Go Private or Stay Public?

Should we put our children in public or private school? Ask this question today and you’ll get a plethora of comments or should I say opinions and you know what they say about opinions. As a former Principal of a K-12 Christian school, I could cover the spectrum from Common-Core to bathrooms, sex in the hallways and on the buses, and the countless problems that students, parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and even older siblings are dealing with daily.

Are art and music important enough curriculum for the tax payers to contribute towards? Certainly most schools want good sports programs, so that children can get scholarships and become productive citizens or maybe even professional athletes. I attended a public high-school with a young man who did great at varsity basketball and went on to play for a professional team (third string). Others I knew who graduated high in their class went on to attend prestigious universities, but had hard times dealing with the real world and showed little common sense.

I write all this to leave the right answers for you to decide. After all, you’ve been educated in the school of life. Too many students who attend private, Christian schools or are home-schooled, are often isolated to the point of no advance, meaning they can’t maneuver their way through life, because they lived in such a bubble, maybe even a fantasy world that does not exist in our all-too-often, regular day-to-day agonies and defeats.

As a side note (for those who are ‘in the church’), statistics show that once students are off to college or university, an extremely high percentage of them will never return to church or their faith again. Perhaps they never had real biblical faith to begin with. You can blame this on the world, but in my professional opinion and coming from a biblical perspective, the church is the salt and light in this present world of darkness, we are the change agents and if we don’t do our job well, there’s little or no hope for the future, so you decide. Surely we don’t want the world in the church, but if the church doesn’t equip the saints to go into all the world, to deal with it biblically, the light will not dispel the darkness.