Some people admit that it might be nice to have the children in a Christian atmosphere but ...
'How can you be specifically Christian when you teach the children that two times two are four?' Well, our answer is that if you cannot teach arithmetic to the glory of God, you cannot do it any other way because it cannot be done any other way by anybody. And by this I do not mean that you have breathed in a sort of Christian atmosphere about the problems of arithmetic in the sense that you have opened the school session with prayer a couple of hours before. By a Christian atmosphere I mean first of all that deep conviction on the part of the teacher that no fact is teachable except when brought into relationship with God.
(Foundations of Christian Education: Addresses to Christian Teachers (Christian perspectives)
Ch 1, Antithesis in Education, p18.
Now the fact that two times two are four does not mean the same thing to you as a believer and to someone else as an unbeliever. When you think of two times two as four, you connect this fact with numerical law. And when you connect this fact with numerical law, you must connect numerical law with all law. The question you face, then, is whether law exists in its own right or is an expression of the will and nature of God. Thus the fact that two times two are four enables you to implicate yourself more deeply into the nature and will of God. On the other hand, when an unbeliever says that two time two are four, he will also be led to connect this fact with the whole idea of law; but he will regard this law as independent of God. Thus the fact that two times two are four enables him, so he thinks, to get farther away from God. That fact will place the unbeliever before a whole sea of open possibilities in which he may seek to realize his life away from God. And this is the basic difference between what 'two times two are four' means to the believer and what it means to the unbeliever ....
(Foundations of Christian Education: Addresses to Christian Teachers (Christian perspectives) Ch 1, Antithesis in Education, p7-8.
