Every philosophy or view of education has its own peculiar set of consequences which are eventually revealed in the lives, character, and conscience of its pupils.

In an education with an emphasis on Biblical reasoning, i.e. American Christian education, individual self education begins to occur around the ages of ten through twelve. With adequate guidance the pupil develops a growing capacity to read, reason, write, and research on his own. Herein is the necessity for self-teaching texts and guides. When the Biblical foundations are laid in the childhood years, the path of reasoning and the inspiration for learning is established for individual self teaching. As children are taught to walk on their own, to eat their meals on their own, to dress themselves on their own, and to work on their own, why are we not expectant that they be taught to learn on their own? Is it not reasonable to expect that self-teaching be an outcome of one’s education?

An invaluable consequence of American Christian Education is the pupil’s acquiring the art of self-government or the skill of Biblical reasoning. When children are regularly exercised in their own ability to read and reason, to deduce principles from ideas, to draw inferences and correct conclusions, and then to articulate and write them, this then is the essence of original scholarship.

In truth, one’s own education is his first individual enterprise, the first step towards his pursuit of happiness or his own vocation and livelihood. From God is mankind given a title to his own happiness, his own enjoyment of the fruits of his own labor. Parents and teachers owe the pupil only the rudiments, the first fundamental principles or foundations of life and learning. The pupil owes it to himself to build upon these foundations to reach maturity and adulthood. His years of youth are his years of building and engaging in the self-enterprise of pursuing his own happiness or livelihood.

American Christian Education is a new deal when one considers the conventional aim, content, and approach to education of today. While America is awash with socialism, American Christian Education is the antidote for modern socialism. American Christian Education creates cutting-edge generations, generations not socialized, trained, and accustomed to thinking and acting only as a part of some group. Individuals knowing how to be independently dependent upon the absolute principles of all of life and living will begin the undoing of socialism in America.

The Characteristics of American Christian Education

When teaching is distressful for the instructor how much more distressful does it then become for the learner? How unjust is this outcome for the poor individual who is a novice at the feet of someone supposedly learned but driven to demonstrate his competence by demanding that his learners perform an arbitrarily determined degree of competence within arbitrarily determined constraints of time?

If the teacher is driven to teach, then does he not become a virtual taskmaster of his students; and they become burdened with heavy, unreasonable loads to bear? The injustice is so much the greater offense when the novice is but a child.

Biblical education by definition is easy and light. Scripture tells us how children are taught: "For precept must be upon precept, precept upon precept; line upon line, line upon line; here a little, and there a little." Isaiah 28:10. When one is taught the principles by which to reason in a given subject, and then consistently exercised in reasoning from principles, then he becomes free from, and independent of, rote learning.

American Christian education affords the training of individual reasoning in which one may come to his own correct conclusions in any given subject. Below are what may be identifiable characteristics of American Christian education:

1. Liberty for the individual to reflect, believe, and follow principles -- as opposed to enslavement to the strict letter of imposed, formulated, standardized answers.

2. Lessons are suited to one’s capacity; given an easy yoke to bear; one is not being given more than he can bear -- as opposed to straining under a heavy burden of unreasonable compliance to an arbitrarily standardized load of work.

3. Simple, uncomplicated principles and ideas to master -- as opposed to having to master by rote an overwhelming amount of minute facts and information.

The Inspiration Inherent to American Christian Education

America is the "firstfruits" of the nations of individuals which should walk in that "newness of life" which Christ brought into the world."Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life," Romans 6:4.

This country of America is the political expression of the outworking of Gospel liberty at work within the life of the individual. Divine Providence planted Christ’s seed of individual liberty— the Word of God in the heart of the individual—and the subsequent individual self-government in the soil of the wilderness of America. Out of individual liberty and individual self-government grew the representative republic that is America. American Christian education is education for the creation and maintenance of representative republics. One may express the life-giving hope of American Christian education with three ideas:

1. There is but One God working, ruling and overruling, in all of the affairs of men and nations to bring liberty to the individual.

2. Self-government is the evidence in this world of the power of Christ in the life of the individual.

3. American Christian Education is the philosophy of education which specifically aims to cultivate the art of self-government, or the art of Biblical reasoning in the individual.

American Christian education is education for all men and nations.