Education as a Religious Discipline

Part II

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Education

Lesson: 2/2

Genre: Lecture

Track: 02

Dictation Name: RR173A2

Location/Venue:

Year

[Introductory Speaker] And as our final speaker I am pleased to reintroduce Doctor R. J. Rushdoony to you.

[Rushdoony] For us as Christians, truth is not an abstract statement of fact, it is Jesus Christ. All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made. So that the truth of all things is for us first of all: they are God created, God ordained, God given, and only to be known and understood in terms of God.

Every area of life and thought as we have seen is governed by a religious perspective, by a faith. And every area of life is only to be understood in terms of God and His word.

Two areas that are especially central to the transmission of religious values are the church and the school. Today the church is seen as peripheral to life. We can understand something of the faith of the colonists who came here in the fact that in the villages of early America, the church was at the center of the village. It is now peripheral. We can understand also the centrality of the knowledge of the word, in that education then was Christian.

Earlier today we saw the problems we have today with definition. That sociology because of its denial of meaning in favor of utility, instrumentality, is not able to define; at best it describes. And I cited some definitions from the dictionary of sociology. Let us turn to it once again to see how education is defined.

I quote: “Education: The acculturation of the newer and/or younger members of society by the older. The institution process whereby the accumulated ideas, standards, knowledge, and techniques of society are transferred to or imposed upon the rising generation.”

It should be obvious from that definition why the humanists are having problems. It is simply a description.

One of the most obvious facts is that the accumulated knowledge of the past is never transferred to the next generation, but only that which the next generation prizes, believes in, treasures, is passed on. So that every generation passes judgement on the past, and out of that accumulation which it has inherited, it will transmit certain things in terms of its own basic faith.

There has never been an education which has passed on the total accumulation of past data and ideas. Education first of all transmits values, and then those facts which are significant in terms of those values. The faith of a people is a governing fact in education, and today our state schools are in deliberate and total warfare against the faith of the people.

Some champions of the public schools or state schools call attention to the presence of Christian teachers, as though this were a significant fact. However, by eliminating the fact of the existence of the triune God as the fundamental premise of all knowledge, and by eliminating scripture, they have eliminated the most important things in education; and any teacher who is there is not teaching. They have left out the heart of education, and therefore their efforts are in vain. State schools, as we saw earlier, are schools for barbarians, schools increasingly for illiteracy.

In the Bible, education is inseparable from the fact that man is created in the image of God. And the image of God is defined for us in different passages of scripture as knowledge, righteousness or justice, holiness, and dominion; and each of these aspects is basic to education. Knowledge in order that we might better serve God, righteousness or justice that we might know and apply the law of God to every sphere. Holiness, that we might dedicate ourselves to God in all that we are, and our world our families, our possession’s; and dominion, that we might make Christ the king in every sphere of life and thought.

Christian education rests on the premise that man is created in the image of God. Humanistic education rests on the premise that man is a creature who is a product of evolution, of blind chance, and as a result is the sole voice of reason in an unreasoning and absurd creation; and that universal unreason therefore negates in effect the slim edge of reason in man. Moreover this slim edge of reason is the tool of the unconscious. Because the unconscious in man reflects his primitive background, and we have what Van Til has called: “Integration into the void.” As we attempt to interpret man.

Now, what are the implications of this for education? In a very interesting work of a few years back, Roger Shattuck, in The Banquet Years wrote on the origins of Avant Garde art in France, from 1885 to World War 1. The book is very important because it deals with the essential influences that have molded modern culture. And because art very commonly reflects a culture before other areas do, we can often see what is coming by looking to art. Thus, Shattuck found four characteristics that marked Avant Garde art in those years. First of all, the historic nature of art had been to stress maturity. A mature vision on the world. A mature knowledge of the technique of painting or of sculpture, or of whatever discipline the artist worked in. There was thus a stress on maturity. On the adult qualities of self-control, of logic, of responsibility, and of maturity generally.

Avant Garde art stressed instead the child, and childishness. The artist became a man or a woman who was given to tantrums. To a lack of controlling of their tempers and habits. It was a studied development of childishness. Instead of the complete man, the new art represented a childish revolt against basic values, against beauty, morality, and reason; and also against learning. Against the discipline of acquiring skills.

One artist of the old school about twenty years ago said that in another generation or two, if this trend continued the ability of artists to deal with their materials in terms of the accumulated knowledge of the past would be gone. An article in the Wall Street Journal not too long ago dealt with the fact that these classics of modern art that have been bought by the various galleries and museums are disintegrating. The artists did not know how to use their materials, or what kind of materials to use, and the result is that some works painted only 20-25 years ago have gone through 5,6,7 restorations, and others are fast reaching a point where restoration will be impossible.

The revolt against maturity in every sphere, whether in techniques, morality, or religion is having its consequences. The avant garde stressed not the mature man in Christ but the child man, the primitive man. This soon became the standard of all life and of education. After all it went back to Jean Jacque Rousseau. The result has been the devastation of education.

Then second, while the older art stressed a high seriousness, the high seriousness of life, avant garde art began in the late 19th century to stress the absurdity of life. Life as a joke. The very fact that they believed in an absence of values was made into a value. The great moral standard of the avant garde artist was to believe in no morality at all, and to violate systematically every standard of Biblical morality. It is ironic that the late Henry Miller felt it necessary to apologize that he had never involved himself in homosexuality, and he made it clear that it was not a matter of moral premises, but it just wasn’t his thing. HE felt it necessary to apologize. Because there is no meaning, the avant garde held mans course must be self indulgence and self inflation. Indeed among some it was a mark of being not altogether with the stream of things if you didn’t burn yourself out and either kill yourself or die at an early date. You were then somewhat conservative.

The same trend we have seen in education. As against the high seriousness of life, the stress on biblical faith, there is an emphasis on the child’s self realization, self evaluation. The child’s enjoyment of life. The need to find self fulfillment, to indulge oneself, and much more.

Then third, the older art had a Christian stress on the reality of God and the reality of Gods world. This gave way to an emphasis on dreams and hallucinations, on the attempt to gain new states of consciousness using drugs, liquor, occult practices, and anything that was a promise of another state of consciousness.

With this went a black sense of humor, an ugly cynicism. The unconscious became very popular. Novels were written in the stream of consciousness style. In education this meant that the child essentially was to teach himself or herself, and the teacher was simply a guide as the child explored life. There was a steady retreat therefore, from learning.

Then fourth, and finally; as against the historic stress on clarity, the avant garde stressed ambiguity. We see this very much in contemporary writing. John Lofton mentioned Bill Buckley in The National Review. I’ve subscribed to it because I feel that I should, ever since it was first published. It continues to irritate me. I will read an article with so much ambiguity, that very often when it is a book review I conclude the review and I don’t know what the book was about. Or, if it is an article, I have trouble finding out which side the author is on, and I know one thing for sure, I don’t like the way he is saying it. the ambiguity, the indulgence of self expression, so that the author tells you how he reacted to endless trifles in the book without telling you: “This is the authors thesis. Let us now evaluate it.” This love of ambiguity is basic to modern education.

We see it in evasive techniques of living, writing, and working. A studied vagueness about everything, a hatred of precision, a general fuzziness; and all in all the clarity of God’s word is replaced with childishness, unreality, absurdity, and ambiguity. All of this constitutes a war against the clarity of faith, against the fact of meaning. Where there is meaning there must be precision.

I pointed out that the dictionary of sociology and more and more modern dictionaries in whatever field they may be, are increasingly incapable of defining. Definition presupposes meaning; meaning requires precision. It is not an accident that when Darwin came on the scene, the hard sciences, physics and mathematics were predominant. And mathematics not only has become peripheral, but increasingly theoretical mathematics, the mathematics of pure imagination without any relationship to reality, governs the world of mathematics.

One mathematician said that it was difficult in any department today to find a man who was ready to teach math to engineers, because the engineers have to build bridges, and they can’t build bridges in terms of theoretical math.

Education as a religious discipline requires precision and judgement. As teachers, we judge all things and evaluate their nature and transmit our assessment, out judgement to children. We discipline ourselves in terms of that judgement. If we believe in honesty then we teach and discipline to promote honesty. Teaching is a process of judgement, and our judgement are in essence religious.

The child is taught how to judge, and the criterion of judgement is not the individual, but God. God and His word. When I was a student at Berkeley, after I graduated and continued with graduate studies, I helped support myself by grading papers. I found the papers rather painful reading. Here were students, even then in the 30’s the standards of literacy were beginning to slip, who were asked in their very imperfect English, to pass judgement in examination papers on Shakespeare, on Milton, Dryden, on Pope, on Francis Thompson, and on others. The arrogance of such teaching and of such papers is incredible. Here are people who can barely command their own language, and they see fit to pass judgement on the masters of it. I do not say that the writers of the past and present are not to be judged, but certainly an immature student is not a judge. And certainly the criterion is not to be our own likes and dislikes, but something above and beyond man.

In a previous session I referred to values clarification and the stages curriculum. The characteristic in all of these curricula is that hypothetical problems are given to children, as though they were reality. Hypothetical problems are given in terms of a hypothetical world, in which a variety of options are possible, none of which have any relationship to reality in Gods world. This is forsaking reality, this is cultivating immaturity. This is insisting that the world is absurd, that there is no high seriousness; and to teach children to seek to create their own values is a monstrous evil.

Our Lord says in Matthew 18:6 “Whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.”

The real world is Gods world, there is no other world. And in that real world we work and teach and the only standard we can have is God and His word. Humanism places responsibility outside of man in the (heredity?) and environment of this world… whereas Christianity says man is responsible to God, must be governed by God, and must be instructed by His word.

There is thus a great difference between Christian and humanistic education. Humanistic education stresses the child, not the man. Childishness, not maturity. The absurdity of life, not the high seriousness. It is concerned with a dream world, a hypothetical world and not reality, and with ambiguity not clarity. These characteristics all mark the people whom we have historically declared to be insane. So that education outside of Christ in our time is education for insanity. Humanistic education and culture are insane. Hence this humanistic culture pursues insane policies.

As a nation, humanism arms it enemies as we are doing. It treats debt as an asset. Apply for a loan if you have never made one in your life and you are a bad risk, because you have never incurred debt.

Humanism favors criminals over victims, ugliness over beauty, and a lie over truth. This should not surprise us. When men worship the creature rather than the creator, they have thereby made the fundamental break with reality. After that all acts of insanity are logical.

Christian education is thus necessary to restore sanity to a culture. Thank you.