The Uncommon Christian School

Why do we need the "Uncommon" Christian school?

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Want to become an uncommon Christian school? Take our self-assessment tool to find out your school’s strengths and weaknesses and learn first steps on how to address them. We identify and score seven different areas within your school’s operations and will generate a report based on your results.

The Problem

The common school model is failing

The Common School model of K-12 education created over 150 years ago and upon which all public schools and many private schools are based is failing.

What Christian parents and the church want, and need is no longer found in the failing “Common School” model. It is our contention that it would be more efficient and effective to start with a clean piece of paper rather than try to reform or improve the model that has moved so far away from our goals and purposes.

Hence, we need to build a new kind of school– one that captures all the elements of the historical Christian education that the Church benefited from for centuries right up until out colonial times. In fact, the current explosion in growth of home schooling, classical schools, and hybrid schools are all expressions of what we would like to point to as the demand for the uncommon Christian school. We need to start with the goal in mind– to transform the hearts and minds of our students to be more like their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and to provide schooling that will enable them to live out His purposes for their lives. This should be the goal of our Christian schools, no matter what pedagogy is employed.

We want to invite you on a journey to build a truly transformational Christian school– one that reflects the excellence and beauty of God as it grows the next generation of fully equipped disciple.

Pete Hegseth and David Goodwin in their recent book Battle for the American Mind narrate how our colonial schools that were fashioned after a long-standing classical tradition of learning and enculturation have devolved into the modern secular public school we have today. This process of change in our schools has taken almost 200 years. The Common School movement began with the best intentions, but the unintended consequences have built the secular public schools we have today.

The American school model from colonial times recognized several things:

The primacy of the parent in the decision-making regarding their child’s education
The need for a Christian faith to be nurtured
A heavy reliance on classical content, including the classics of history, philosophy, literature, and religion
The importance of the teacher-student relationship as one fostering discipleship
The goal of building citizens for two kingdoms– of earth as well as heaven

These are clearly no longer the priorities of today’s secular Common Public School. Unknowingly, many of our private Christian schools have been built on this same model and suffer from its limitations. This is then the problem.

HOw exactly did we get here?

History of the Common School Movement

How is it that so few of these ingredients mentioned above that were essential to the education of our founding fathers and the generations that preceded them are present in our secular public schools? The story begins with Horace Mann and the Common School Movement he and other pioneered in the first half of the 19th century. The goal was noble– that every child should be able to receive an education. America was the first to adopt this model as a matter of fairness and was spurred by the idea that our growing nation needed an educated citizenry. The progressives later in the century added the idea that we needed an educated workforce as well to realize the better society that such a workforce could build.

These earliest common schools retained many of the elements of colonial classical education. The parents were still in charge through their local school boards (95% of the population still lived in smaller agricultural towns at the time), and the curriculum was thoroughly Christian and classical. However, to reach its new goals, namely affordable education for all and an educated workforce, compromises had to be made as the country became more diverse and the requirements of an educated working class increased.

In fact, it is interesting to note that Catholic schools were formed in the late 1800s because the common public schools were virtually Protestant schools. However, the growing diversity and urbanization of the population removed the school further from parental control and into the control of the state educational apparatus. The spiritual nature of the curriculum became increasingly watered down to accommodate the growing religious diversity of the population until the mid-1900s when both prayer and Bible reading were banned from our public schools. The curriculum became increasingly career based and the classic subjects and content were slowly removed from the curriculum. In fact, by the late twentieth century, the five characteristics we outlined earlier were so watered down that we were let with what has now become our secular public school. This is where the Common School movement has led us and why we need a new model.

The Solution