The Global Cultural War and Education

From the Christian perspective we are called to find the Lord Jesus Christ as a vital part of education, and this does not contradict with secular education.  The separation of the church and state does not threaten true learning in Christ.   It is a life that stands not from the support of the state, but the realization within the individual who knows Christ.

Education was very much a part of the Calvinistic influence that once permeated the USA.  Calvin was a completely dedicated Christian, but his education and teaching was not only from the Bible but as well from the humanities that were part of his training as a lawyer.  Here was a seedbed from which much of our Western education developed.  Proverbs 22:6 was once a theme in American education as it said:  “Train up a child in the way that he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”  Education was not just to get people ready for heaven, but it was to give good common horse sense for living.

Underlying much of the rhetoric of the conflict between the Middle East and the West is the global cultural war that is going on. The Jewish nation has a much closer affinity with Christianity and the Democratic focus than the Islamic religion.  Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, made some observations recently about the differences between the Judeo-Christian world-views and that of the radical Muslims.  I’m not sure just how accurate the distinction between radical Muslims and more progressive Muslims really is, but that doesn’t matter in this evaluation in respect to education and the global cultural war and comparison between the Judeo-Christian and the Islamic.

Netanyahu said:  “The Jews are NOT promoting brain washing–children in military training camps, teaching them how to blow themselves up and cause maximum deaths of Jews and other non Muslims!

The Jews don’t hijack planes, nor kill athletes at the Olympics, or blow themselves

up in German restaurants. There is NOT one single Jew that has destroyed a church. There is NOT a single Jew that protests by killing people.

The Jews don’t traffic slaves, nor have leaders calling for Jihad and death to all the Infidels.  Perhaps the world’s Muslims should consider investing more in standard education and less in blaming the Jews for all their problems.

Muslims must ask ‘what can they do for humankind’ before they demand that humankind respects them!!  Regardless of your feelings about the crisis between Israel and the Palestinians and Arab neighbors, even if you believe there is more culpability on Israel ‘s part, the following two sentences really say it all:   ‘If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence.  If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel.’

What is meant by the concept that Netanyahu used when he said, “Perhaps the world’s Muslims should consider investing more in standard education and less in blaming the Jews for all their problems?” Standard Education can be defined as outcome-based education. It should be neither pro-religion nor anti-religion, but the Islamic focus will not allow this.  Yes, if the Islamic focus gets it way all the way there will be no Israel, and neither in time America!

Educational reform in the United States, for example, since the 1980s has been largely driven by the setting of academic standards for what students should know and be able to do. These standards can then be used to guide all other system components. The standards-based reform movement calls for clear, measurable standards for all school students. Rather than norm-referenced rankings, a standards-based system measures each student against the concrete standard, instead of measuring how well the student performed compared to others. Curriculum, assessments, and professional development are aligned to the standards.

Educational standards define the knowledge and skills students should possess at critical points in their educational career. “Standards serve as a basis of educational reform across the nation as educators and policy makers respond to the call for a clear definition of desired outcomes of schooling and a way to measure student success in terms of these outcomes” (National Research Council 2001).  National, state and local educators play an important role in improving student learning through development and implementation of standards throughout the country. Standard Education does not fit into the Islamic world-view.

Dr. Ibrahim B. Syed, Ph.D analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of Public, Parochial, Private non-parochial, Islamic, Virtual Islamic, or Home Schools in the United States in an article on “Education of Muslim Children – Challenges and Opportunities.”  He said that “Education is the birth right of every Muslim and Muslimah. Islam puts considerable emphasis on its followers to acquire knowledge.”

Professor Syed went on to say, “Today, globally Muslims have the lowest literacy rate… Those who attend Muslim high schools do not fare better in college.”  Syed then stated, “Education of Muslim children in the west has both opportunities and challenges.  In the Western World the purpose of education is to provide for the economic prosperity of a nation. At a personal level the purpose of education is to acquire academic and professional skills that enable one to earn a respectable living with riches and fame, and also a luxurious and comfortable life. For a Muslim providing economic prosperity of a nation does not contradict his/her Islamic beliefs, however focusing the goals of education solely for the purpose of money making is unpalatable. Muslims want to impart Islamic education.”  Yes, there is an educational culture war going on the global scene!

“The vast majority of Muslims think that Islamic education means acquiring Islamic religious knowledge-study of Qur’an, Arabic, Hadith, Sunnah, Seerah, Fiqh, Islamic history, and allied subjects. As a matter of fact, in the present world broadly speaking we have two types of Muslims–those who have followed the Western type of education or secular education and those who have acquired Deeni or Islamic education,” wrote Syed.

Possibly secular education, without religious underpinnings, could have been what Netanyahu meant, for the “Islamic Education”.   The Koran, the Muslim Scripture, is primary in the learning process, for…The aim of Islamic education is Character building. Growth and development of an Islamic personality should be the final goal of any Islamic School. Islamic values are the foundation of the Islamic personality… Parents should provide an Islamic environment, an Islamic culture.”  But what is meant by this position?  Study to see the enslavement that Islam brings is in many ways!

The questions come as to just what part should religious education have in standard education.  And much of this revolves around who is setting the standards.   There is the purely secular, the integrated, and the purely religious in education.  At one time in America we followed more an integrated formula, the humanistic and the religious together, to where the religious focus was not hostile to the secular, nor the secular to the religious.  But elements in our culture are seeking to reverse this, particularly in respect to the Judeo-Christian values and beliefs that we once basic to our land.

Helen Thomas a Lebanese American, 89 year old columnist for the Hearst Newspapers,  proclaimed that, “ Israelis should get the hell out of Palestine.”  There are many elements in the USA who would just as well say, the “Christian influence should get the hell out of public school education in America.”

Netanyahu in his response to the situation between the Jews and the Muslims drew attention to those who had received the Nobel Prizes in Literature, Peace, Physics, Economics, and Medicine.  He noted that ONE BILLION TWO HUNDRED MILLION or twenty percent of the world’s population – twenty percent of the world’s population were MUSLIMS, and seven had received the Nobel Prizes.  Then he observed that the Global JEWISH population is approximately 14,000,000—Only FOURTEEN MILLION or about 0.02% of the world’s population and 129 of the Jewish population had received the Nobel Prizes.  This should make anyone think, particularly in the world conflict between the educational focuses of the Jews, the Christians, the pure secularists, and the Muslims.

Author and lecturer Nonie Darwish says the goal of radical Islamists is to impose Shariah law on the world, ripping Western law and liberty in two.  She recently authored the book, Cruel and Usual Punishment: The Terrifying Global Implications of Islamic Law. Darwish, a Christian convert from Islam, warns about creeping sharia law – what it is, what it means, and how it is manifested in Islamic countries.   For the West, she says radical Islamists are working to impose sharia on the world. If that happens, Western civilization will be destroyed. Westerners generally assume all religions encourage a respect for the dignity of each individual.  Islamic law (Sharia) teaches that non-Muslims should be subjugated or killed in this world.

Darwish points out that “Peace and prosperity for one’s children is not as important as assuring that Islamic law rules everywhere in the Middle East and eventually in the world.  While Westerners tend to think that all religions encourage some form of the golden rule, Sharia teaches two systems of ethics – one for Muslims and another for non-Muslims.  Building on tribal practices of the seventh century, Sharia encourages the side of humanity that wants to take from and subjugate others.”

Nonie states that: “While Westerners tend to think in terms of religious people developing a personal understanding of and relationship with God, Sharia advocates executing people who ask difficult questions that could be interpreted as criticism.  It’s hard to imagine, that in this day and age. Islamic scholars agree that those who criticize Islam or choose to stop being Muslim should be executed. Sadly, while talk of an Islamic reformation is common and even assumed by many in the West, such murmurings in the Middle East are silenced through intimidation.”

While Westerners are accustomed to an increase in religious tolerance over time, Darwish explains how petro dollars are being used to grow an extremely intolerant form of political Islam in her native Egypt and elsewhere.

The writer went onto say, “It is too bad that so many are disillusioned with life and Christianity to accept Muslims as peaceful.  Some may be but they have an army that is willing to shed blood in the name of Islam.  The peaceful support the warriors with their finances and own kind of patriotism to their religion. WHILE AMERICA IS GETTING RID OF CHRISTIANITY FROM ALL PUBLIC SITES AND ERASING GOD FROM THE LIVES OF CHILDREN, THE MUSLIMS ARE PLANNING A GREAT JIHAD ON AMERICA.”

Yes, the conflict between the Middle East and the West is the global cultural war that is going on.    The Jewish nation has a much closer affinity with Christianity and the Democratic focus than the Islamic religion.  The Jewish religion is the foundation on which the Christian religion developed, and within this thinking developed the concept of freedom in learning, which was greatly encouraged by the Protestant Reformation and the educational thrusts as seen by the Lutherans, the French Huguenots, the English Puritans, the Scottish Presbyterians, the Dutch Reformed Church and others.  We in America have been greatly influenced by the Reformed understanding of education that once harmonized well with the more humanistic teachings that developed from the Renaissance.  Here was integration between the sacred and the secular that fitted with the standard requirements that developed in education, and helped our nation once to lead the world in education.

Are we losing the freedom in education that helped to make our nation great?  In the lands were the Islamic faith dominates, freedom in education is gone. We need to open our eyes to see the global cultural war that is going on and to return to many of the basics that are innate in the Judeo-Christian world-view.

The Islamic religion, I feel, is a religious perversion, a branch from both the Jewish and the Christian faiths, but an ultimate contradiction to both in that it cultivates bondage, rather than liberty.  One reason so few Muslims have achieved intellectual recognition, is much in part to do with the Islamic view of education.  With a false foundation, how can you build a truly free society?

The Christian writer, Karen Armstrong, well observed, “ Mohammed, founder of Islam, was an illiterate, womanizing, lust and greed-driven, warmongering, hallucinating Arab, who had embellishing/hulluncinating/plagiarizing scribal biographers who not only added ‘angels’ and flying chariots to the Koran but also a militaristic agenda to support the plundering and looting of the lands of non-believers.”

There is a global cultural war going on, and much of it is being fought in the battlefield of education.  In America we need to stop the deterioration of the faith that enabled us to have the freedom to explore and use our minds that would balance the sacred and the secular.  Remember the Lord Jesus Christ said, “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed,” which well applies to education.

.

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