The first school is a home

“Fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath; instead, bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4). It is worth noticing that the verse is addressed to parents, and that what it commands is not a privilege but a burden. It is followed immediately by the child’s side of the covenant: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right,” and “‘Honor your father and mother’ (which is the first commandment with a promise)” (Ephesians 6:1-2). Authority and responsibility, bound together, in a household that is meant to be a miniature of something larger.

Scripture is everywhere about the family, and it is specific about its shape. “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24) — that is the first thing the Bible does with a human being, and it is not incidental. “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6). “Children are indeed a heritage from the LORD, and the fruit of the womb is His reward” (Psalm 127:3). The child is not a project of the state, a data point for a statistician, or a consumer in a market to be shaped. He is an heir, given to a family, and the family is the first institution God made and the first He charged with responsibility for a soul.

And a Christian is obliged to say this in a country where the idea of the family’s authority is being quietly retired. The state now claims an increasingly detailed jurisdiction over the child’s body, its mind, its diet, its gender, its speech, and its instruction; and the language in which it does so is the language of the child’s own best interests. Our Constitution says “A child’s best interests are of paramount importance in every matter concerning the child” (section 28(2)), and it is a fine principle. But a principle that is invoked to remove the parents from the room is not a principle about the child’s best interests. It is a principle about the adults in the room. “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8). And “If anyone does not provide for his own, and especially his own household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Timothy 5:8) — the Bible makes the household’s responsibility non-negotiable, and the corollary is equally plain: where the state takes the household’s responsibility away, it does not relieve the household. It orphans the child and calls it policy.

Notice what this is not. It is not a claim that parents are always right, or that the state has no business protecting a child from abuse. It is a claim that a child has a right to be raised by his own family, and that the state’s job is to protect that right — including from itself. “He has shown you, O man, what is good, and what does the LORD require of you but to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8). “Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless; uphold the rights of the afflicted and oppressed” (Psalm 82:3). A state that protects the vulnerable child is acting rightly. A state that treats every parent as a suspect and every child as a ward of the government has decided that the family is the problem, and it is worth asking on what evidence.

Because there is an evidence question, and it is a moral one before it is a technical one. This is where the platform’s other rows become relevant rather than optional. A government that cannot keep honest weights (Proverbs 20:23) has no business lecturing parents about how to raise children. A government whose flagship city carries a qualified audit opinion flagging billions in rands of irregular and unauthorised expenditure and loses R5.7bn a year to electricity theft, whose municipalities have had to be dissolved by a court or placed under national intervention because they could not deliver basic services, is not a government with a credible claim to moral authority over a parent’s decision about a school, a diet, a vaccine, or a curriculum. “When the righteous flourish, the people rejoice, but when the wicked rule, the people groan” (Proverbs 29:2). A parent watching that record has a very good reason to want the smallest possible state between his family and the school gate.

And there is a positive reason, which is stronger than the defensive one. The family is the first school, and everything the platform’s other rows argue for depends on it. A child raised in a home where there is a God, a father, a mother, a discipline, a work ethic and a respect for other people’s property is being prepared for exactly the society this platform argues should be built: a country of people who work, who do not steal, who do not take a bribe, who treat their neighbour as a neighbour, and who do not need the state to tell them what is right. “Train up a child in the way he should go” (Proverbs 22:6). “Let no one despise your youth, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity” (1 Timothy 4:12). “As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD” (Joshua 24:15). Nobody wins an election for the truth, but the household is where the truth is actually transmitted, and in thirty years of voting it is the only institution that has never once been asked to justify itself in a manifesto.

So the manifesto test. Read the manifestos of the parties on your ballot for 4 November and look for the specific thing: does the party protect the parents’ right to raise their children in the faith of their choice, including in state schools? Does it protect the parents’ right to choose where their children are educated, and to teach them at home? Does it protect the child’s biological family and the integrity of the household, in law and in the classroom? Does it protect the conscience of a parent who declines to have his child inducted into something he believes is false? And does it commit to those things, or does it mention “the family” in a paragraph about housing and leave it there? A party that wants the family’s vote should be able to say what it intends to do for the family. If it cannot, it does not want the family’s vote; it wants the family’s endorsement.

And for the Christian voter, the stake is larger than any one row on this table. “Seek out the LORD and His strength; seek His face always” (1 Chronicles 16:11). A people that surrenders the family surrenders the thing that transmits the faith, and a faith that is not passed to the next generation is not a faith with a future in that country. “Unless the LORD builds the house, its builders labor in vain” (Psalm 127:1) is a psalm about a house and a city, and it is worth noticing that it is a psalm of ascents — a song carried uphill to a city, sung by a people on the way to a city that was meant to be built by something other than their own hands.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The same parties have asked for your vote on the same terms for thirty years, and the same families have lost the same ground each time. On 4 November, you can stop the loop: read the manifesto, find what it says about the family and about the parents’ right to raise their own children, and vote for the party that means it.

Mark the tick if this analysis holds. And in the comments: what is the single decision about your children that you have been told is not yours to make — and does the party on your ballot say anything about it?