The Moral Core to Learning

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There is an interchange in the Christian life, whereby in knowing God in Christ, there is a moral core for learning in all aspects of living.  There is knowledge of the empirical world together with the spiritual world that creates a harmony relating to the formation of a moral cognate.  It ties together self-discipline in learning where one can see Jesus Christ as all in all.  I Corinthians 2:11 points to this as it says:  “For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.”.

It was noted by William Haller in The Rise of Puritanism that the “Puritan’s ends were first moral and then political; they were striving after power in the church, in society and the state.  The knowledge they urged men to get was to be sought by observation of the Holy Spirit in their own breasts and in the lives of men about them, by the reading of useful books, above all reading the Bible interpreted as an image of spiritual war and adventure and other books conducive to the same effect.”  This focus was basic in the establishing of education in developing democracy in America..

The core of learning is to learn by the spirit and not by the law.  Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) was a Frenchman who warned about the misuse of the law by the government to establish what he called “legal plunder,” where the government could take from some and redistribute it to others.  He wrote, “When law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense or losing respect for law.”  He noted that, “protectionism, socialism, and communism are basically the same plant in different stages of its growth.” The government can usurp control of education, undermining the basic core personal morality that is essential to true learning! .

Karl Marx in his early writing from 1837-1844 wrote:  “The political emancipation of the Jew, the Christian, and the religious man in general implied the emancipation of the state from Judaism, Christianity, and religion in general.” Could this process be at work today in America?  Aren’t we seeing our moral foundation in the Judeo-Christian worldview being attacked, debased, and ignored by the educational establishment? Where once in the Western world, religion, morality, and education were closely related, there is now a shift to secularism.  This shift basically takes the soul out of learning.  The focus is on teaching facts, while the schools have become a moral chaos!.

We are observing a breakdown in our moral foundations. Looking back to the sixties in public education, when the law removed the religious and moral influences from public education, influences that were originally established as basic in this land, we can see the ravel beginning.  It was evidenced not only in removing Bible reading and prayer from the schools, but in developing a general disenfranchisement of the religious influences by all methods in the public square, thus affecting the whole morality of our land. .

Hebrews 8:10-11 says,  “For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord; I will put my laws in their mind, and write them in their hearts; I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people.  And they shall not teach every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying ‘Know the Lord’,” for all shall know me, from the least to the greatest.”  The Bible herein conveys a shift from legalism to a spiritual focus in the formation of a moral foundation of learning!.

Bastiat wrote in respect to the law and education, that: “You say, ‘There are persons who lack education,’ and you turn to the law.   But the law is not, in itself, a torch of learning which shines its light abroad.”  Public education takes our money in taxes to educate children, but the government doesn’t want any influence from the Christian faith that was once basic in our land.  We can look to that which Bastiat observed over a century and an half ago as the danger of state control of education, and we can see the application of more and more legal regulations being imposed on education. The torch of learning is fading!.

The cultivation of morality in education was vital in Western thinking.  Friedrich Froebel (1782-1852) has been credited as transforming Western education in a way that stimulated freedom in a context where “immorality of the soul and the existence of God were not self-contradictory conceptions.” A vital part of education was the moral effects from it. There was not conflict between God and nature. The empirical sciences and the spiritual domain found harmony together from this thinking. .

But without a moral core to learning, modern day public school education is finding itself foundering, seeking to teach children who don’t want to learn what they don’t feel they need to know and children who aren’t sure of what value it all is.  Basically, for many, if not most, the public school has become a social event, rather than a learning process!.

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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