I’ve said before in this space, and it needs to be said during just about every presidential campaign, that there is something much more potentially terrifying than to watch the government continue to fail in its efforts to prop up education in this country. Much worse than such a continuing failure would be to watch the government succeed.
Shaping the minds and the value system of our children is simply not the proper function of government—almost certainly not at any level, but especially at the distant federal level. (Emphasis added)
If your child’s school chooses never to mention
what Jesus calls "the first and great commandment of life"—to love the
Lord our God with all we have—all the rest of that school’s education
will be as hollow as it is shallow. And even worse will be the effort,
so often attempted (and sincerely so), to address some expression of
the second great commandment—"loving your neighbor as yourself"—without
having dealt seriously with the first one. The first provides both
skeleton and heart for the second; the second is impossible without the
first.Society needs to understand, and so do evangelical Christians, that
the real problem with state education today (and even with much private
education) has nothing to do with teachers’ salaries or funding levels
or phonics or curriculum or how many months of the year or hours of the
day children go to school. All those things have their significance and
are worth discussing at the right time.But the right time for that is always after settling what education
is really about. Until educators get that straight, they’re not going
to get anywhere with "education reform." And they have no business
talking about stretching the federal government’s reach into preschool
and daycare—where the best they will ever do is to compound their
present clumsiness.
Fascinating, to see the argument for Christianity to be taught in our schools put so baldly.
I somewhat agree Louis, I think this is a bit of a strangely, if not clumsily put argument.
I think what it is trying to say is that, when you remove love for God and mankind as the centerpiece of education, you get bad education. And I would agree. But I am not for religious indoctrination in public schools.
Rather, I would like to see traditional Christian values, or character formation, part of education, like they used to be – values such as honesty, industry, chastity, humility, generosity, and forbearance are no longer taught.
However, when it comes to public education, I do think that the secularist antipathy towards religion, as well as the multicultural mistake of viewing all religions or ethical systems as equal in value, do tend to also lead to worse education, because in the case of the latter, rational discrimination and evaluation is replaced with dumb ‘tolerance.’
As I related in Religion, innovation and economic progress, not all religious systems translate into equal social wellbeing and advancement.
And as far as the secular impulse to remove religion from school, while I understand the need to remove religious indoctrination, what ends up happening is that we also remove the Christian values which are shared by many worthy ethical systems and which made our education great. We end up replacing chastity with safe promiscuity, industry with instant gratification, charity with self-indulgence, and generosity with greed, etc.
Not that secularism teaches such things, but that in our zeal to cleanse our system of the influences of faith, we inevitably end up with a lesser ethical system, esp. when it comes to sexuality.
I disagree with all except this:
Shaping the minds and the value system of our children is simply not the proper function of government—almost certainly not at any level, but especially at the distant federal level.
I agree with that with that whole-heartedly.
I have to point out that the secularist antipathy towards religion, as you put it, comes about because the values you enumerate (particularly honesty, humility, and forbearance) aren't often found among the religious. I know that much of my antipathy towards religion and the professedly religious is founded in the rank hypocrisy, inhumanity, and cruelty promulgated by organized religion. The Roman Catholic church provides a good example: though it thinks it can instruct the rest of us on morals and ethics, it is rife with corruption and hypocrisy, and sports a history replete with the same. The same goes for the rest of the organized religious. You guys just don't have the superior moral standing you think your religions give you to lord it over us.
The values you cite are good ones. The point is that they are not exclusive to religion in general or to any particular religion. We don't need religious dogma or theology to hold them dear. The fear of some invisible cop watching and waiting for the slightest slip is unneeded to teach such matters. They can be taught without recourse to religious indoctrination.
While MOST may be taught without religious indoctrination, some ideas require the inculcation of God.
For example, the framers of the constitution thought it critical to indicate that our rights come from God, not the state ('inalienable rights') – this concept makes little or no sense if approached from a secular perspective, yet is crucial to our system of government.
Also, the social consequences of certain perspectives may be so distant and hard to correlate with certain unethical actions, that without referring to some religious or other moral authority, secularism will never support those values.
This is especially true with sexual mores. While science shows promiscuity to be unhealthy, secular humanism, in general, excuses it, and rather than promoting chastity (and heterosexuality), encourages 'safe sin,' ignoring the long-term consequences of individual, social and family breakdown.
Yes, yes, we are all familiar with your particular hobby-horse.
Yes, I am a big proponent of the constitution.
Only when amended to suit your superstitions.