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While many people, including parents and students, think attending Christian military schools is excellent, a few more people hold views in contrast to this idea, which is also great. There are always two sides to a coin.
As the title of this article suggests, this is a deep dive into the benefits of deciding to attend a Christian military school and the challenges that come with it.
In this article, you’d find:
To start with, let’s take a look at the beautiful side of the coin.
The Pros of Attending a Christian Military School
- Great Academic Education Built on Biblical Principles
In Christian military schools, God and the Bible are not far apart. In fact, at the core of learning is the Bible. When you choose to attend a Christian military school, your mind is engaged in rigorous academic activities that meet the standards of a military school that challenge and open your mind while exploring your faith as a Christian.
As a Christian military school student, you don’t get to choose between studying academics and taking a journey to learn about your faith. Instead, every course you take, either history or mathematics, is taught through the lens of the Christian worldview in a way that should improve your understanding of the subject and deepen your faith.
As a student, this allows you to combine Christian virtues and military values with academics while providing solutions to the social issues in the world around you.
- Build Character and Values
If there is one thing that makes Christian military schools stand out, it is their high priority on students’ character and value formation. Christian military schools invest highly in the qualities of character in their students. This is often not found in secular schools.
Values like integrity, self-discipline, personal courage, and self-confidence are built into the science of students’ studies. Every one of the activities in Christian Military Schools has a nuance of these values taught to its students.
Through the early formation of character, students learn to take responsibility for their actions, understand the principles of good decision-making, and deal with the consequences of short-sighted decisions.
- Grow in and build a Community of Friends.
College is often the best place for students to make lifelong friends. However, when building lasting friendships that mutually benefit the parties involved, care must be taken to choose the right friends. In doing this, the right environment to choose good friendships goes a long way. This right environment is what Christian military schools offer to their students.
Christian military schools thrive on creating friendly environments for students who come from several countries, tribes, homes, and economic statuses to interact and build lasting relationships and solid connections that run outside the four walls of the classroom.
Furthermore, the enabling environment that Christian military schools offer allows students to share something in common, which fosters a sense of belonging and community that tends to be missing from secular institutions. Christian military school students also find the opportunity to be in the same room with others who share their values and faith system reassuring and comforting.
- Build Teamwork and Leadership abilities.
Activities at Christian Military Schools revolve around teamwork and leadership. Christian Military Schools have systems to ensure every student participates actively in leadership roles throughout the day. An integral part of Christian Military Schools is the JROTC program and other leadership structures, such as seminars and workshops, to develop students’ intuitive leadership abilities.
In addition, students at Christian Military Schools do not just learn about teamwork at the surface or theoretical level; they put it into practice every day. They live together and work as a team to achieve common goals. These goals range from sports to academic activities, music, drama, group sharing, etc. To achieve these goals, students develop an understanding that everyone has a role to play, and by doing so, each student begins to build communication, human management, cooperation, and planning abilities.
Students at Christian Military Schools all have the opportunity to become leaders. They start as responsible followers and become great leaders under the tutelage and foundational guidance of Biblical principles and military ethics.
- Participation in soul-enriching activities.
For one, many think a Christian military school does not engage in fun activities. This is not true. Christian Military Schools are one of the most structured academic institutions, allowing students to participate in extracurricular activities actively. This is because the school understands that education goes beyond the four walls of the classroom.
However, the only disparity between extra-curricular activities in Christian military schools and contemporary schools is the faith-based focus that emphasizes students’ moral standards.
Christian military schools offer opportunities for students to participate in activities that let them serve on campus and in an immediate environment.
Through sports, drama, community outreach, or chapel activities, students are trained to enjoy every activity while maintaining high moral standards, military ethics and seeing God at the center of all they do and their service to humanity.
With this, students become mere participants in a school system and contributors to the school’s missions and efforts.
Now that we have examined the pros and cons of a Christian military school, let’s look at the other side.
The Cons of Attending a Christian Military School
What makes a Christian military school challenging?
- Indoctrination
Most Christian military schools, in a bid to develop the spirituality of their students, often fall into the risk of indoctrination rather than authentic learning.
The essence of education is to inspire students to develop critical thinking abilities and skills to draw particular conclusions on subject matters based on empirical evidence. However, it would be rather dangerous to train students from one perspective without creating room for questioning that allows them to express their critical thinking abilities.
A West Point Cadet quit because of this issue a few years ago.
- High Standard of Discipline
At Christian military schools, emphasis is laid on the importance of living a disciplined and godly life. As expected, some students would actively pursue this way of life, while others may find it challenging.
The fraction of students who find it difficult to live up to the standards of Christian military schools are often prone to academic probation and expulsion.
- Rigorous Training
Christian military schools combine the ethics of Christianity and the values of the military. The military part of the school requires very demanding physical and mental training that may not be suitable for every student.
- Problems of Inclusivity and Diversity
One of the challenges with the education structure in Christian military schools is its failure to include different perspectives and cultures within the context of the education being taught.
At Christian military schools, you will most likely not be able to converse or mingle with people with opposing worldviews, opinions, and beliefs.
Understanding and realizing that other religions and faiths exist is essential, and not everyone will agree with your point of view.
When students are not adequately educated on the ethics of Christianity by the understanding that other worldviews, religions, and faiths exist, their worldviews and beliefs are limited, which leads to the development of harmful stereotypes and biases.
- Access to excellent education can be expensive.
Unlike most secular schools, Christian military schools offer an exclusive academic style of education. This includes smaller classes, access to world-class educational facilities, qualified teachers, sports facilities, etc.
Putting these in place usually costs a fortune, and it could be safe to say that if you don’t have an extra $40-$50k, you could run into debt, sending your child to schools like this.
Conclusion
Choosing between Christian and secular military schools could be a hard nut to crack and must be carefully considered.
The choice of schools makes a significant impact on the lives of students, and a wrong choice could hurt a lifetime, particularly when it has to do with faith, reason, and worldviews.
So, as much as earning a solid Christian background is considered important, necessary attention should be paid to developing wider views and perspectives surrounding education in a Christian military school.