Part 2: How to prepare your 10 year old for college

In the first article, we established that perspective was necessary before we even try a serious answer to this question. I stated it like this: “As a ten year old, they need to do what is best for a ten year old, not as a prospect for competitive college admission in eight years… If the question is whether there is something you do with a 10 year old that relates to college, I would answer yes. The answer, though, is more in terms of a ‘flight path’ for launching our children than a rigorous program of preparation.”

For this article and beyond, we’ll talk about what that flight path looks like. What really prepares our children for college, and even for competitive college admissions? Today, I want to focus on our children as students, whether they are five years old, ten, fifteen or twenty. They need to be nurtured and encouraged and challenged as engaged learners who are taught how to think. There is some appropriate contrast between teaching them “how” to think and “what” to think, but let’s dig into that a little deeper.

Can education be value-neutral, just giving students thinking skills and not telling them what to think? Our ‘trying to be secular’ society would like to think so, but it is really a logical absurdity. Does teaching phonics and mathematics include a “what”? Of course. Science teaches method and theory, but also fact. History teaches perspective, but also conclusions. Do we teach that lying and stealing are wrong? Is respect for authority based on positive rewards, personal power or the revealed will of God? Will school teach that all lifestyles are a personal choice? Does everyone pick his own god and his own truth? Those questions arise in literature and history and daily classroom discussions, whether I’m in the government’s schools or a secular private school or in a Christian school. School – any school — will teach kids what to think. We, as parents, have to choose well which school that is so we know what they will be teaching.

There is a meaningful contrast, though, between an education which strives only to teach kids the what, and does little or nothing to help grow the how. Some schools, Christian and secular, do stop at the what. These schools are preparing their students neither for college nor for the future. At Mingo Valley Christian, we are never satisfied with the what, and make the how our primary objective. Scriptural truth is unchanging, but our children have to apply that truth in a world which is changing. Spiritually, what if we prepare them to answer the naturalistic challenges to the miracles of the Bible so prevalent in the 19th and 20th centuries, yet their college and culture ignore these points and challenge them on questions of bioethics in genetic engineering which haven’t even been invented yet? Academically, what if we prepare our students with reams of subject knowledge but they learn little about reasoning and analyzing and synthesizing and communicating? The subject knowledge will change as they progress through college and beyond. But students trained to think will be thinkers meeting new questions throughout their lives.

Practically speaking, we know that our children’s educations have crucial ‘what’s’ that make a difference. We also know that the how of their education will grow them to be young men and women ready for college and the world. At MVC we offer a biblically and academically grounded education which prepares students as learners, thinkers, and communicators who are ready for the unknowns of college and beyond.

Next time, we will look at what families can do together with school to educate and grow our children. We’ll look at the difference this partnership makes in preparing them for college.