Mission of the Christian School

This is the second of a two-part series on student ownership of the mission and values of Christian schools. The series is based on the writer’s study of twelve selected Christian schools, all members of ACSI or CSI. Kaufmann has a PhD in education from the University of Iowa, where he studied the history, philosophy, and sociology of education.

In Part 1, I questioned whether our Christian school children are becoming reflective students whose minds and hearts are devoted to Jesus Christ and who are ready to serve Him in home, church, and society. This is the ideal that all Christian schools hope for. My school study indicates that there is reason to believe we are not, or not consistently, realizing this ideal. Two previously noted reasons appear especially significant:

1. The school’s purpose as stated in the public relations brochures is often altered beyond recognition as it travels through the board, the administrators, the faculty, and finally the students. The ideas behind the appealing rhetoric of the brochures are not filtering down to guide the everyday work of teachers and students in the classrooms. In fact, there is little evidence that the schools have a coherent plan for communicating their mission. What students are left with is chapel as the place promoting spiritual values and classes as the place promoting academic values.
2. A secular/sacred dualism appears to be the de facto philosophy of many schools. The study found that often curricular and co-curricular programs are driven by priorities having little to do with Christian commitment and much to do with the values of the larger culture. For example, by a two-to-one margin, students reported that the sports program was what made their school distinctive. Chapel was a distant second.

Changes Suggested

I asked the teachers what they thought needed to be changed in their school to address these problems. Here are representative responses:

• Close down the school for a year.
• Reevaluate priorities and review philosophy.
• Be clear and consistent with rules.
• Recruit families who are committed wholeheartedly to Christian education.
• Higher academic standards, a much stricter attendance policy, an explicit dress code.

It is clear that the teachers believe that better support from the parents and the administration is needed if they are to succeed in their task. Many teachers indicated that, in their judgment, permissive homes and inattentive parents are the cause of the self-absorption and materialism seen in many students. They argued that the school will be able to do its job only if there is a change in parental priorities.

Next, I asked the teachers: “Do you think your students are capturing the vision that drives the mission of your school?” and listed their responses in six categories, as follows:

I asked the students what improvements they would suggest to their school. “Less strict rules” led the list. The results, listed below, show the number of students who chose each item:

Here are some representative comments from the students:

• The entire campus needs changing in order to make it more professional looking.
• We need new teachers who are more vivacious and I can actually learn from.
• Make it less of a reform school and more of a Christian school.
• I would like to change the hair and dress codes because they are way too restrictive.
• I would change the way teachers judge how smart you are. In this school you don’t get awards or scholarships if you’re not academically smart. I feel that people should be recognized for effort and not for their academic achievement.
• The teachers try to shelter us too much and need to tell us about the bad as well as the good.

In my judgment, the discussion of needed changes revealed two disturbing findings. Among the students there is a substantial negative feeling about certain aspects of school life. The attitude among the teachers is one of concern bordering on discouragement as they consider the things that inhibit success in their work. This attitude is reflected in their concern over the lack of student ownership or the school’s mission. Nearly 80 percent of the responses indicated that at least half the students had little to no ownership of the school’s mission.

When I met with faculty members to discuss the results of the study, I suggested that their strategy of tightening admission requirements may be unrealistic. In the present cultural climate, parental attention to the rearing of children is more likely to decrease than to increase. If teachers’ suggestions were implemented, the school created might well become one for which few students would qualify.

One Exception Considered

In one school I visited (referred to here as CCA), I did not perceive the same pessimism in teachers and negativism in students as I had in the other schools. I visited this school because I knew the curriculum for seniors had been altered to include a requirement of one afternoon per week of community service. In my judgment, the program was a direct implementation of the school’s mission, and I wanted to find out what impact the curriculum change might have had on student ownership of the school’s mission. Here is a partial comparison of the results from CCA with the results from all the schools:

After students had completed the questionnaire, I met with the sixty seniors to discuss Faith in Action, the service program required of all seniors. I asked what they might say to a friend who told them they were being deprived academically by missing one afternoon of classes each week. One student said, “I would say that this program best expresses what we are about as a school.” To test whether this sentiment was generally held, I asked them whether they thought Faith in Action ought to be required of seniors. Fifty-nine of the sixty voted yes!

I interviewed three administrators and five teachers, and I talked informally with several other faculty members. All considered service to others an important and regular part of the school’s program. I also found that a service ethic had made its way into many areas of the school’s program. The National Honor Society chapter is actively involved in community service. In fact, all clubs are encouraged to have a service component.

Through their Peer Counseling Program, selected older students received training in befriending and assisting younger students in need. The program is set up as a counseling service, with younger students scheduling appointments with the older student counselors. An annual leadership training retreat is held in the late summer for all class and club officers. At the retreat, students learn leadership skills, particularly, how to involve other students in achieving their organization’s goals. Students lead in planning and serving banquets, dramas, and other events.

In my judgment, CCA has succeeded in developing a service ethic that supports the school’s mission. In other words, the school has gone beyond the transmission of ideas as the means to communicate its mission. Teachers and students have translated their stated mission into systematic, regular, and purposeful student action, and that action appears to be translating into significant student ownership of the school’s mission.

Conclusions

In my judgment, the administrators at all the schools I visited are able to state a transformational Christian mission for their schools. However, their understanding has failed to carry over in any significant way to the faculty and students. As a result, the transformational rhetoric remains a kind of sacred “icing” on an otherwise largely secular program.

The study indicates important differences within the faculty in their understanding of mission. This lack of consensus has been passed on to the students, and therefore the schools fail to counteract the materialism and radical individual-ism that students have absorbed from the larger culture. It does not appear that students are acquiring a significant understanding of Christianity as a culturally relevant worldview.

I further conclude that transmitting the ideals of a transformational Christian worldview is a necessary but insufficient condition for student ownership of those ideals. Student ownership of the school’s ideals appears to be closely related to student participation in achieving them. In the light of these findings, I believe there is an urgent need for Christian schools to rethink the nature of their programs.

The Mission of the Christian School 1.1