Can”t Imitate Abstractions

“Abstractions can be true and can be affirmed, but they cannot be imitated. This is why many schools are filled with children who learn various biblical abstractions and can repeat them back, but there is nothing there to imitate. Children from other denominational traditions repeat back a different set of abstractions. The lives of the two groups of children do not differ that much from one another because you imitate what you see, not what you hear. None of the children see a distinctively Christian culture. They all see the same basic secular American culture poured through a rudimentary sieve (designed to cath the larger chunks of secularism) into the jars of differing ecclesiastical traditions. And they imitate what they see” (The Case for Classical Christian Education, p. 160).