There is no doubt that a Lutheran school is distinguished from other schools by the content it teaches. Lessons at Mount Hope are unique to our confession of faith. Where else, for instance, could students seamlessly discuss the rise and fall of Roman emperors alongside the First Commandment and beautiful hymn stanzas like “Trust not in rulers; they are but mortal: / Earthborn they are and soon decay” (LSB 797, st. 2)? Yet God’s Word informs more than just lessons and lectures. It also informs the day-to-day, practical ways that teachers manage their classrooms and deal with their students.
First, God’s Word teaches us the nature of our students. They are saints, washed in the blood of Christ. Yet they are also sinners, daily needing Christ’s forgiveness. They love God’s commandments and wish to obey them, yet often disobey them instead. In other words, they bear the same lot as any Christian! When running a classroom, teachers must account for this struggle between the Old Adam and the new man. We do not treat students as bundles of belligerent naughtiness that we must either yell at or bury alive in posters of tedious rules. At the same time, we do not allow students to do whatever they please, as if they had some kind of inherent goodness. Instead, we instruct students in the goodness of God’s law, while also giving them clear consequences for disobedience.
Knowing the Christian struggle allows a teacher to rightly handle disobedience. He shows the student his sin, helps him confess, and forgives him. Then the sin is gone. The day goes on, undisrupted by further chiding or animosity. Teachers can also assist students in their struggle with sin by helping them form good habits and routines. Since routines give students very clear and specific ways to obey their teachers, they assist students in their godly desire to keep the Fourth Commandment.
Besides teaching who our students are, God’s Word also teaches the foundation for authority in the classroom: the Fourth Commandment. God gives parents authority over their children. Parents, in turn, give teachers authority over their children, to assist the parents in bringing them up. Whatever the routines of a classroom might be—and even if they change—students are to honor and obey their teachers, just as they would their parents. This means the teacher does not need to depend on his own tricks and threats and artificial rewards as reasons for his class to obey. Instead, he depends on and upholds God’s commandment, which gave him authority in the first place. He enforces it by God’s will, not his own. Since a person, not a system, has authority in the classroom, each day becomes relaxed and natural: the classroom looks like a family operating at home instead of a factory line or a military camp. When students keep the Fourth Commandment, things go well with them. It makes for a joyful school day for everyone.
Finally, God’s Word fills teachers with love for their students. Faith in the Gospel leads to love for the neighbor. Only a teacher who knows his Father’s love for him, who tastes and treasures Christ’s body and blood for him, who hears the Holy Spirit preach to him the bliss of the Gospel, likewise loves his students as his little brothers and sisters in Christ. Such love, although still battling sin, overflows from the teacher into the atmosphere of his classroom, affecting routines and discipline and everything that happens in the day. God’s Word instructs both our teaching and our living, and God’s love in Christ moves us. That love is, in fact, the whole reason Lutheran schools exist at all.
In Christ,
Miss Hahn
