Our future foundations

Did you know that children spend an average of at least 20,000 hours in school by the time they're 18? Let me break it down...

If a child starts nursery around the age of 3 and stays in education until they’re 18, that’s 16 years of schooling. With an average school day being 7 hours and 180-190 school days in a year (depending on the country), that adds up to over 20,000 hours spent in school.

Twenty thousand hours. And that's just the estimated minimum!

But that’s not just time spent learning how to spell, memorising historical dates or solving equations. That’s time spent soaking up values, behaviours, attitudes and beliefs - sometimes consciously, often unconsciously. It’s time spent watching how adults treat one another, how conflict is handled, how success is celebrated and how failure is treated. It’s time spent forming the kind of person a child will eventually become.

We often say the first 5 years of life are the most formative, and science backs that up. However, just because those early years lay the foundation doesn’t mean the building stops there. From age 5 to 18, children are still forming their identity, beliefs and understanding of the world. They are constantly learning and this even continues into adulthood - or at least, it should.

After the family home, school is where children spend the majority of their lives. Nursery, pre-school, elementary, primary school, junior high, secondary school, high school, sixth form, college...most of a child's day, year and childhood is shaped inside the walls of a school.

So, what are we really doing with those hours?

In a parable spoken by Jesus, He describes 2 houses - one built on a rock and the other built on sand. The storm hit both, but only one stood firm. The difference wasn’t the storm...It was the foundation.

That parable isn’t just about buildings - it’s about people. About what we build our lives on and what we allow to shape us.

When children are given an education rooted in truth, structure and purpose, they are more likely to grow into individuals who can weather life's storms. People who are secure in who they are. People who are not easily swayed by culture, fear or peer pressure.

That's why what we teach matters! Not just the academic content, but the way we teach it. The environment. The values. The examples. Children are not just absorbing facts - they’re building foundations. 20,000 hours is far too long to treat school as nothing more than a place that simply prepares children to pass exams. Education should be a partnership between schools and homes - a shared responsibility to nurture, shape and build children up in wisdom, strength, identity and truth. Parents lay the earliest foundations, but teachers help to reinforce and expand them. When those two worlds work together, children flourish.

We’re not raising exam-takers. We’re raising future adults. People who will grow up to become neighbours, friends, leaders, employees, spouses, parents and citizens. And if we don’t invest in their foundations now - if we only focus on academic performance and neglect who they're becoming - we'll continue to see generations of young people who are academically able but emotionally unstable. High-achieving but low in resilience. Capable, but unanchored.

Strong foundations don't just happen. They're built intentionally. First at home, then reinforced and expanded through education. If we really care about the future, we need to care about how we're spending those hours now. If we neglect to build good foundations now, we'll end up patching cracks in our broken society for years to come.

So, what are some good values to build a strong foundation on? Which values are currently missing in our education system now?