Seven Day Solutions

“Thus says the LORD, “Cursed is the man who trusts in mankind and makes flesh his strength,” Jer. 17:5

Two of my grandchildren went venture capitalist this week. Their quest to go into business had been burning all summer but finally their mother concurred and gave them time and substance to embark. One of these fine afternoons we’ve been having, they set up a stand in their front yard after school and marketed lemonade and fresh baked chocolate chip cookies to the world. The excitement was Titanic as they rehearsed their lines (“Order up!”) and engaged the general public. The ambition of a five and eight year old to enter the marketplace is mostly just too cute for words but also laudable. Any impulse toward creative effort, work, and service deserves to be praised. From what I hear, there is an epidemic of twenty-somethings that could learn a thing or two from my Isabelle and Grayson.

“But on the other hand” (as our Fiddler friend Tevia is so famously wont to say), I can easily work up a case of pity for what I call “seven day people.” These are the folk that are either driven to the point of exhaustion by blind and furious ambition or else they are folks trapped in a cycle of endless labor trying to escape the wolves of indebtedness and poverty. You can find these “seven day people” living in both hovels and mansions. In either case, they are severely focused on either getting ahead or just surviving both of which entail seven days per week of constant toil and labor. While we can easily digress into broad questions of poverty, politics, and pride, I would simply like to point out that there are limits to man’s ability to fix his own dilemmas or accomplish his own dreams. There are other factors at play in our quest for prosperity and success that can be equally vital as any work ethic. Believers should know this well, but we can easily forget.

This week a new plan has been rolled out in five different states in another attempt to “fix” our problems in education. You will be proud to know that Tennessee is one of them. I find it dangerously close to being what I call a “seven day” solution. It is the mindset that says what we have been doing is just not working. Therefore, let’s do more of it. Starting in 2013, our state will join Colorado, Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut in adding some 300 hours of instructional time to some pilot school programs. They will either lengthen the school day or the school year or both. We will call it an “expanded-learning program” and it will all be promoted in the name of “educational reform.” What is truly scary is that there are some radical voices out there who suggest that the only true fix for our educational woes is for our schools to be open six or seven days per week for eleven or twelve months out of the year. One of them just happens to be Arne Duncan, our national Secretary of Education. For some reason, I suddenly get this image of a “quarry slave at night, scourged to his dungeon”1 and see a dispirited child trapped in the chains of endless curriculum as day after day he claws at the rocks of calculus, chemistry, and a secular catechism.

We all confess that the only way to save some children is to just take them away from their parents. But theft is unethical. And to what end? To make our nation more competitive in the world? Are we to make our children the servants of national ambition? And just what is the good life? No one wants to talk about that. And so we have “seven day solutions” chasing phantom ends resulting in a treadmill existence.

Our school’s namesake chapter, Jeremiah 17, speaks to, nay, hammers at the issues of work, rest, poverty, and prosperity (read it slowly and often). Sin and a lack of trust in the living God can banish one to a stony waste in the wilderness as surely as any lack of a good education. And God instituted the Sabbath as His way of advocating for “six day solutions;” never seven. May we be resolute “six day” people in our “seven day” world.

Mercy and Truth, Mr. Moe 1Thanatopsis, William Cullen Bryant