The Value of Education

Years ago, back when I still had four kids at home, my parents came to visit. They took us all out for dinner. During the meal, my mother noted that one of my sons was meticulously moving carrots over to the side of his plate. Eventually she asked, "Aren't you going to eat those?" "No," he answered matter-of-factly. "Why not?" she asked. "Don't you know they're good for you?" "Yes," he said, "I just don't like them." My father quipped, "See? Education is not the answer."

It was one of those "many a truth is said in jest" moments. You see, a lot of people, Christians included, think that education is the answer. If we can just inform people about their world, themselves, and life, they'll be better people. They'll do what is right. If we just give them the facts of the Gospel and valid reasons to believe, they'll be Christians like us. It's just not true.

I don't mean to suggest that education is not valuable. It is. But there is a duality that occurs in the minds of most people in our society that says something like this. "The mind can be trusted, even if people cannot." Christians affirm, for instance, Original Sin -- that human beings are sinful by nature. Most Christians understand that this problem is at the core of Natural Man. Still, there is a sense that our minds are fine; the problem is in the spiritual realm.

The truth is that sin rots the brain. We see this in Romans 1 when Paul says, "They became futile in their thinking" (Rom 1:21). We see this in Romans 12 when he writes, "Be transformed by the renewal of your mind" (Rom 12:2). This sin condition affects the mind. Jeremiah said, "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?" (Jer 17:9). Sin twists human beings.

This is not to suggest that humans can't think. It simply means that our thinking processes are suspect. We can certainly discover things and learn things and understand things. It's just that we are limited in those capabilities. Let me try a perhaps silly illustration. Let's say that I find an object on the street and take it to a local professor for examination. He puts it through various tests and comes up with his evaluation. "It's a metal object, constructed primarily of aluminum. It is basically rectangular in shape, but with rounded edges. It is covered on one side by various pigments -- white, black, and red paint." And for all that he said, it was accurate. He understood all that, and he was right. However, he failed to note that the black paint was in the shape of an arrow and the red paint was in the shape of a circle with a line through it. He failed to note that the sign had a message: "No Right Turn". You see, the reason he failed to note any of this was because I told him it was an artifact I found on the street, so he wasn't looking for a message.

It's the same with education. We can present facts. We can tell truths. We can even encourage learning and reasoning. But when we start with the core value, "Human beings are perfectly capable of understanding their surroundings" instead of "The earth is the LORD's and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein" (Psa 24:1), we'll very likely miss the message. If science, for instance, doesn't begin with "For [God's] invisible attributes, namely, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made" (Rom 1:20), it won't get the message. Can they rightly identify facts about the world? Absolutely! But they won't recognize the message. Faulty preconceptions (what I called "sin") will skew the results and produce faulty understanding.

Jesus said of the Holy Spirit, "He will guide you into all the truth" (John 16:13). There is education and there is thinking and it is of value in and of itself, I suppose, but there are two truths that are ignored when we see them as ends rather than means. First, it ignores the natural condition of Man. Second, it misses the need for guidance by the One who made Man and all that is around us. Unless we get that kind of perception, we'll miss the message and think we're doing fine with our education, thank you very much.