The freedom to educate our children is being eroded. Are Christians ready to offer resistance? Joshua Kellard explores this question.
Christians understand that freedom is not ornamental, but necessary for us to flourish as God intends. We see this in the gospel itself, which calls us out of spiritual bondage and into the freedom of knowing and loving the living God. In the Exodus narrative, spiritual liberation is also worked out in the civil sphere, as the children of Israel are delivered from excessive external control (tyranny). Pharaoh’s claim on the children of Israel is exposed as legally illegitimate because the Lord Himself has already laid claim to their lives. They are His.
God’s personal claim on the people of Israel leads us to the heart of a truly Christian vision of freedom: human beings are free to the extent that we can serve and obey the Lord for whom and by whom we were made.
This is not to say that Christians cannot glorify God in situations in which they are oppressed and denied basic freedoms. But it is to say that we have serious theological and devotional motives for preserving hard-won liberties, both for ourselves and for others. Furthermore, if these liberties are taken from us, we reserve the responsibility to ‘obey God, rather than man’ as an exercise of spiritual freedom for the glory of God and the good of our neighbour.
I begin in this way because the subject of this article, the critical pressure on our educational freedom, needs to be considered in relation to our spiritual context.
A sacred responsibility
Raising and educating children made in the image of God is a sacred responsibility. Biblically, it is a task which belongs primarily to parents.
It is bound up with the charge to our first parents to ‘be fruitful and multiply’.
It is present in God’s call to Abraham in Genesis 18:19: ‘For I have chosen him, that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing righteousness and justice, so that the LORD may bring to Abraham what he has promised him’.
It is underlined by Moses, as he stipulates that God’s commandments are to be taught by parents to children (Deut. 6:7; 11:19).
It is summarised by Paul, as he insists that fathers do not provoke their children to wrath but ‘bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord’ (Eph. 6:4).
There is beauty and goodness in the Lord’s ordering of family life. Mothers and fathers have been charged by the Creator to nurture, protect, challenge, and sacrificially serve their children for His glory. The parent-child relationship is utterly unique, intended to mirror God’s own heart for His people in a special way.
We should not be surprised, therefore, that there is spiritual and cultural opposition to the family and the freedoms necessary for it to flourish.
As our culture sheds its Christian heritage, it is abandoning respect for the family and for parental authority. In place of these, it is increasingly substituting the authority of the state, not as an emergency back-up for when the family fails (as it sometimes does), but as the entity primarily responsible for the ‘wellbeing’ of children.
The state we’re in
The involvement of the British state in the lives of children is nothing new. What is novel is the state’s sheer determination to oversee the development of every child in the country, from birth to graduation.
The prevailing view of those in power is that just as the office is the place for adults, so school is the place for children. Writing about the results of her ‘Big Ask’ survey, Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel De Souza writes about hearing from children how much they missed their friends, teachers, and schools during the pandemic. ‘This confirmed my long-held belief,’ writes De Souza, ‘that school really is the best place for children to be’.
We may agree with this or find its narrowness troubling. What is clear, however, is that the government is intent on all children in the country being in a state-regulated learning environment. As Christians, we must reckon seriously with the principle and practice of this. The principle should make us uneasy: we believe primary responsibility for children belongs with parents, not the state. The practice of the policy should stir us to prayerful action: the authorities wish to consolidate their supervision of our children at precisely the moment that dangerous ideologies are bending the system against parents, against faith in Christ, and against the commandments of God. At present we have some freedoms to mitigate these influences: soon we may not.
The Schools Bill pincer
If evidence were needed that the government intends to know about, regulate, and vet the education of every child in the country, consider the Schools Bill 2022, introduced last May. Designed to cover England, it nevertheless pursued goals which devolved administrations in Scotland and Wales have also cherished for a long time.
Not all of these aims are bad. Two refrains in the government literature are ‘safeguarding’ and ‘suitable education’. I doubt that anyone reading this newspaper would dispute the importance of ensuring both for children. But these two important issues are not a licence for unlimited state intervention: at most, they suggest that the state has a back-stop role to play in cases where there is evidence of neglect or abuse. However, this nuance is lost in an effort to establish a new framework for the state’s supervision of children.
The Bill’s key proposals form a pincer movement on the part of educational authorities. One claw of the pincer moved against independent schools gathering informally. Designating these to be ‘illegal, unregistered schools’, the Bill made it virtually impossible to establish learning settings or full-time parental cooperatives which are truly independent of state regulation. Instead of praising the willpower and resolve of those who take the initiative to educate children in creative contexts at their own expense, the Bill aimed at conformity under supervision.
The other claw tightened harder than ever around home educating families, insisting that all children not in schools be registered with local authorities (LAs). Should families fail to register their children, LAs were granted new powers to issue school attendance orders (SAOs) and to fine or imprison non-compliant parents. Yes, you read that right: parents who have a conscientious objection to registering their children with local state authorities could face fines and, if resisting school attendance orders, imprisonment.
The key here is to grasp what registration entails. Data is never collected idly, and the Department for Education has made no secret of its desire to ensure every child has a ‘suitable education’. Registration of children not in school is intended as a first step to what will effectively be compulsory oversight of children by local authorities. We must consider carefully what sort of educational philosophy and curricular requirements such authorities will require from Christian parents in the years to come.
What next?
We are not out of the woods – far from it. The Schools Bill was quietly dropped just before Christmas, a casualty of the Autumn’s political chaos more than anything else. The battle for educational freedom, however, has only just begun. Unfortunately, we are far from mobilised and battle-ready. Not so with those arguing for greater state supervision of education. Humanists UK, for example, have been fighting for years for a crackdown on informal schooling, that of a religious nature being of particular concern to them. They rejoiced to see The Schools Bill materialise, and were dismayed by its failure.
Not deterred from its larger aims, the Department for Education has vowed to bring in registers for children not in school during 2023. Once in place, they are unlikely to be rolled back. While they will affect home educating families first, registers and consequent supervision will drastically reduce the educational freedom of the whole populace. No one will be free to set a course of instruction for their children without the potential, at least, of interference from a government official. All of us will be affected by such a development, and all of us have a role to play in resisting this move.
We have some limited time to regroup. What, then, can we do? Perhaps the first step is to pay closer attention to what is going on in the halls of educational power. Better informed, we will then know how to pray and how to live.
A step that churches can take is to consider whether they have a mandate to aid and assist the education of the children in their midst. Is it possible that the state has not only displaced parents, but also the church community as a vital provider of instruction and nurture? Relatedly, how can churches support those parents who pull their children out of state schools with real spiritual concerns? If there is a plausibility problem with such ‘counter-cultural’ decisions, then the church can help to make those decisions easier, offering understanding, encouragement, and even financial support.
Finally, with the likelihood that the state will encroach further on educational freedom, perhaps it is time for us to draw up plans for peaceful, principled resistance to these measures, making it more plausible, when the time comes, for our parents to act bravely in the face of unjust laws. Joshua Kellard works in Christian publishing. Together with his family, he is part of the Livingroom Church, Wallyford (FIEC).
