So today, we will briefly look at the four aspects of training parents are responsible for.
First of all, we are responsible for what we personally teach our children about God’s world. Christian parents are called by God to train their children to know and love God. In Deuteronomy 6, Moses tells God’s people, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and 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. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. Godly parents do not just love God with all their heart, soul and might, they teach that love to their children. Here in Deuteronomy, this is framed as an all of life thing. This teaching happens everywhere.
So secondly, we should see that as parents we are responsible for what we model to our children. So much of teaching goes beyond the words we say. It is the model we provide. For instance, as parents we might teach that we should obey God rather than men, but if our interactions with others indicate an unhealthy fear of man and we are unable to stand up for truth when it counts, we are providing our children with a mixed message lesson.
Thirdly, as parents we are responsible for the teachers we place over our children through avenues such as school and sport. This matters. When we as parents place our child under the tutelage of another adult, we do not magically hand our responsibility over. It’s not as if God’s understanding of the family shifts in this instant. No, fathers are still the heads of their household, and they are still responsible at this point too. Now, this should have implications for who we decide to place in teaching authority over our children. Jesus himself pointed out, “The student is not above the teacher, but everyone who is fully trained will be like their teacher.” Is your child’s atheist teacher at school who you want your child to be like? Is the coach who teaches children to ‘look deep inside themselves for strength’ helpful to your child’s spiritual formation?
Finally, we are responsible for the indirect teaching that happens to our children based on what our children do in their spare time. This is perhaps the area we as parents think least about. The most obvious example of danger here is in our children’s discretionary screen time. Most of us are careful about who we let come around and babysit our children. Most of us want our children’s school teachers to be men and women of integrity. Are we applying this to the digital realm? We wouldn’t let a transgender or LGBT activist into our house to lecture our children about affirming a friend who is ‘coming out’. Nor would we let a woman into our house who had the design of performing a strip-tease show or demonstrating sexual positions. And yet, without proper parental responsibility in the area of screens, we may be actually unintentionally allowing these things.
So there you have it. We are responsible for not only what we teach and model to our children, but also who we place in a teaching position over them, and also the indirect teaching they receive through what we allow them to do in their spare time. This should drive us to greater thoughtfulness in each of these areas.