Doug Wilson Says ‘A Christian Education for Christian Kids is Mandated by Scripture’
“When it comes to the question of education, I have argued for years as a pastor that a Christian education for Christian kids is mandated by Scripture (Eph. 6:1–4).”1 – Doug Wilson
“The fact that many thousands of Christian parents still have their children in the government schools shows how far we are from even beginning what Paul requires of us.”2 – Doug Wilson
OPINION: Doug Wilson has advocated for Christian education for decades. He helped found Logos School (K–12) in 19813 and then created the Association of Classical Christian Schools.4 He later helped to found a college5 and seminary.6 But Doug has not simply established educational institutions. He also teaches that God’s Word requires parents to provide their children with a particular form of Christian education and if your children are in public school, you are in direct violation of God’s Word.
In order to understand Doug’s beliefs regarding education, we must examine the specific Greek word that he often references—παιδείᾳ (paideia), commonly translated “discipline” in Ephesians 6:4: “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline [paideia] and instruction of the Lord” (NASB95). The word means: “the act of providing guidance for responsible living, upbringing, training, instruction.”7 While it is true that paideia can refer to a more formal type of education in Scripture, in such cases it is descriptive rather than prescriptive and does not advocate a specific educational model for believers.8 Doug stretches the term beyond its biblical meaning, presenting paideia as the cornerstone of his philosophy of “classical” Christian education.9 In reality, his version of classical Christian education has less to do with the Bible and more to do with the ancient educational tradition of pagan Greeks and Romans.10 As biblical scholar Ernest Best wrote: “There is nothing here [in Ephesians 6:4] on which to base an educational theory.”11 Paul’s instruction is simply commanding “believing fathers to train and admonish their children in ways prescribed by the Lord in the power of the Holy Spirit.”12 Paul’s chief aim is not to warn fathers against secular schooling, but rather to urge them to raise their children with the goal that they would know and follow Christ.13
Outside of the linguistic issues with Doug’s interpretation, he also commits the logical fallacy of non sequitur14 when he claims that no one has yet been able to fully obey Paul’s command to bring up their children “in the discipline [paideia] and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4) when he states: “I want to argue here that it is not possible to fully provide ‘the paideia of the Lord’ outside the context of a Christian civilization. If this is the case, then Paul’s command to the Ephesians, when they did not live in a Christian culture, just as we do not, means that he saw, at some point in the future, the necessity of establishing a Christian culture.”15 Such an interpretation does not follow logically from Ephesians 6:4—Paul gives an imperative to first-century believers in Ephesus and does not say, “Of course, you’ll only be able to do this if your whole city, region, or empire is Christian.” He expects them to obey here and now, despite their pagan environment. If the command actually required a fully Christian society, then it would have been moot for those original readers. But Paul’s teaching presupposes it is both possible and expected to carry out the command immediately. Doug reads his own presupposition of post-millennial theology16 into the text and shows once again he is a poor exegete who does not accurately handle the word of truth, but reads his own ideas into the text (eisegesis) and propagates them as God’s Word.
Beyond this, as you read more of what Doug intends when he states that “a Christian education for Christian kids is mandated by Scripture,”17 it is clear that he is not referring to Christian education in general, but specifically what he deems to be Christian. In a chapter entitled “Why Evangelical Colleges Aren’t” Doug writes:
“Parents are not about to spend years sacrificing themselves to provide a private Christian education only to give it all away when an ‘evangelical’ college offers to undo all they accomplished in the previous twelve years…These colleges were founded over a century ago, and the Christian school movement has only developed within the last twenty years…Our only real hope is that the parents currently showing such zeal in the sound education of their younger children will not be too tired, when the time comes, to turn their attention to the establishment of small but genuine colleges.”18
Doug clearly implies that you are not following Paul’s command if you send your children to just any private Christian school, and that you are required by Scripture to send them to a private “classical” Christian school, conveniently identical to the educational institutions he personally founded and continues to influence.
On top of all this, while Doug denies that education is a “savior” of our children,19 he contradicts himself (once again) by implying that his particular method of education will lead to salvation: “…if we trust God with the education of our children appropriately…God in His goodness will summon them all to His throne room, where purity dwells, and the rainbow is emerald green (Rev. 4:3).”20 Whether we choose to educate our children in public school, private, “classical” or homeschool, such a choice will never guarantee salvation for our children.21 Our children will not be saved based on the education they receive. Rather, “if you confess with your mouth Jesus as Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved; for with the heart a person believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth he confesses, resulting in salvation” (Romans 10:9–10, NASB95). We know this experientially. How many of you reading this (who are believers) attended public school? Maybe you chose private school, homeschooling, or even public school for your own children—perhaps because of challenges you faced in your own education experience. But here’s the truth: You know Christ today, in spite of attending a public school. Your life is living proof that God is greater—more powerful than any “government school.” Is the gospel so weak that we must follow some formulaic method of education in order for our children to be saved? No! “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Romans 1:16, NASB95). The gospel is powerful because it is of God, and we should not fear that the world and its influence is stronger: “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world…You are from God, little children, and have overcome them; because greater is He who is in you than he who is in the world” (1 John 4:1, 4, NASB95).
My prayer is that Doug would repent from placing heavy non-biblical requirements on parents (like a costly private “classical” Christian education), as if those requirements are from God himself (Mark 7:6–9), and rather preach that the gospel has the power to save, and we need not be fearful, but know that there is freedom in Christ concerning how we raise our children in the Lord, and that ultimately we must trust God to save our children, not our adherence to some man-made system of education.
Want More Context?
Here are some links to other blogs and podcasts dealing with this and other issues in more depth:
https://heidelblog.net/2021/11/do-you-know-who-is-influencing-your-classical-school/
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/video/good-faith-debates-public-schools/
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/perspectives-on-our-childrens-education-going-public/
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/perspectives-on-our-childrens-education-homeward-bound/
https://rachelgreenmiller.wordpress.com/2016/05/05/plagiarism-wilson-and-the-omnibus/
Footnotes
Footnotes
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Douglas Wilson, Rules for Reformers, Canon Press, 2014, p. 227, Kindle Edition. ↩
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Douglas Wilson, The Paideia of God and Other Essays on Education, Canon Press, 1999, p. 10, Kindle Edition. Doug repeats this same line of teaching in his 2021 reprint of Excused Absence: Should Christian Kids Leave Public Schools?: “That’s where this book comes in. It aims to persuade Christian parents to act wisely in their children’s education by giving them the kind of education the Bible requires: a distinctively Christian education, which their children cannot receive at government schools” (Douglas Wilson, Excused Absence: Should Christian Kids Leave Public Schools?, Canon Press, 2021, p. 9, Kindle Edition). ↩
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https://web.archive.org/web/20250219235254/https://dougwils.com/institutions and https://web.archive.org/web/20160606164555/http://classicalchristian.org/our-history/ ↩
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William Arndt et al., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, University of Chicago Press, 2000, p. 748. ↩
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As it does of Moses’s education in Egypt (Acts 7:22) and Paul’s education by Gamaliel (Acts 22:3). But it is important to note these usages are descriptive only, not instructive: “Controlled merely by history, and without theological significance, are the two verses Ac. 7:22 and 22:3, where one finds the usage which Hellenistic biography developed and which Hellenistic Judaism correspondingly used in biographical observations concerning its great men” (Georg Bertram, “Παιδεύω, Παιδεία, Παιδευτής, Ἀπαίδευτος, Παιδαγωγός,” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel, Geoffrey W. Bromiley, and Gerhard Friedrich, Eerdmans, 1964–, p. 619). The Bible’s references to Moses’s Egyptian education and Paul’s Jewish education using the same root word emphasizes the fact that there is no hidden or exclusive “Christian” method of formal education, as Doug seeks to argue. ↩
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Doug outlines this philosophy in his 1999 book The Paideia of God and Other Essays on Education. His work echoes Dorothy Sayers’s essay The Lost Tools of Learning, though her preferred educational model is based on the medieval “Trivium” and “Quadrivium,” not on the ancient Greek “paideia.”(https://archive.org/details/sayers1948losttoolslearning/page/n3/mode/2up). ↩
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Doug cites Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture by Werner Jaeger as the basis for his understanding of what paideia entails: “Werner Jaeger, in his monumental study of paideia, shows that the word paideia represented, to the ancient Greeks, an enormous ideological task… . So the word paideia goes far beyond the scope and sequence of what we call formal education. In the ancient world, the paideia was all-encompassing and involved nothing less than the enculturation of the future citizen” (Douglas Wilson, The Paideia of God and Other Essays on Education, Canon Press, 1999, p. 10, Kindle Edition). Two volumes of Werner Jaeger’s work are available online: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.46411/page/n5/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.13759/page/n5/mode/ This is not to say we can’t learn from the educational methods of the Greeks or Romans, but that we should not treat them as mandated by Scripture. ↩
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Ernest Best, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Ephesians, International Critical Commentary (Edinburgh: T&T Clark International, 1998), 569. It is also of note that “… neither in the NT age nor in that of the Apologists is the vocabulary of παιδεία developed further” (Georg Bertram, “Παιδεύω, Παιδεία, Παιδευτής, Ἀπαίδευτος, Παιδαγωγός,” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel, Geoffrey W. Bromiley, and Gerhard Friedrich, Eerdmans, 1964–, p. 624). Even when the word is used in I Clement 21:8 (81–96 AD) it has to do with instruction in Christian character and doctrine, not a method of liberal education: “Our children, let them have a share in the instruction [παιδείαν] that is in Christ. Let them learn what humility has strength to do before God; what pure love is able to do before God; how the fear of him is beautiful and great, saving all of those in it, who walk devoutly with a pure mind” (Rick Brannan, trans., The Apostolic Fathers in English, Lexham Press, 2012). ↩
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Harold W. Hoehner, Ephesians: An Exegetical Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2002), 799. ↩
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“The phrase ἐν Χριστῷ, ‘in Christ,’ functions in a similar way in 1 Clem 21.8, which states that children are ‘to participate in Christian instruction’ (τῆς ἐν Χριστῷ παιδείας μεταλαμβάνειν). By specifying that the various forms of instruction are to be ‘of the Lord,’ the writer underlines that the education that goes on in the household has a new orientation. The learning Christ and being taught in him spoken of in 4:20, 21 is to be an activity that takes place not only in the Christian community in general but also specifically in the family, with the fathers as those who teach their children the apostolic tradition about Christ and help to shape their lives in accordance with it” (Andrew T. Lincoln, Ephesians, vol. 42, Word Biblical Commentary, Word, Incorporated, 1990, p. 408). ↩
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“The fallacy of non sequitur (‘it does not follow’) occurs when there is not even a deceptively plausible appearance of valid reasoning, because there is an obvious lack of connection between the given premises and the conclusion drawn from them.” (https://www.britannica.com/topic/fallacy#ref1102393) ↩
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Douglas Wilson, The Paideia of God and Other Essays on Education, Canon Press, 1999, p. 11, Kindle Edition. ↩
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https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/article/postmillennialism-a-biblical-critique/ https://bredenhof.ca/2023/07/03/doug-wilson-the-bad/ ↩
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Douglas Wilson, Rules for Reformers, Canon Press, 2014, p. 227, Kindle Edition. ↩
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Douglas Wilson, The Paideia of God and Other Essays on Education, Canon Press, 1999, p. 113-118, Kindle Edition. Doug reiterates this same idea when he writes that the reason for the “great apostasies” currently occurring in America is “our godless educational system”—implying that the system itself is directly responsible for leading people away from the faith. He writes: “These words [in Deut. 6:4–5] are contained in the middle of a passage on the importance of bringing up your children under the Word of God. It is the beating heart of a passage that is all about Christian education. And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and thou shalt talk about them all the time (Deut. 6:7). This is no peripheral issue, and so where do great apostasies—like the one we are experiencing right now—come from? They come from not doing this. They arise from disobedience. America has cancer bad, and what would be our disease-ridden lymph nodes? The answer to that question is pretty plain, at least for those willing to repent of the ongoing denial and look straight at the MRI. The answer is our godless educational system, K-12, which is then augmented and brought to a corrupt fruition by our Christless system of higher education” (Douglas Wilson, Gashmu Saith It, Canon Press, 2021, p. 41, Kindle Edition). Contrary to Doug’s argument, Scripture never directly blames a culture’s educational system for apostasy. A more biblically faithful exhortation would focus on the danger of trusting in a works-based salvation or making a mere outward profession of faith that lacks genuine root in Christ—rather than attributing the cause to societal institutions (Matthew 13:20–21; Galatians 1:6ff; Hebrews 3:12). Doug also errantly connects the salvation of children to the obedience of their parents here. In the context of Ephesians 6:4 we could actually lay some blame on fathers provoking their children to anger as a cause (only a secondary one) for children walking away from the faith. ↩
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“And no, this does not leave out the gospel. We deny that education can be any kind of a savior” (Douglas Wilson, Gashmu Saith It, Canon Press, 2021, p. 42, Kindle Edition). But he appears to contradict himself even in the same book (see footnote 18). ↩
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https://web.archive.org/web/20240414194220/https://dougwils.com/books-and-culture/s7-engaging-the-culture/children-of-the-rainbow.html ↩
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Could it be unwise in some situations to send your child to a public school? Yes—just as it could be unwise to homeschool or to send them to a private Christian school in other circumstances. The point is, in Christ, parents have the freedom to make this choice according to their own consciences before the Lord. ↩