Life-Long Learning

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by Joe Renfro, Ed.D., Radio Evangelist, Retired Teacher and Pastor, Box 751, Lavonia, Georgia 30553, 706-356-4173, joerenfro@alltel.net

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The Bible says to “Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needs not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.,” This is not just to know the scriptures, for the New Testament was not yet gathered together. It sets no an age limit. It was said, “Perpetual hunger is the key to a full mind. When you stop learning, you stop.” In learning many people, as they age, move into retirement and then “expirement,” a term I’ve created to show the state of becoming dead to the excitement of realizing one’s mind continue to develop God’s glory as we age. If you don’t use it, you lose it!

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. served as a justice of the Supreme Court. At ninety-two, Justice Holmes was hospitalized, and his friend, President Franklin Roosevelt, stopped by to visit. The President was surprised the see Justice Holmes reading a Greek Primer. “What are you doing, Oliver?” asked the President. “Reading,” answered Holmes. “That much I can see,” said the President, “but why a Greek Primer?” The lifelong learner Holmes answered, “Why, Mr. President, to improve my mind.”

This concept of life-long learning was vividly expressed by Mark Twain in Life on the Mississippi, “Two things seemed pretty apparent to me. One was, that in order to be a [Mississippi River] pilot a man has got to learn more than any one man ought to be allowed to know; and the other was, that he must learn it all over again in a different way every 24 hours. Learning is a journey approached in multiple ways throughout life!

During the aging process from the tiny infant on to the more aged, learning takes different forms, and people learn in different ways. But learning is more that just awareness of something. There is learning about something, learning how to do something, and growth in knowledge in any and all contexts. Learning is a many-splendored thing. Learning for the enrichment of the soul is a vital motivation and gauge.

Public education was once closely related to the values inherent in the Scriptures, but this influence is increasingly neglected in the minds of the new generations. Here is a generation gap in learning! One of the sad observations that has been made of our American culture is: “Souls artificially constituted by a new kind of education live in a world transformed by man’s artifice and believe that all values are relative and determined by the private economic or sexual drives of those who hold them.”

It would seem that in contemporary America the quest of sex in all the different understandings of it or economic growth regardless of the foundations have become the basic motivators. It is distressing to see sex being portrayed in so much of the advertising on the media as the basic appetite that must be gratified for one to know real life.

What used to be understood as our “souls” has shifted to being our “spirits” with the riches to be esteemed not an eternal relationship with God but an accommodation to the values very often to what once was called the “counter-culture.” We have gone down hill, and yet we then acclaim it as progress!

It was interesting Oliver Wendell Holmes was studying Greek. Once the study of Greek and/or Latin was an imperative in most all advanced education. In some universities the curriculums allowed the substituting of Greek in the place of Logic. We need a basis for thinking! Greek sets an ordering by rules that are basic, where Romantic Languages are not near so consistent. Evidently Holmes felt the need to have this knowledge of consistency in his growth of understanding the laws in which he had to make decisions.

The study of Greek entails discipline of the mind. Minds need to be disciplined from the cradle to the grave, and life-long learning is an imperative. One of the basic influences since the mid 1960s in public education has been from the influence of B.F. Skinner’s behaviorism, which Psychology Today noted was the basic thinking in contemporary education. Here people are nothing more than advanced animals—no soul, no ultimate values, nothing but products of stimulants and responses, as environments alone determine it all, environments to be predetermined by the educators.

The basic thrust of Skinner’s focus is not the discipline of the mind, but the gratification of ones desires. It is not working, as a PTO study in Wisconsin showed in grade one 80% of students felt good about themselves, and by grade six only 10% felt that way. The study is not unique. The right kind of education is not motivated from the outside in, but is from the inside out!

The Bible was basic in Western education back before the 60s. Allen Bloom noted: “In the United States, practically speaking, the Bible was the only common culture, one that united simple and sophisticated, rich and poor, young and old, and as the very model for a vision of he order of the whole of things.” But the change came greatly with influence of behaviorism, for now for masses learning is not so much a life-long learning process, but the imposition of knowledge lacking a unified core for life-long learning.

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JOE RENFRO, EdD

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Contributing Editor – Education Columnist

Retired Minister & Retired Educator

Box 751, Lavonia, GA 30553

706-356-4173

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