by Charles W . Mayes
W h y Our Church W en t Into The Day School Business
therefore subsidized to a greater degree) or a member of 15 other denominations served. Their costs have risen to a range of $17 to $24.75 or an average cost of about $250 for each pupil per year plus $6 for books and a $2 insurance fee. Second and third students of a family get reduced rates. Public schools in the area spend about $325 per pupil each year be cause of more elaborate buildings, high salaries for teachers and other reasons. A Committee of 1,000 Friends — people who probably will give $1 or more per month to Brethren schools — helps subsidize operat ing expenses and build new build ings. Half of our Board of Educa tion must be selected from parents who have a very active part in the general work of the school through our Parent-Teacher Fellowship. In this procedure our program is a blending of the parent-controlled and the. church-controlled system. Our curriculum follows the Cal ifornia state program of education plus one period of Bible in every grade every day. UCLA, Southern California’s only accrediting agen cy, has established the high school on good, solid accreditation. Grad uates of Brethren High have been accepted at Harvard, , Yale and Stanford Universities, at the Mas sachusetts Institute of Technology, Cal-Tech and by all the top-notch Christian colleges across the nation. There are some curriculum dis advantages with a high school student body of less than 500. For example, some courses have very small classes but a teacher for it
We began our program in 1947 with about 90 boys and girls in the first eight grades. We now have nearly 600 in all 12 grades (and kindergarten) and about 50 young people will be graduated from our high school this year. It was not easy to rally Christian people to this task at the beginning. We found that most church mem bers were secular minded. They pictured our school as a duplicate of the public system with a little Bible t e a c h i n g thrown in and naturally they objected. They com pletely missed the idea that a Christian school should correlate and integrate all truth with the revelation God has given through His Word. We began, therefore, with a nucleus of lay people in our church who really wanted the school and gradually other friends got the vision for it. Our first classes were held in the basement of the Seal Beach Breth ren Church. After two years we purchased our own property. Costs per pupil ranged from $10 a month to $24 at the beginning, depending on the grade, whether the s tudent r ode the bus and whether she was a Brethren (and
W h e n the American system of education was still in its infancy, the late Dr. A. A. Hodge of Prince ton University fame made the fol lowing prophetic statement: “ It is capable of exact demonstration that if every party in the state has the right of excluding from the public schools whatever he does not be lieve to be true, then he that be lieves most must give way to him that believes least, and he that believes least must give way to him that believes absolutely nothing, no matter in how small a minority the atheists or the agnostics may be. It is self-evident that on this scheme, if it is consistently and persistently carried out in all parts of the country, the United States’ system of national popular educa tion will be the most efficient and wide instrument for the propaga tion of atheism which the world has ever seen.” Dr. Hodge saw with an eye of remarkable prophetic discernment. In our day the Christian empha sis within the state school system has been reduced to practically nothing. This is not to be taken as a criticism of public education be cause in our day a school system agreeable to the great majority would not allow any definite Chris tian testimony. Since we cannot expect that the gigantic state educational system (which last year spent nearly $12 billion) shall be built to satisfy the small minority of Christian believ ers, I believe we must start our own Christian day schools — a constitu tional privilege most people aren’t aware of.
About the Author
Charles W . Mayes has been a Brethren pas tor for 32 years; is currently at the First Brethren C h u rch of Long Beach, Calif.
Mayes has also been a magazine editor and has taught in public schools and at Biola.
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