Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76Plough Quarterly • Winter 2015 33 Clearly, public schools can be troubled places. Accordingly, it’s no surprise that the Christian consensus seems to side with Mohler; a quick online search yields an ­ immediate harvest of articles imploring Christians to remove their children from public education. And when I meet people in town who share my faith and education, they often confess they never seriously considered enrolling their chil- dren in the local schools. The prevailing wisdom is that private or homeschool options are the best choice, that the extra investment of time and money allows us to put our children first, rooting them into the kingdom of God. But what about the children who are left behind, in increasingly darker places as each Christian light is removed? Should the ­ Christian response be to abandon troubled public schools – or should our answer rather be to ­infiltrate them? Our family moved to this Chicago suburb after perceiving God’s nudge to invest in his Vi e w p o i n t Should Christians Abandon Public Schools? C A T H E R I N E M C N I E L Last September, after my sons boarded the bus for a new year at our local public school, I read two articles that might make any parent question the decision to entrust a child to the public-school system. The first, in a local newspaper, documented the growing levels of poverty in schools in the suburbs of Chicago. The district with the biggest increase in poverty is the one in which my children are enrolled. No less than 76 percent of district students now come from low-income homes; many arrive at school hungry, and test scores are falling. In the second article, Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, asked Christian parents, “Is public education even an option anymore?” Writing for Answers magazine, he outlined various ideological prob- lems, concluding that “for Christians who take the Christian worldview seriously and who understand the issues at stake, the answer is increasingly no.” Photograph from Corbis Images