WELS Statistical Report: Schools
Continuing our examination of the WELS 2023 statistical report, Rev. Jon Hein enumerates four categories of students using secular categories.
I have kindly fixed his list and placed them into Biblical categories of heathen, heterodox and demon-worshippers. It's not very winsome, but it is biblical...
So why do we admit heterodox, heathen and demon-worshippers?
2023 was a tipping point: WELS/ELS students are now a minority at their own educational institutions.
Hein pays brief lip-service to the Wauwatosa theologians in a footnote
"Prof. John Schaller, in a paper titled The Need of Christian Education by Means of Parochial Schools, shared his belief that Lutheran parochial schools were simply a tool to aid parents in discipling their children. “We are at once confronted by the fact that the Christian home cannot accomplish this sacred task unaided.” The point: Lutheran schools were seen exclusively as a tool for discipleship."
But this was not simply Schaller's belief, it was only a part of the conviction of the Wauwatosa faculty. Schaller speaks much more forcefully in his article "The Fight for the Christian School as a Fight for the Christian Worldview":
“This fact is also recognized by the world in a characteristic way. Time and time again the Christian school has had to endure hostility from the children of the world. All the education legislation aimed directly at the distinctly Christian school provides the proof that the world instinctively knows how foreign such schools are. [The Christian schools] bear a stamp that the world cannot recognize as genuine without denying their own cause. For this reason we cannot expect recognition for the civic and social value our schools provide so long as the church pursues this work deliberately and energetically. If the parochial school is recognized by the world, then there is good cause to wonder whether it has remained a Christian school. “If you were of the world, the world would love you.”
J.P. Koehler, Wauwatosa theologian, in his wide-ranging Sanctification is not Hurrah touches on the thought that we don't absorb the worlds' educational techniques and they aren't particularly good anyways, but rather that the essence of the parochial school is for our children, not as a mission field or a source of profit:
"When much clamor is made in the school fight about the efficiency of the American state-school rearing and about our American statecraft in general, then to a great extent that does not correspond with the truth. It isn't true that our American political exertions contribute to the welfare of the world, or to our people themselves. It isn't true that the irreligious public-school training can be of any special blessing to our people. It isn't necessary to enlarge on that here. Anyone among us who doesn't recognize that or hasn't recognized it long ago can't be converted by many words now. Nor does it have much sense to argue with the friends of the state school. We lack a common ground for that. They never will understand the essence of our parochial school as long as they do not through the understanding of the Gospel see the value and necessity of our schools not only for the salvation of our children but also for the continued existence of a decent and just state government."
The disdain for public education and public approval by the Wauwatosa faculty is more than just "parochial schools were simply a tool to aid parents in discipling their children" rather it was a recognition that modern educational pedagogy (of the early 1900s, mind) was useless in raising our children both to keep the faith and to be good citizens. How much more today as WELS schools incorporate social and emotional learning? As we bend the knee to woke accreditation and state legislation implementing a different gospel? As we compete in the marketplace for heathens and heretics in order to subsidize programs? Chasing that sweet school choice Bemjamins?
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