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Arising from a thicket of local grass roots, Christian schools today are found in a bewildering variety of shapes and sizes from kindergarten through grade twelve, at academic levels that range from fairly high to very low. Discrimination in favor of religion is a basic raison d'etre, and at the more zealous schools, a tub-thumping suspicion of all nonreligious learning fills the air. In a 150-page how-to-start-a-school guide for would-be organizers, Educator Robert Billings (now a top Reaganite administrator in the Department of Education) warns in capital letters: NO UNSAVED INDIVIDUALS SHOULD BE ON THE STAFF!
Says the Rev. Rex Heath, 65, who runs the Mother Lode Christian School in Tuolumne City, Calif.: "When the community appeals to higher standards of academics, that always kills spiritual values. All those schools like Yale and Harvard started out as Christian schools, but then they got concerned with quality." Tuition can be as low as $225, as high as $2,500 per year. But whatever they cost, the schools do seem to excel at training in basic skills, personal courtesy and classroom decorum. A cross section of Christian schools-Christian Liberty Academy. "Government schools are a taxpayer rip-off and a blight on our students," says the Rev. Paul Lindstrom, 41, head of the Christian Liberty Academy in the Chicago suburb of Prospect Heights. A former inner-city schoolteacher, Lindstrom founded the academy in 1968 partly to oppose what he saw as creeping socialism in the public school curricula. Today, 150 students (preschool through twelfth grade) get a stiff dose of moral education and free-enterprise economics in small classes (average pupil-teacher ratio: 15 to 1).
For grades one through eight, the main reading and literature textbooks are McGufley readers dating from the 19th century, which progress from primers designed to teach reading by the use of phonics to literary anthologies of great poetry and prose—often heroic or uplifting excerpts. Instead of sentences like "See Spot run," special first-grade texts use Christian lessons to teach reading: "Adam was the first father. Eve was the first mother." Two plus two will always equal four, says a math lesson, just as "Thou shalt not kill" will always mean thou shalt not kill. In high school economics, students are taught the need to return to the gold standard—on biblical authority. (To buttress their policy academy economics teachers cite Isaiah 1: 22, "Thy silver has become dross, thy wine mixed with water.") The academy proudly reports measurable results of this curriculum, taught in strict classrooms by teachers who view their work not as a job but as a calling: the five-year-olds, who attend for only half-days, read fluently. Academy students generally test one or two years above national norms. Lindstrom is unabashed about the mix of politics and morals in his classrooms. Says he: "We espouse all the views of the Moral Majority, and then some."