Christian Education: Discipline, Educational Commentary
By Kevin Craig
Discipline: an important word; a misunderstood word, Mr. Rushdoony cites the following to test your understanding of the word "discipline." A pious couple has an erring and seriously delinquent daughter. "Complaining because of her behavior, her unmarried and pregnant condition, and her contempt of their authority, the parents insisted that they had "disciplined" her regularly. She had been deprived of various privileges, and had been frequently slapped and spanked when younger. The girl, almost twenty years of age, was pregnant and in bad company, given to experimenting with narcotics and much else, but she did not know how to sew, cook, study or work, or obey a simple order."
Question: was the girl disciplined? If you answered "yes," then you need to pay serious attention to this article. The parents of this girl had chastised her, but she had grown up radically undisciplined. Today, more than ever, Christian school teachers and parents, especially parents, need to understand Christian discipline
Mr. Rushdoony explains the concept of discipline: "Discipline is systematic training and submission to authority, and it is the result of such training. Chastisement or punishment is the penalty or beating administered for departure from authority. Clearly discipline and chastisement are related subjects, but just as clearly they are distinct." This definition can be clarified by showing why the Christian educator must work to bring about disciplined children, and how he can.
A society is made up of individual men. The character of men determines the character of a society. This is an age of laziness. This is an age of self-gratification. This is an age of disrespect. To understand these problems in society, we must see that they are problems with men who rebel against God. To change society, we must change the hearts of men. This is the task of the Biblical educator.
Man's basic purpose in life is to exercise dominion over the earth to the glory of God (Gen. 1:26-28). But the Bible is clear: fallen man is no longer Dominion Man. He is Sluggard Man, characterized by laziness, and shunning his work (Prov. 12:24; 18:9; 21:25-26; cf. also Ezek. 16:49).
Since man has declared himself to be his own god (Gen. 3:5), he is thereby concerned only with his own needs, his own desires. His basic motive is self-gratification or self-worship. "If it feels good, do it," is a popular expression of this attitude. It also implies, "If it doesn't feel good, don't do it," and when it comes to work, study, and self-discipline, fallen man doesn't—not without pressure.
Finally, because God has ordained structures of authority (parents, teachers, employers, government), and man is rebelling against God, he naturally rebels against these authorities. This is disrespect. Students of past generations rose to their feet when their teachers entered the room (see Lev. 19:32). But this is now the "punk rock" generation.
Modern man: lazy, self-centered, disrespectful. If this is what characterizes fallen men, what do you think characterizes their culture? The productivity of this lazy nation has declined 275% over the last decade. Teenagers who have their desires for instant gratification frustrated, show a high suicide rate, as they wallow in self-pity. Back in the Great Depression, authority patterns constrained behavior. Today's poor feel they have the right to loot and riot In general, the disrespectful age is an age of incompetence. Men who do not obey the commands of their superiors are men who lack discipline. They cannot complete a task. They despise and grumble at an eight-hour-a-day job. As housewives they are unable to patiently and creatively fulfill their duties, and so they retreat into novels and soap operas. As students they cannot compete, and cannot (will not) overcome an assignment without breaking down and crying to parents or peers. Regularly.
Low productivity; self-pity; poor character and incompetence: this is our age in a nutshell. As Christian educators we must come to grips with this profound truth: Only Christian Education can solve these problems. Even more challenging, Any education that is not solving these problems is not a Christian Education. Every Christian school, regardless of size, can and must work to solve these tremendous social problems. Where do we start? We start in the hearts of our students.
First, we must conquer the problem of laziness. We instill in our students' hearts a desire for godly dominion. Man's purpose is to work, not to play. Man must exercise dominion over the earth, not retreat from his God-given responsibilities (Gen. 1:26-28; 2:15, 19; II Thess. 3:10¬11; I Tim. 5:13). Not only must man desire to involve himself in God's glorious creation, to grapple with life, and get his hands into his work (Eph. 4:28; I Thess. 4:11), Dominion Man seeks to overcome sin and the problems and difficulties that tempt us to deny God's Law (I John 5: 4-5). Clearly, we often fail (the Greek word for "sin" is hamartia, "to fall short of the mark"), but we keep trying. With discipline, the things that beat us yesterday are the things we conquer today. The word we misspelled yesterday is a tool for dominion today, and we both thank the Lord and take pride in the work of our hands. We must develop in our students this godly desire to work and succeed.
The student who thinks only of his own immediate pleasure, however, will not so easily cultivate a godly desire toward work. He sees only the present, and does not understand that hard work today pays off in the future (Prov. 12:24; 22:29). All of our students will be more concerned with play, easy-living, and the way of slothfulness. Therefore, second, we must overcome this commitment to self-gratification. We must instruct our students to obey God, to desire to please Him and not ourselves. We must also pray that God would give them the grace to declare, "My soul is consumed with longing for your laws at all times" (Ps. 119:20). Christians must find a real joy in their heart to serve with cheerful obedience the Lord Jesus.
Third the solution to an undisciplined, incompetent generation lies with God's ordained authority, the parents of tomorrow's adults. Too often, we believe not as Christians, but as the Seneca Indians of the Colonial Era. For these people, "parental tenderness" was carried to a dangerous indulgence. Punishment was lacking, and mothers were quick to express resentment of any constraint or injury or insult offered to the child by an outsider. As Mr. Rushdoony, himself a missionary to the Indians for nearly nine years, has put it, "I never saw a frustrated Indian child." He goes on to give us some insights into how we must deal with our students, and sometimes with their parents. "I found the Indians a lovable people, of real ability and more than a little charm, but the permissiveness of their society guaranteed their continuing unhappy and low estate. An unfrustrated child is inescapably in for trouble. It is impossible to live in a fallen world - where conflict of wills is a daily problem, and a minor one in the face of our major world and local problems - without having frustrations. Discipline in childhood is a schooling in frustration and training in patience and work (cf. Heb 5:8). Discipline not only prepares Us for frustration, but gives us the character to work towards overcoming frustration. Permissiveness in child rearing thus avoids frustrating the child only to insure continual frustration for the adult." (The Chalcedon Report, No. 67, P.O. Box 158, Vallecito, Calif. 95251) If the parents of the children we teach are less Christian and more Seneca Indian, and continually indulge their children by doing their homework for them, or pressuring you to stop pressuring their child, you must counsel them along the lines of this article.
What, then, is the purpose of the Christian educator? Simply, to frustrate children. Sound rather bleak? Then understand that by frustrating the child, we deliver his soul from hell. Proverbs 23:13-14 says that if we do not withhold discipline from a child, we shall do just that. Still unmotivated? Then consider your purpose, first, in light of our fallen students. Our students do not want to read; they do not want to study; they do not want to work they do not want to keep trying to do that math problem until they get it right. They want you to give them the answers. And if they don't get the answer from you, they'll go home and ask their parents, who, unless they're reading this article, will probably give it to them. Sound cynical? You and I both know it isn't, because we know ourselves all too well. "One of the problems facing anyone who works with people today," warns Mr. Rushdoony, "is this radical lack of discipline and the ability to meet frustrations realistically and to overcome them. The desire of most people is to walk away from problems. But nothing does more to increase the problems inherent in a society and constant to a man's life than the refusal to meet them head-on and then work patiently to overcome them. To ask for a trouble-free, unfrustrated life is to ask finally for death, and, before death, a lower class, slave status." As fallen men we all have this desire. Fallen students are no different: they too desire to put aside their responsibilities. As teachers we must frustrate that sinful desire. Our students want the unfallen, work-free world of Disneyland. They won't get it when they graduate; they'd better not get it in school. For their own sakes.
Look at Proverbs 22:6. Now listen to what Bruce A. Ray has said in his, excellent book, Withhold not Correction. "In the Hebrew text of Proverbs 22:6 the phrase "in the way he should go" is entirely lacking. Rather, the Hebrew says, "Train up a child in his way, and when he is old he will not depart from it." Train up a child in his way..., allow a child to have self-expression, let your children decide what they will and what they will not do and when they will and will not do it, look into the future and you will see those same children unbridled, undisciplined, and unable to bring their bodies into submission to the commands of God. That is a stern warning." If you care anything at all about Christian competence, the integrity of the Gospel, and both the present and future Sanctification of your students, then in light of the fallen nature of man, you will make your school tough. It's that simple; it's that unappealing; but it's that important.
Second, consider our obligation to God. Proverbs 23:13 is one of many proverbs that command Biblical educators to frustrate the sinful desires of their students: "Withhold not correction from a child." The same sinful desires that make the student rebel against your God-given authority make you rebel against exercising that authority. Again, Burce Ray says, "It is natural for us to seek to withhold discipline from our children. It is much easier for us to do something else, or to be someplace else, but God requires of Christian parents and especially of Christian fathers that they administer the discipline which He reveals in His Word. For parents, and especially for fathers, to withhold that discipline is to sin against God...." (cf. Prov. 19:18 and 13:24).
Finally, consider our love for our students. If we love them, we will be tough with them. We will force them to adhere to strict standards of competence and integrity. We will expect them to work hard, to study independently, and to build the character it takes to be a rust-rate soldier of the Lord Jesus Christ. We must be tough. In far, far, too many Christian schools today, the standards of excellence are below those of the public schools. We don't want monks and nuns. Godly living does not consist merely in the memorization of a few Bible texts. It begins with character. A diligent worker, a Biblical mindset; a respecter of authority: these are the things that please God and convey a fine testimony to the unsaved. Christians must be leaders (Matt. 5:13-16). Christians must be diligent, able to persevere (Prov. 11:27; Rom 12:11). Christians must be disciplined. It starts with parents, at home. It continues with teachers, in schools. It ends with Christians who are prepared and competent to disciple (i.e., to discipline) the nations (Matt. 28:18-20). Proverbs 13:24 says, "He who spares his rod hates his son." The teacher who fails to challenge his students, hates his students. A tough program of early reading, mastery of the English Language, and a broad understanding of God's Law in the home, the government, and in our current economic situation, is indeed tough. But it is not hate; it is love. We want our students to obey God because we love them and we want to see them saved and brought to an obedient walk with, and knowledge of, the Living God.
Be a roadblock for incompetence. When you see your student begin to take the road of easy-living, force him to make a detour onto the harder mad. If he rebels, and stops in his tracks, goad him forward (Ecc. 12:11). Develop godly character so that when he finally gets out onto the real mad of life, he will be disciplined: ready and competent (Phil. 3:14).
AN EDUCATIONAL COMMENTARY ON THE BIBLE
By Rodney N. Kirby
*6 "Social Training and the Family"
"And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him...And the rib, which: the LORD God had taken from man, made He a woman, and brought her unto the man...Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh." (Genesis 2:18-24)
In this century, under the influence of John Dewey, a primary function of the school has been seen to be "socialization." The children must learn to become "socialized," to "get along with others," to function properly in a "democratic" society.
Early childhood education (kindergarten and nursery school) has thus become all-important. Children must learn how to play together, how to share, and how to co-operate. It is thought that if children are not sent to school at the earliest conceivable age, they, will grow up to be social outcasts.
The same reasoning applies to teaching older children at home, rather than sending them to an ungodly school. These children are seen as somehow being "deprived"—deprived of the chance to interact with their peers. To many Christian parents, this concern is so strong that they succumb and send their children to schools they know to be anti-Christian, simply for the "socialization". (All these children are "deprived" of is being taught in the ways of Hell.)
Our passage for this lesson shows us something different. God saw that it was not good for Adam to be alone (vs. 18), just like people today say it is not good for children to be alone. But notice that God did not give Adam a "peer group" with which he was to "socialize." (Neither did God make "Adam and Steve," gay lib notwithstanding.) To solve Adam’s problem of aloneness, God made a wife—Eve. Thus began the first human institution—the family.
Broadly speaking, this shows the centrality of the family in society. God did not make for Adam a church, complete with elders, deacons, committees, and choirs (the "War Department"). Neither did God make a civil government, including legislators, judges, and bureaucrats (certainly FDA would have required a label, "Caution: Eating this fruit may be hazardous to your health!"). God instituted the family first of all. The family is central to man in carrying out the cultural mandate—note the context (vs. 15). Before Adam could effectively subdue the earth, he needed a helper suited for him. God gave him a wife to assist him in exercising dominion.
This centrality of the family has definite implications for our schools. In Social Studies (or History), we must not neglect the family. As we study a given society, we must study the family structure which dominates that society. Does the father take the lead? Is the family governed by the mother? Does the family unit frequently include grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc. (cf. Gen. 2:24)? Are two homosexuals considered a "family"? Is the family weakened through the use of ungodly laws (e.g., inheritance taxes)? We must examine such questions as these, and note their implications in the rest of society. For example, the imposition of inheritance taxes results in the loss of the family farm, and the increase in corporately-owned farms; a disregard for the importance of the family has definite economic implications. Taking a covenantal view of history, we examine societies in the light of God's commands, and one of these commands is the cultural mandate. Since the family is central to this task, we would be missing the point entirely in our study of history if we neglect the family.
Getting back to the original topic (the "socialization" of the child), we may take a fresh look at the problem. Concern for such "socialization" has only arisen in recent years. Twenty, thirty, or forty years ago, no such concern was prevalent. Was it because people then were somehow less enlightened concerning the social needs of the children?
No, the problem is that these same years have witnessed a breakdown in the Biblical concept of the family. Divorces are more frequent; government economic policies of monetary inflation force many mothers out of the home to find a job; gay rights, kiddie lib, and extramarital sex have all sprung up. The family is disintegrating.
God's solution for Adam's "aloneness" was to provide for him a family. This is the same solution we must give for the social development of the children. In the family, children learn how to get along with other people—how to converse, how to show loving concern, how to cooperate, and how to settle disagreements. The family is the main instrument for the "socialization" of the child. (Granted, it was easier in the days when a family consisted of eight or ten children—a family was practically a community in itself!)
The godly family teaches the child how to do these things in a Biblical way. The corrupt family of the present day also teaches the child how to behave—it teaches him to run away from problems (divorce), to seek for instant self-gratification (extra-marital sex), and to assert his own "rights" without regard to anyone else (woman's, children's, gay lib). Parents have told me, when I told them I had a problem with their child fighting, "He picks that up from all the kids at his church; they are always picking on him." However, I have noted that these family members are constantly fighting among themselves—husband and wife, brother and sister, parents and children. The problem is at home, not at church. Fighting families produce fighting children.
Hand in hand with the centrality of the family in "socialization" goes the family's role in discipline. Discipline in the school is only effective if it is reinforced at home. The old rule of, "If you get a whooping at school, you'll get another one when you get home" is valid. If the parents are lax regarding discipline, then no amount of strict discipline at school will (humanly speaking) really change the child's life.
The importance of the family in fulfilling the cultural mandate must be emphasized in high school, as students consider their life's calling. In "career counseling," the student must be made to see that establishing a godly family is the most important thing he must do to prepare for work. Men must see that, except in rare cases (cf. Matt. 29:10-12), they are to many, and that a wife will be a vital asset in the exercise of their calling. Likewise, women must understand that their calling is generally to marry and be supportive of their husband in his work. This would all necessitate teaching the biblical view of the family to high school students in some formal way—perhaps in an ethics class.
God has created the family and given it a key role in His world. This must be carried out in our schools, in order that the children might effectively carry out the dominion mandate. Let the world have "liberated" women and children—they will only lose dominion, and we Christians can take over that much quicker!
BOOK REVIEW
By David H. Chilton
The Rise of the American State
When the framers of the Constitution authored that great document, they took care to devise a system of "checks and balances," to ensure that no part of civil government would become a nest of tyranny. Accordingly, they offset the demands of the populace with the authority of the states. The President was given the power to veto Acts of Congress, and Congress had the power to override his veto. The Court could prevent the other two branches from transgressing their constitutional limits. And, coming full circle, the people were able to vote their leaders out of office. Only one flaw exists in that remarkable construct, but it is a fatal one: there is no effective check on the power of the Supreme Court. The result was that the Court became the haven for nationalists, those whose goal it was to establish the United States as a national state rather than as a federal Union of States. By gradual steps, the Supreme Court usurped the powers of government until, as Chief Justice Hughes observed decades ago, "the Constitution is what the Supreme Court says it is": the Court is thus above the Constitution.
The story of the decisive beginnings of this development is told sympathetically in a very important book, The Constitution and Chief Justice Marshall, by William F. Swindler (Dodd, Mead, $17.95). The fact that I am emphatically opposed to the author's perspective should indicate that the following is no casual recommendation: Every Christian school should have this book. It is an excellent resource for constitutional history from 1787 to 1835, the crucial years when far-reaching precedents were set—set I fear, in concrete. Swindler, a distinguished law professor, provides a well-written account of the Court under Marshall's leadership and of the landmark cases through which judicial supremacy became fully entrenched in American government. This is followed by a short section on the Constitution of Marshall's day, printed with the significant clauses in bold type. The third section is the longest, and is the really valuable portion of the book: a complete reprinting of the official opinions in the major cases and related documents. In the chapter dealing with McCulloch v. Maryland, for example, we have Justice Story's opinion in the earlier case of Martin v. Hunter's Lessee; the Charter of the Second Bank of the United States; the Bank's Rules and Regulations governing the Offices of Discount and Deposit; the Maryland statute taxing foreign banks; the Maryland Court of Appeals record on McCulloch v. Maryland; Marshall's opinion; and excerpts from the opinion on Cohens v. Virginia. It is, in short, a history teacher's delight. The book may be profitably both skimmed and deeply studied (and an author who can accomplish that achieves a rare distinction). The documents speak for themselves, tracing the growth of Supreme Court tyranny.
John Marshall became Chief Justice early in 1801, already firmly convinced of nationalist ideals. The first major test of his doctrines came in 1803 with Marbury v. Madison. As the trial progressed, Marshall "converted his colleagues from a confession of limited power to an assertion of exclusion power in the judicial branch to make the final determination of the constitutional validity of acts of the other branches" (p. 29, emphasis added). In delivering his opinion, he proclaimed: "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department, to say what the law is" (p. 141). Marshall was less concerned with the particular cases brought before him than with defining the supreme power of the judiciary. This point was reinforced in his statements in United States v. Burr (1807), in which he attempted to subject the executive to the judicial branch, as he had already done with the legislature. Real progress toward, nationalism was made in Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1816). Marshall's goal was that "the supremacy of national government over state governments in a federal system was to be established by fitting each of these interpretations into a mosaic, a matrix" (p. 57). The means for attaining this goal was the contract clause, which "was to become for Marshall the practical implement for asserting judicial surveillance of state actions as the commerce clause in his day would become the implement of national power" (p. 57). Marshall used the contract clause again to declare, in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), that the federal government was independent of the states. The argument was furthered in Cohens v. Virginia (1821): Marshall stated, "America has chosen to be ... a nation; and for all these purposes, her government is complete ...." (p. 328). This rewriting of history was based partly on Story's opinion in 1816, when he claimed that the Constitution had been "ordained and established, not by the states in their sovereign capacities, but emphatically, as the preamble to the Constitution declares, by 'the people of the United States"' (p'. 294). This is a distortion. It was the people as states 'who ratified the Constitution. "The Constitution was not designed to make the United States a 'nation,' but to federate already existing states" (Rushdoony, This Independent Republic, p. viii). Moreover, sovereignty resides nowhere but in God. We err disastrously if, in rejecting federal sovereignty, we argue for the sovereignty of either states or people. Sovereignty is despotism, and God is the only rightful Despot. The intention of the framers was to avoid lodging sovereignty with any human institution. As Kelly and Harbison observed, "the delegates were generally agreed that the federal judiciary was not to possess the general right of expounding the Constitution …Certainly the Convention did not anticipate the future role of the Supreme Court as the final arbiter of the constitutional system" (The American Constitution, 1976, pp. 133ff.). But ever since the French Revolution, men who lust for power have first claimed that sovereignty resides with the people, and then claimed for themselves the supreme authority to act on behalf of the people. No institution is more dangerous than the one which professes to act for the general welfare.
Marshall's final step in establishing nationalism came with Gibbons v. Ogden (1824). He relied heavily on the commerce clause as the practical tool of implementing national sovereignty and consolidation. As Swindler points out, what Marshall began came to "full flower" in the 1964 Civil Rights Act (p. 84f.). As Swindler hasn't seen anything yet, if the statists have their way with the churches and the Christian school movement. And this is why we need to study these documents: we will lose the war if we allow the children of this world to be wiser than the children of light.
Additional historical detail on the rise of nationalism is provided in a recent biography of a leading statist, James Wilson, by Geoffrey Seed (KTO Press, $16.95), and again the treatment is very sympathetic—nay, laudatory. Wilson (1742-1798) was raised in Scotland in a time when the favorite reading matter among preachers was by Leibniz. He was educated in terms of natural law concepts, Reid's "common-sense" ideas, and the theories of David Hume. Soon after coming to America in 1764, he became involved in political activity, and was prominent in the framing of the U. S. Constitution (where, thankfully, not all of his suggestions were adopted). Wilson had high ambitions: he even volunteered to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, but Washington had enough insight to appoint him to a lesser post as associate justice. His unpopularity was due in part to his theory that massive debt was the key to fortune. Understandably, "the danger of his imprisonment for debt so increased that there were several states he did not dare enter, and by 1797 he could not appear even in Philadelphia," which was his home (p. 149). He was saved from certain impeachment only by the salutary event of his death.
Statists often claim to be democrats, and Wilson was no exception, believing that "no authority was by the grace of God; all was by grace of the people"—yet, of course, expecting "the citizens of a republic to subordinate their own interests to those of the state" (pp. 18f.). In marked contrast to the Antifederalists (who were, in Cecelia Kenyon's phrase, "men of little faith"), he had unbounded faith in the power of a strong centralized government to bring about "the perfection of man" (p. 18); it was "a positive instrument for the people's well-being" (p. 89), and, naturally, education "was of vital importance to the progressive state" (p.21). Theodore Roosevelt praised Wilson as the inspiration for his own "theory of governmental action" (p. 179), and Seed concludes: "Efficient government, drawing its authority always from the people, has become a distinguishing feature of the American system, and for this more is due to Wilson than to any other man of his time" (p. 182).
If all this sounds disillusioning, take heart. Not all the Founding Fathers were of this stripe, and men like Patrick Henry were able to pass the Bill of Rights over the objections of Marshall and Wilson. Statism has a long history, and we who seek to uproot it must become familiar with its origins.
Biblical Educator, Vol. 2, No, 7 (July 1980)
For a PDF of the original publication, click here: