What Starting a Private School Taught Me About God

Starting a private school was supposed to be about education. I never expected it to become a masterclass in understanding God’s heart.

It began with the weight every parent feels: How do we raise our children right? Our oldest daughter had fit in well during kindergarten initially, but we watched her excitement for learning slowly drain away. She stopped coming home happy. The sparkle in her eyes when talking about school was gone.

My wife and I felt a heavy burden on our shoulders. We began exploring alternatives—homeschool, different programs, anything that might reignite that love of learning. As we researched, we noticed something profound: every education philosophy that resonated with us aligned with our faith and how God teaches as our loving Father.

As members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we have a deeply rooted belief in the freedom to choose for each individual. We believe life is more about who you become through your choices than what you know. We know it was Satan who proposed we’d be better off if we were just compelled to be good and eliminate the risk of failure.

Surely there was something we could learn and model from God’s divine teaching method for all His children.

When we discovered Acton Academy, we were blown away. Its model was built around the strongest emphasis on the agency of each individual learner and their potential to choose to become a hero who could change the world. The more we learned, the more we saw we’d found a model that captured nearly every aspect of the divine way God teaches us:

Mentors instead of lecturers. Stories of heroes we can pattern our lives after. No forced actions, very few occurrences of direct instruction. Just trust in each person’s potential. God provides a world with everything we need and expects us to act as a community, learning from each other with complete freedom to fail or succeed.

So we decided to launch our own Acton Academy in Rexburg. After tons of work and anticipation, we started in 2023 with a small group of 6-10 year olds, not sure what to expect.

The first two weeks felt like heaven on earth. Polite, engaged kids working diligently toward their dreams. I thought, “This is easy. We’ve cracked the code.”

Then reality hit.

It was like someone flipped a switch. The same children who had been model learners suddenly tested every boundary, broke their promises, and chose chaos over growth. I remember lying in bed one night, replaying the disasters of the day, and thinking, “This is why God sent the flood.”

That’s when it hit me: This must be what God feels watching us every single day.

God gives us everything we need—commandments for our protection, scriptures full of stories of heroes to inspire and give a map to pattern our life, prophets for direction, community for support. He shows us the path to happiness and success. But then He does something that seems crazy: He refuses to force us to take it.

Why? Because before this world was created, there was another plan. A plan that guaranteed everyone would return to heaven. No risk, no failure, no heartache. Just force everyone to be good and call it success.

That plan was rejected—not because it wouldn’t work, but because it would rob us of the very thing that makes us human: the power to choose who we become.

There is something about our freedom to choose that is so important that God refuses to take it away from us, even at the risk of losing some of His children who choose to misuse this gift. There must be a reason.

I began to see how much traditional education was leaning more and more toward the plan of compelling action and forcing learning and behavior to protect our kids from the risks of being free to choose. I began to realize that there could be something inherently evil about my feelings to compel my children to be good out of impatience, instead of setting up an environment where they had everything they needed in place to make their own choices.

Running Acton taught me that you cannot educate someone—they must choose to be educated. The moment you try to force learning, you kill it. Real growth only happens when someone decides for themselves that they want to change.

This is how God teaches: He tells us stories of heroes like David facing Goliath and Daniel facing lions—not to give us a script to follow, but to show us what’s possible when ordinary people choose to do extraordinary things. He gives us covenants and commandments, then steps back and lets us choose. Even when it breaks His heart to watch us stumble.

Earth life isn’t meant to be comfortable—it’s meant to be transformative. A proving ground where we discover who we really are when no one is forcing us to behave.

But somewhere along the way, we forgot this divine pattern. Our schools have become monuments to the rejected plan. We measure, we rank, we compare, we compel. We’ve created systems obsessed with force, metrics, uniformity, and peer comparison—exactly what the adversary proposed in the beginning.

Here’s the truth about traditional education: Any real learning happening is happening in spite of the system, not because of it. It happens when a student sees a teacher who genuinely cares, feels their passion, and chooses to follow their example. But you can’t manufacture that moment. You can’t force inspiration. You can’t compel someone to become.

Every day at Acton, I’m tempted to revert to the old ways. When kids waste time or break their promises, everything in me wants to lecture, punish, and control. It would be so much easier to just tell them what to do.

But then I remember whose plan that was.

Now, I must note that one comparison doesn’t translate from God’s plan to our school: unlike God, I as a guide am not all-knowing or infinitely patient. But I do trust that every young person in our school has a calling, and it is not my place to decide what that is for them.

Instead, we stick to God’s pattern. We give them stories of heroes who chose courage over comfort. We create contracts they write themselves. We let them experience the natural consequences of their choices. And yes, we watch them fail—sometimes spectacularly.

In the Pearl of Great Price, we read that God wept as He watched His children make poor choices. I understand that sorrow now. But what fills me with even greater joy is watching them choose correctly—seeing a young person rise to meet a challenge they set for themselves, witnessing the moment they discover they’re capable of more than they imagined.

There’s something almost intoxicating about watching young people feel truly trusted with real responsibility. They’re hungry for it. In nearly every other part of our current society, that trust has been stripped away from them. But when you give it back—when you show them you believe in their potential—they come alive in ways that will astound you.

Here’s what I mean: We had a boy who was struggling to focus on his goals. He’d make up every excuse he could to be distracted without disrupting his peers—which was his freedom within the rules he and his peers had set. I wanted so much to tell him to focus and not waste his time, but that would make me responsible for his ability to focus. After several weeks of this, he began to run out of excuses with his peers and saw their success. He decided he wanted that for himself. He chose to double down and focus, then finished an entire grade level of math in just three weeks. Throughout the rest of the school year, he continued to improve in his power to focus on his goals to achieve success. This is education through agency, not compliance.

So if you’re a parent torn between protecting your children and letting them struggle, remember this: struggle is the curriculum of eternity. God doesn’t want to raise perfect children—He wants to raise people capable of becoming like Him. And that transformation only happens through choosing to grow, again and again, especially when it’s hard.

Give them boundaries. Tell them stories of heroes. Show them love. Then step back and let them choose who they want to become.

Because that is how we become all that God hopes we’ll become—one choice at a time.