So, in this post I’m going to briefly go over three challenges to producing effective, influential children. First, choose a better spouse. Second, Christian classical schools. Third, socialist countries make homeschooling and private Christian schools effectively illegal.

1. Choose a better spouse

So let’s start with the first one. Christian parents and pastors need to educate young people to choose spouses who are equipped educate to produce effective and influential children.

So in the case of choosing a man who will be involved in producing effective, influential children, here are some tips:

• don’t choose a man based on attraction to his appearance or displayed wealth
• whether homeschooling or private Christian schools, the man should have chosen a major and a career that allows him to pay to avoid public schools
• it’s better to choose a man whose career allows him to work from home, so that he is available to supervise the education, and discipline the children as they grow
• he should demonstrate his ability to move people in his circle of influence to greater effectiveness and influence, for example making them try harder at school and work, or get better at defending the Christian worldview, especially on controversial issues

So in the case of choosing a woman who will be involved in producing effective, influential children, here are some tips:

• don’t choose a woman based on attraction to her appearance or sexual availability
• children need their their mothers at home from birth to age 5, so if a woman has a career, then she needs to put it on hold during that time. If a woman wants to do a career to benefit the Christian community as a whole, e.g. – Supreme Court justice, then she should probably not have children between those ages
• it’s better to choose a woman who has demonstrated the ability to do hard things, so that she has the ability to take responsibility and be accountable for producing results, e.g. – a degree in computer science, and two years of private sector coding experience
• she should demonstrate her ability to move people in her circle of influence to greater effectiveness and influence, for example making them try harder at school and work, or get better at defending the Christian worldview, especially on controversial issues

It’s no good to complain when the children arrive that your spouse isn’t involved in spiritual and moral education. The time to settle that was when you were training to evaluate and choose your spouse. And Christian parents and pastors have a role to play in equipping young people to make better choices.

2. Classical Christian schools

I’ve looked over the curricula of a number of these classical Christian schools, and I am not convinced that they are useful for producing effective, influential Christians.

Suppose I were trying to educate my child to be the next Jay Richards or the next Stephen C. Meyer or the next Kristen Waggoner or the next Clarence Thomas. Are classical Christian schools useful for producing results like that?

Education has two goals. 1) educating the person in valuable skills, so that they can earn a lot of money without sacrificing family engagement, and without violating their conscience. 2) it should teach young people to resist the culture on the basis of reason and evidence. If we are talking about God’s existence or origins, then we are dealing with mainstream science. If we are talking about gospel reliability or the resurrection, then we are making historical arguments using mainstream evidence. If we’re talking about religious pluralism or the problem of evil, then we’re talking about mainstream philosophical theology and philosophy of religion. Etc.

I have yet to meet anyone involved with classical Christian schools who was steering young people into careers where they would make a lot of money, working from home, and not exposing themselves to cancel culture. You would think that these classical Christian schools would be focused on careers like developing software with open-source components, but they don’t have the skills. Secondly, apologetics is poorly handled in these curricula. If there is any, it’s presuppositional – an approach that is used by none of the most effective and influential Christian scholars. The ones who actually debate non-Christians and move the ball downfield in the culture.

3. Move to a conservative state in a conservative country

Many Christian men and women often pooh-pooh my seriousness about marriage and parenting planning. They say “I was born in Washington, and it’s a fine state. The public schools are great here. And I’m sure the government, although entirely Democrat, will respect my rights as a parent and as a Christian. After all, I pay their salaries.” But this is just laziness and ignorance. The people who say this don’t want the burden of having to make plans, and execute plans in order to produce effective, influential children.

Consider this article from Daily Wire, about Germany – a secular socialist state:

Home education has been outlawed in Germany for more than a century; four years ago, the European Court of Human Rights ruled against a family from Darmstadt, Germany, which had asserted the right to homeschool their children. Private religious schools, although legal, must follow state-mandated curricula from the area in which they are located.

Tobias Riemenschneider, a pastor at Evangelical Reformed Baptist Church in Frankfurt, Germany, said in an interview with The Daily Wire that the nation’s restrictive education laws present “great difficulty to parents who are convinced by their Christian faith that it is God’s will for them to raise their children themselves in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” He noted that parents who defy government sanctions against home education risk incurring considerable fines, prison sentences, and the possibility that authorities will take their children.

The same kind of stuff is happening now, in states like Washington and California.

It’s just like those Christian-owned business in SOGI states. SOGI states elevate sexual orientation and gender identity to be a protected category, like race. Christian businesses in those states think “well, I was born here, and my family is here, so I’m going to start a business here, and keep right out of politics. I’m sure God will make my laziness and ignorance work out”. They are taken by surprise by being persecuted by secular left tyrants. A much better plan is to be serious about moving to a state with low taxes, high liberty, and support for the plans of Christian parents. It’s better to spend your own money on educating your kids, rather than to spend it on legal defense.