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Teaching Discernment

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Friday, September 12, 2014

  We often chuckle over the message board in front of the school down the street.  Every week one side proclaims the "Life Skill of the Week" apparently in an attempt to inform parents which particular character trait they will be instilling in the school's students that week.  My favorite week is "Sense of Humor Week".  How do you even teach a skill like that?
  For our own family, I have always thought that character development (life skills, call it what you like) were an integral part of the way we raise and discipline our kids.  We don't have a class during school for responsibility, we give our children responsibilities they can handle and continue to raise the bar as they mature.  Honesty is not a skill; it is expected and dishonesty is punished. 
  Still, there are a few character traits that our kids need to develop that deserve some thought on our part, and a bit of effort instilling them in our children.  Discernment is one of those.
  Simply put discernment is the ability to assess information and make a value judgement:  Is something right or wrong?  Good or bad?  Profitable or unprofitable?  Or does it matter either way?
  But discernment goes beyond that; a discerning person knows why something is right or wrong, good or bad.  He also needs to understand the implications of belief systems that oppose his own.  It is all fine and well to argue for creation against evolution, but we do we realize that evolution sets up a system of thought with far reaching consequences?  The idea that man is a highly specialized animal rather than an image-bearer of an Almighty God filters into many areas of life from how and why we educate to how criminals are punished.
  We live in a world full of choices and at a time when we are pushed from every side to make choices (or to tolerate the choices of others) which go against everything we have been taught.  From the old hobby horse of evolution to gay marriage to legalized marijuana to global warming, our children will be faced with a vast array of issues in which they must show discernment both in their own choices and how they deal with the choices of others.  We need to make sure that we are equipping our children to think about these issues and make good decisions.
  We have a lot of options when it comes to the curriculum we choose for our students.  Gone are the early days of homeschooling when parents had to use secular books or develop their own material.  Now we have so many options for Christian based education that it is sometimes hard to choose between them.  And living in a conservative state as we do, with churches everywhere, it is relatively easy to raise our children in a Christian bubble where they are shielded from all views that oppose our own.  But to do so is to do our children a great disservice.
  We should instead teach them to check the things they hear - bearing in mind, of course, which subjects are age appropriate - against what they have been taught and against the Scriptures and make their own judgements.  We commend the Bereans in Acts who went to the Scriptures to "find out if these things be so" but do we remember who they were fact checking?  Seriously, does anyone fact check the Apostle Paul?  And yet, rather than accepting his word immediately as truth, the Bereans searched the Scripture to be sure his teaching was true.  May we be diligent to do the same - and to teach this important skill to our children!
 

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