Faith-Based Education: Weighing the Advantages and Disadvantages

Choosing the right school for a child is a significant decision for parents. For families who prioritize faith, faith-based education, particularly Christian schools, often emerges as a leading option. However, like any educational path, it's crucial to carefully consider the pros and cons of faith-based education to determine if it aligns with a family's values and priorities.

Introduction: The Role of Faith in Education

The ‘proper’ relationship between churches and the state has been a deeply contested matter throughout Western history. This is particularly true for the role of churches in public schools. Most Western school systems have their historical roots with the churches. When states tried to transform church-run schools into non-denominational mass education systems during the 19th century, they faced fierce resistance from the churches (Ramirez and Boli 1987, West and Woessmann 2010). The churches wanted to ensure that schools taught children to become good Christians.

Advantages of Faith-Based Education

Shared Values and Community

One of the most appealing aspects of faith-based colleges and schools is the strong sense of community they foster. Being surrounded by people who share your faith and value system can be very comforting. It gives people something in common and can create a community that’s hard to replicate at larger, secular colleges. The entire campus community shares the same values and beliefs. This forges stronger bonds between individual members making for a tighter-knit community.

Many families find that Christian schools offer a strong sense of belonging. Because Christian schools are built on shared values and high expectations, students often experience a learning environment that makes them feel physically and emotionally safe.

Integration of Faith into Curriculum

One of the most significant advantages is that Christian schooling places God at the center of education. Subjects are taught through a biblical lens, helping students connect faith to real-world learning. If faith plays an important role in your life and you want your faith to be reinforced in your child’s learning environment, then you have probably started exploring the idea of sending them to a religious school.

Character Development

In a world full of conflicting messages, Christian schools focus on shaping the heart. Values like integrity, kindness, humility, and service aren’t just taught-they’re modeled daily by teachers and staff. Schools like Plenty Valley Christian College, for instance, focus on the compassionate and loving aspect of Christianity and work to make sure that every child reaches their full potential in a vibrant, safe, and caring environment.

Conservative Values

There’s no denying that education is showing a left leaning bias these days, and that can be terrifying to some parents. Some see liberal schools as tools of indoctrination, and some parents would rather have their kids being exposed to more conservative values or point of views. Others won’t feel comfortable with things like sexual education being handled by the school district and not them.

No Persecution About their Faith

One of the biggest advantages of sending your child to a religious school is that they won’t end up being ostracized or isolated due to their practices or faith. For instance, they won’t have to feel left out during Halloween celebrations if you’re against them. And they’ll be able to relate better to their other classmates as well.

Personal Attention

Class sizes tend to be smaller as compared to public colleges, so you can expect personal attention from professors and a higher level of interaction with your classmates.

Parent-School Connection

Christian schooling thrives on a strong connection between home and school.

Read also: Tuition and Aid Options

Disadvantages of Faith-Based Education

Cost Considerations

Faith-based colleges are private educational institutions and cost more to attend as compared to public colleges. Unlike public schools, most Christian schools are privately funded, which means families are responsible for tuition.

Limited Program Variety

Faith-based colleges don’t typically offer a larger variety of programs as some of the larger colleges do. If you are looking for a less commonly-offered major or an unusual combination of programs, you may find it difficult to find a school that offers you your first choice. Depending on the school’s size, resources for athletics, clubs, or elective courses may be more limited than in larger public schools.

Strict Rules and Regulations

Many faith-based colleges have dress codes, separate dorms for boys and girls, curfew timing, and strict visitation rules. These stricter rules are part of the whole package with consequences for breaking them. This can be stifling, especially as it comes just at a time when you are striking out on your own. Of course, not all faith-based colleges are so strict.

Limited Exposure to Diverse Perspectives

While Christian schooling offers a clear biblical worldview, some families may wonder whether students are being exposed to enough differing perspectives. It is important to understand and accept that there are other religious and faiths out there. Not everyone will agree with your viewpoint-and that’s ok! (As long as they’re respectful about it, of course. And vice versa).

Commute and Transportation

Because private schools aren’t always tied to district lines, families sometimes face longer commutes or limited transportation options.

Factors to Consider When Choosing a Faith-Based School

If you’ve weighed out the pros and cons and decided in favor of a faith-based education for your child, the next step is to determine which school is right for your family. Regarding the last question, faith-based schools don’t have the same governmental regulations as public schools. So religious schools may not meet the exact stringent requirements. If your family is religious, you may want to look for a school within your faith. Suppose your family isn’t religious or is considering a school of another denomination. Also, keep in mind that beliefs and practices vary widely even within particular religions and among denominations. You want to make sure the values instilled by the school you’re considering are in line with yours. To help you make that determination, talk to other parents whose kids attend the school.

How much of the school’s faith is embedded in the curriculum? What are the school’s teachings in science regarding biology and evolution?
How is religion taught in the classroom? Do students learn about other faiths as well? If so, are teachings about different beliefs positive and respectful?
What does the physical setting of the school and classrooms look like?
What are the school’s beliefs and teachings on gender, sexual orientation, race, and other religions?
If your family isn’t of the same faith as the school, what are your child’s options? Can your child opt out of religious classes, chapel time, prayer, and faith activities?

Whether your family is of the school’s particular faith or not, make sure you’re comfortable with the answers. Choosing the right school for your child requires leg-work and can be a tough decision. But by making an informed decision, you can alleviate significant stress for yourself and your child.

The Impact of Religious Education on Religiosity

But does it matter? Can school curricula in fact change students’ religious attitudes and lives in the long run? Religious attitudes are an important component of people’s personalities and values. In the World Values Survey, 82% of participants said they belonged to a religious denomination, 71% said that religion was important in their life, and 57% prayed several times a week (Inglehart et al. 2014). Studies in the economics of religion show that religiosity has important consequences for individual outcomes and economic development (Iannaccone 1998, Iyer 2016, McCleary and Barro 2019, Becker et al. 2020). Becker and Woessmann (2009, 2013, 2018) and Becker et al.

In a new paper (Arold et al. 2022), we show that being exposed to compulsory religious education in school indeed affects students’ religiosity in adulthood. Our analysis exploits the unique German setting where a reform abolished compulsory religious education in a staggered way across states since the 1970s. The 1949 Constitution of West Germany had enshrined religious education as the only regular subject in public schools, so religious education was compulsory in state curricula. The compulsory nature of religious education was changed in the different German states at different times, from Bavaria in 1972 to North Rhine-Westphalia in 2004. The reform replaced the obligation to attend religious education with the choice between denominational religious education and ‘ethics’ as a non-denominational subject. A particularly interesting feature of the reform is that the counterfactual to compulsory religious instruction is not to have no value-oriented instruction, but rather non-denominational value-oriented instruction.

We use the variation across states in the abolishment of compulsory religious education to study effects on adulthood outcomes in two-way fixed effects models. Accounting for fixed effects for each state and birth year, the series of reforms provides plausibly exogenous variation in individuals’ exposure to compulsory religious education that can be exploited in a difference-in-differences setting. We use three datasets, each of which allows us to link religious (as well as family and labour-market) outcomes of adults to their state and time of schooling in childhood: the National Educational Panel Study, the German General Social Survey, and the German Socio-Economic Panel.

Our results show that schools can affect religious outcomes later in life. We find that abolishing compulsory religious education significantly decreased the religiosity of affected students in adulthood. As indicated in Figure 1, individuals who entered school after the reform report significantly lower levels of religiosity. The figure also shows that reforming states did not have significantly different trends in religiosity in the years prior to reform compared to non-reforming states. We find reductions not just in general religiosity, but also in specific religious actions: the personal act of prayer, the public act of going to church, and the formal act of church membership (which is costly in Germany, connected to paying church taxes). The effects on religiosity and personal prayer appear gradually over time.

Historically, the churches promoted traditional religious family role models, advocating gender-specific roles within families and marriage before cohabitation. Correspondingly, we find that the reform led to more equitable and less conservative attitudes towards gender roles and family norms later in life. Recent studies suggest that gender norms are important determinants for lifetime outcomes (Kleven et al. 2019, Jayachandran 2021), but it is not well understood where these norms come from.

Abolishing compulsory religious education also affected actual family outcomes. The reform may also have affected economic behaviour and outcomes. The bible quotes Jesus as saying “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:24-27, Luke 18:24-27). The decrease in religiosity may have promoted a materialistic orientation. Reducing the time spent in various religious activities may have induced a substitution effect towards economic activities (Barro and McCleary 2003, Gruber and Hungerman 2008). Reducing the time to raise (fewer) children may have changed decisions about family and career planning. Changes in gender norms may have opened up better labour-market opportunities for women. Our results show that the reform indeed led to increases in labour-market participation (+1.5 percentage points), working hours (+0.6 hours per week), and earnings (+5.3%).

By contrast, there is no evidence that the reform affected ethical values and behaviour such as reciprocity, trust, volunteering, and life satisfaction, nor political values and behaviour such as political interest and leaning, voting, and satisfaction with democracy. In terms of these outcomes, it appears that the counterfactual of attending non-denominational ethics classes was equivalent to attending religious-education classes. The reform is also unrelated to placebo outcomes such as years of schooling, type of school degree, or age of first employment. Consequently, the identifying variation is unlikely to capture alternative sources such as other contemporaneous educational reforms - which is corroborated by the fact that results do not change when conditioning on a range of other educational reforms.

In sum, we find that students who were subject to compulsory religious education in school do indeed show higher religiosity when they are adults. There is ample evidence that the quality of teachers and institutional features of school systems have important effects on students’ academic achievement and later labour-market success (Hanushek 1986, Chetty et al. 2014, Woessmann 2016). Our results indicate that the content of the school curriculum exerts a lifetime influence on students, even on inner attitudes and values such as religiosity.

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