The Darwinistic narrative of human beings buttresses the tragically flawed view of education practiced in government schools. When the educationist fails to understand that man is created in the image of God, then education is reduced to the commoditized function of technocratic operations. If you get this wrong you will get everything else wrong. Educational philosophy always stems from important truths about the human person. Any view of education that is divorced from the dignity of mankind which comes from creation, will never lead to human flourishing, let alone the Godward development of children. What follows are seven quotations made up of truthful statements about education, each followed by a brief commentary about the statement. May you be established, renewed, and encouraged in the Christian education of your children.
#1 “Hence we ought to have been brought up in a particular way from our very youth, as Plato says, so as both to delight in and to be pained by the things that we ought; for this is the right of education.”
Aristotle
If education is soul development, then people ought to learn to love what is beautiful and recede from what is ugly. Without the development of the soul in this way, has man learned to know God aright? You know something is wrong with school when children get all A’s and flunk at all the things that matter about life. What does it profit a teenager if he graduates high school but doesn’t enjoy reading a book? What does a college resume mean if it is filled with faux activities and clubs but the teenager doesn’t enjoy productive work? What is a scholarship to Behemoth University worth if the teenager doesn’t esteem purity? What does a high GPA indicate if the student doesn’t love knowledge? If the soul is not capable of wonder and if the heart is not receptive to poetry and transcendence, then can we call it education?
#2 “Education is not a subject, and it does not deal in subjects. It is instead a transfer of a way of life.”
G.K. Chesterton
The curriculum must be about transferring the inheritance from one generation to another. It’s not just conveying certain facts, data, or qualities. It’s about placing the student within the tradition of God’s people. The Christian tradition grounds people in the phenomenology of God’s world and the corresponding thoughts, emotions, memories, and virtues that are proper for it. One mark of modern education is an obsession with methodology over content. Because Christianity transfers the Christ-life to the next generation, it is marked by soul-touching content over bureaucrat-redacted methodology.
#3 “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.”
James Baldwin
A child will instinctively know what their parents think is important, despite what the parents say. Teenagers often reject what their parents say but they never reject what their parents think is important. Whatever a person truly believes will be reflected by their children. You can watch their children and find out what they value the most.
#4 “The technology just sits there; the idolatry brings on the hype-e.g., all the falsehoods we are told about what the latest software will do for us. A very recent example of this is the exuberant tub-thumping for computers in education. We are told, ad nauseam, that a computer has to go into every classroom room to prepare us for the twenty-first century. We have not yet realized that the computers may simply be moving our ignorance around the planet at incredible rates of speed. As one wag put it, “We used to think that a million monkeys typing away at a million keyboards boards could produce the works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not the case.” A fool in the back of a cart humping along the road five hundred years ago is, today, a fool in the backseat of a Lexus. Certain things are not changed by the computerized dashboard.”
Douglas Wilson
Just because modern people have vast technical knowledge does not mean they are educated. People in the twenty-first century are simultaneously brilliant and stupid. The inventions of modern technology are dazzling. Yet the way it is used turns people into lizard brains who touch their phones 4,000 times a day. There is a great difference between using modern technology and being educated. Technology enhances utility but not necessarily wisdom. People today have the entire world of knowledge at their fingertips, yet they still vote for politicians who don’t know the difference between a boy and a girl.
#5 “Consider education not as the painful accumulation of facts and dates and reigns, not merely the necessary preparation of the individual to earn his keep in the world, but as the transmission of our mental, moral, technical, and aesthetic heritage as fully as possible to as many as possible, for the enlargement of man’s understanding, control, embellishment, and enjoyment of life.”
Will Durant
When education is done rightly, all the generations become contemporaries. A student must not only know his forefathers but respect them. The past does not possess bigotry or superstition any more than the present. There is as much prescription, presumption, and prejudice in the newest idea as the oldest. The dangerous difference is when we assume a frame of reference that declares the new idea is neutral and the old idea prejudicial. The sin of presentism assumes present morality is superior to previous morality. Yet the Bible describes children as those who do not yet know good from bad (Dt. 1:39). Parents bear the primary responsibility for transmitting the moral imagination of Scripture to their children. This is a vision of the good life that will conflict with the way people today regard the enjoyment of life.
#6 “State education” is the “practical elimination of the parent.”
G.K. Chesterton
Government schools work against the parent rather than for the parent. This is by design. John Dewey is the singular most important thinker in terms of the history of the public school in the twentieth century. John Dewey held that the central importance of the public school is to separate children from the prejudices of their parents. Where did Dewey get that idea? Karl Marx writes “the bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course.” Marx desired to replace the parents’ authority over their children and give it to the proletariat. Communism holds itself to be an ideology superior to that of the family such that it is willing to turn children against their parents. For instance, in the Soviet Union, the Communist Youth League lionized boys who turned in their parents to be executed as enemies of the Soviet regime. In addition to Dewey was Ellwood Cubberley, a professor of education at Stanford University in the early twentieth century. He believed that the government needed to take control of the loyalties of children on behalf of the state. Why? In order to separate children from their parents. Cubberley said, “Each year, the child is coming to belong more and more to the state and less and less to the parent.”
#7 “The educationist must find a creed and teach it.”
G.K. Chesterton
One of the most oft-repeated bits of nonsense is that teachers should not teach children what to think but how to think. Such a sentiment is not found in Scripture. Certainly, it is proper to teach children the laws of thought (i.e. “how to think”). It is also proper to follow the pattern of Moses, Jesus, and Paul and teach children what is right and wrong about God, life, and the world. There is a creed (i.e. “what to think”) and it ought to be taught.
Trinity Reformed Church 