WHAT I DONT kNOw!

This has been a great week for reading! I just finished a book this afternoon that challenged many of my assumptions regarding church ministries.
Before today, I didn't know...

Plato (428-347 BC)
"All those in the city who happen to be older than ten they will send out to the country; and taking over their children, they will rear them - far away from those dispositions they now have from their parents - in their own manners and laws that are such as we described before. And, with the city and the regime of which we were speaking thus established most quickly and easily, it will itself be happy and most profit the nation in which it comes to be."
Allan Bloom, The Republic of Plato, Translated, with notes and an interpretive essay. 2nd ed, (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 220*

Plato actually asserted that for best results, the city or state should own or rear the children away from the influence of the parents.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1788)
"If there are laws for adult life, there should be laws for childhood, which teach obedience to the others; and just as the reason of each man is not left to be the sole judge of his duties, so too the education of children should not be left to their fathers' capacities and prejudices, especially since it is even more important to the state than to their fathers; for in the natural course of things the father's death often deprives him o f the ultimate benefits of having educated his child, but his country will sooner of later feel the effects of what he has done: the state remains while the family is dissolved."
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, "Discourse on Political Economy," in Discourse on Political Economy and the Social Contract, trans/ with Introduction and Notes by Christopher Betts (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1994), 23*

In 1848 the Quincy Grammar School in Boston, Massachusetts was formed. Prior to this time there was no such thing as "grade levels" but students all learned at their own pace even though common schools (which later became government schools) had formed. However, at the Quincy Grammar School, they had twelve classrooms of equal size.

Charles Silberman quotes Frederick Burk, the first president of what would become California State University at San Francisco...
"It [graded schools] is constructed upon the assumption that a group of minds can be marshalled and controlled in growth in exactly the same manner that a military officer marshalls and directs the bodily movements of a company of soldiers. In solid, unbreakable phalanx the class is supposed to move through all the grades, keeping in locked step. This locked step is set by the 'average' pupil - an algebraic myth born of inanimate figures and an addled pedagogy. The class system does injury to the rapid and quick-thinking pupils, because these must shackle their stride to keep pace with the mythical average. [But] the class system does a greater injury to the large number who make slower progress than the rate of the mythical average pupil...They are foredoomed to failure before they begin...Could any system be more stupid in its assumptions, more impossible in its conditions, and more juggernautic in its operation?"
Crisis in the Classroom: The Remaking of American Education (New York, Random House, 1970), 166.*

Then there is this quote from Charles F. Potter...
"Education is thus a most powerful ally of Humanism, and every American school is a school of Humanism. What can the theistic Sunday-schools, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching?"
Charles Francis Potter, Humanism: A New Religion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1930), 128.*

Then, 53 years later, John J. Dunphy writes...
"The battle for humankind's future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers who correctly perceive their role as the proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity that recognizes and respects the spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being. These teachers must embody the same selfless dedication as the most rabid fundamentalist preachers, for they will be ministers of another sort, utilizing a classroom instead of a pulpit to convey humanist values in whatever subject they teach, regardless of the educational level --preschool day care or large state university. The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and the new--the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism, resplendent in its promise of a world in which the never-realized Christian ideal of "love they neighbor"will finally be achieved. Then perhaps, we will be able to say with Tom Paine that "the world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion" It will undoubtedly be a long, arduous, painful struggle replete with much sorrow and many tears, but humanism will emerge triumphant. It must if the family of humankind is to survive."
John J. Dunphy, The Humanist, Vol. 43, Issue 1 (Jan/Feb 1983), 23-26*

Scott Brown, referring to the aforementioned paragraph, says...

"And it worked! Christian parents uncritically trusted this system, placed their confidence in it, and sent their children into these pagan indoctrination centers. Their children came out walking, talking and thinking like pagans."
Scott T. Brown, A Weed in the Church ( The National Center for Family Integrated Churches, October 2010), 105*

These quotes were brought up in order to ask this simple question, "If man's wisdom invented age-segregated learning away  from the instruction of the fathers, why are we doing the same thing at church?"

Is the Bible silent of this issue? (Hint-kNOw!)

*Disclaimer- I am not giving a blanket endorsement of Plato, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Silberman, Charles Potter, John Dunphy, or Scott Brown. However, the words of each of these men have challenged many of my assumptions regarding church ministries.