Worshiping the Goddess of Education

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Education has become a magic word coupled with the economic and socio-political verbiage of our times.  Supposedly education, bowing to the goddess of education, is going to solve all the increasing massive problems facing mankind. The Bible says in the last days men shall be “ever learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (II Timothy 3:7).  I think of this verse often, when I observe the national and international happenings all about us.

Our nation spends astronomical amounts of money on the idol of education, and although education is vital and important in many ways we have created it to be the goddess of education.  Learning is good, but the substance of learning determines the true value. We are seeing a type of learning develop that does not revolve from the Truth, but it is a type of knowledge acquisition that implants a godless worldview projecting to an evolutionary projection of truth that is in many ways a type of epistemological suicide. It is painted as a humanistic utopia, but it is a counterfeit with much ado about everything, but ultimately moving toward destruction.

John Dewey (1859-1952) was a famous American philosopher, psychologist and educator whose thinking set the stage in American education that there are no eternal and absolute values. To him all values changed with time and space. Man was the creator of his own values. What is true today in Dewey’s thinking may cease to be true tomorrow. Man’s life is but a series of experiments and purposeful action. Truth is a process not grounded from the Truth. To him everything was provisional, nothing ultimate. Knowledge was always a means, never an end in itself.  It was purely instrumental. Hence the title of Dewey’s philosophy is “Instrumentalism.”

Dewey’s philosophy coupled with that of many other similar thinkers is instrumental to the pattern of worshipping the goddess of education in America—education without the foundation that once basic to Western education. We are observing the chaos in the meaningless lives of the masses of our populace, and the loss of individual responsibility and character development that should accompany education.  It is fading away into a type of nihilism, much because we have subtracted the foundation of faith in God from contemporary education, even attacked faith in God as the Ultimate One, implanting the politically correct new goddess of education!

Recently the President of our nation proposed we set it up to where there would be free education for any and all students who wish to go on to two additional years after high school. He said nothing about the academic and intellectual quality necessary for advanced learning. Do we lower standards to accomplish this?

In response to this call for two years free post-secondary education Ben Carson (Washington Times, Feb. 3, 2014) said: “There has been much talk recently about providing free community college education. First of all, it is only free if no one has to pay for it. It is not free if we rob Peter to pay Paul. Secondly, Pell grants already exist to pay for community college expenses for needy students. For those who are not needy, there is an old-fashioned remedy that is very effective called work. In fact work might even be beneficial for those who are needy. It certainly provided some very valuable experiences for me… It is time for us to begin to emphasize to students that the person who has the most to do with what happens to him in life is himself… When we re-inject personal responsibility into life lessons, we will strengthen our society.”

Personal responsibility is increasingly subtracted from the American way of life and supplanted with the new thinking to develop America into a Post-Christian nation.  It developed from the thinking of the Progressives, trained into falling into the thinking of people such as John Dewey, Karl Marx, John Watson, B.F. Skinner, Friedrich Nietzsche and John Paul Sartre from the secular domain and now even is developing from the Islamic fundamentalist indoctrination from the religious domain.  The Judeo-Christian worldview is under attack from the Progressives on the secular side and from the religious side the Islamic fundamentalist worldview.

The message of the Koran and the Bible are very different with the educational focuses basically irreconcilable.  The Liberal Progressive understanding of Christianity rejects the concept of original sin as being basic to our human alienation and points to socio-economic inequalities as the basic evil in humanity.  The concept of original sin, as well is not recognized in Islam, and Muslims believe that to teach that Jesus Christ was the manifestation of God among us is anathema.  The Liberal Progressive worldview of the Lord Jesus is not in his death and resurrection but in his example of accepting all, a social reformer.

The goddess of education in Islamic fundamentalism stands against the Western understanding of learning.  Illustrative of this is Boko Haram spreading all over Northwest Africa.  The name Boko Haram means “Western education is forbidden” or “Western education is accursed.”  It condemns the reading of other books than the Koran.  It developed from the fact that the British brought Western education to the people in Nigeria as Christian missionary endeavors back when it was a British colony.  The kidnapping of 276 Christian school girls hyphenated the Islamic support of the goddess of education from the Koran and rejection of Western education and any taint of Christianity to it.

The Bible says in II Timothy 3:16 that “All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness; that the man of God may be prefect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works.”  The secularists and the Progressive Liberals reject this and the value of the Bible, as the inspired Word of God, just as do the Islamists. Their bond together is not so much what they share in common but what they reject together.  Both reject the Bible in respect to education.  There are in America right now massive socio-political endeavors to transform our Judeo-Christian culture into a more Islamic country by the Progressive powers that be.

Back in February 2, 2011 Hiram Reisner published an article in Newsmax from an interview between a Muslim cleric and Sean Hannity, where the cleric said that “Egypt will be ruled by Sharia law and eventually the United States – and the whole world – will fall to radical Islam…Sharia will come and it will remove the corruption of democracy, and freedom, and all of your exploitation.”  He went on to say, “You are worried because you know Islam is coming to your backyard.”

The Islamic world, seething with revolution from Islamic fundamentalism, seeks to erect their indoctrinated goddess of education from the Koran.  America has her goddess of secular education, an education that seeks to remove Christian influences from the classroom with all the disastrous results very much evident in our day despite all the emphasis on more and better education.  Our world is a mess and much of it because we look to the goddess of education instead of the Lord God, revealed in Christ, as the “Way, the Truth, and the Life.”  Christ is the one who is Truth that connects to all truth!

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by Joe Renfro, Ed.D., Educational Columnist, Radio Evangelist, Retired Teacher and Pastor, 5931 West Avenue, Lavonia, Georgia 30553,  706-356-4173, joerenfro@windstream.net

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