Philosophy of Education

Principles That Determine What We Do As A School

The Covenant Community

• God has given parents the primary responsibility for the education of their children, and thus the school is to function as an extension of the home.
• Covenant children are to be trained and nurtured primarily by their own parents, but also receive assistance and encouragement from the entire body of the church, reflecting the commitment of God's people to support one another.
• Relationships are best developed and learning is accelerated in small groups. Therefore, the school designs its program to best produce such by keeping class sizes small and promoting a family atmosphere and a parental role of teachers.
• Both teachers and parents should be continual learners themselves, as education continues through all of life. Thus education is modeled as well as taught.
  

• Covenant children are a precious gift from God and made in His image. As such a child is a fearfully created, unique person to be respected, nurtured, and treated as an imagebearer with responsibility to God. Proper motivation for learning in children is that which results from this relationship, rather than other inducements.
• At the fall, the image of Christ in man was broken. As God disciplines those He loves, children need discipline from parents and teachers to develop godly habits that assist them in learning and living.
• Respecting the proper development of the child, formalized education need not begin before age 5. The school day of grades K-3 should be considerably shortened to allow more time at home.
• Academic achievement should not overlook the healthy development of the whole child in a proper environment. Young children (especially up to the age of 9) are better nurtured spiritually, emotionally and intellectually by their parents in their homes. Among numerous benefits, the home provides opportunities to:
  
  • spend time outdoors to explore and play safely;
  • stimulate learning by doing, experimenting and observing;
  • develop responsibility through working with parents in cooking, cleaning, gardening and other household projects;
  • model and imitate family values, rather than those easily adopted by children in other settings; and
  • have security, acceptance, and love from parents that cannot be duplicated by other caregivers.
    

• Glorifying God involves children living abundantly for Him and serving others in their present vocation as students, not just preparing for a future occupation.
• God, after establishing the world, gave His children the "creation mandate," the responsibility to subdue the earth and gain dominion over all His works.
• God, after man fell into sin, gave the "redemptive command," that those who come to a true knowledge of God by repentance and faith will be able to enter a relationship with Christ, which will enable them to understand the Truth and glorify Him.
  

• Understanding the Truth involves the acquisition of wisdom through the fear of God, not just the accumulation of knowledge. To deprive a child of truth is to deprive him of life. Thus the reality of God's grace must accompany a commitment to integrity, diligence and moral purity.
• All of God's knowledge is unified and whole. Therefore, education is a process of continually seeking to gain and apply knowledge in its wholeness in Christ, rather than a process of fragmenting that knowledge into pieces because they are easier to understand and measure.