Education Ends

Esteem her (wisdom), and she will exalt you; embrace her, and she will honor you. - Proverbs 4:8 NIV

So where are we going with our educational treadmill? That has been somewhat the focus of our past few issues. It is a question we need to keep in mind as we direct and encourage our children to put forth the effort every day to keep up their rigorous pace. How we answer it will in large part determine their future and the extent and direction to which we pour our time and treasure, college or no.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the realm of public education is rapidly losing its way. The threat of an a-moral, secular, Darwinian education is now being surpassed by the corrosive effects of the no-child-left-behind mentality which is spawning a wasteland of mediocrity and intolerance of standards of any kind. (Ask your friends in the public schools about the new minimum grade of “60” for all student work.)

But where are we going and what do we want to maintain as the ballast in the bottom of our educational boats? If you want to tie your thoughts in endless knots of increasing complexity and confusion, there is no quicker way than to pick up some books on education. Just thinking about all the curriculum options available to Christian homeschoolers now is enough to give one a headache. Go to your university library and the volumes of opinions on education rendered over time require a whole wing. In light of that, I have come to appreciate the utter beauty of Proverbs 4:7 which so quickly reduces so many of our endless, human dialogues and all of our continual striving with its one, easily grasped truth: “The principal thing is wisdom; therefore get wisdom.” You have heard me beat this drum before. And you will again. It is our north star guiding us from infancy to adulthood. It influences our K5 curriculum choices and the “if” and “where” of sending our children off to college.

As such, we teach literacy because it is the key to reading the Book of Ages, the fountain of all wisdom. The wisdom of Scripture, in turn, tells us to subdue the earth and so we teach mathematics and science to restore, in part, the damage caused by the fall. As a dividend, Math gives us the discipline and exercise of logical reasoning and thinking. Science causes us to sit and ponder the majesty and mystery of creation and our creator. Scripture leads us also to examine History for it compels us to examine our ways and what we have done with our knowledge of good and evil which we so dubiously chose in the garden. Will all this show up on a SAT test? Only in small parts and pieces.

But regardless of test results, our goal is to bring our children to the point of being able to think clearly and rationally developing a passion for God’s Word as a touchstone of basic truth for all of life. We want them to be more than Bible ‘spouters,’ however, for God’s wisdom should propel us to be not only morally redemptive agents in this world but to be redemptive agents of change for all aspects of this world’s fallen-ness. We fight disease because it is an unintended but natural result of sin. We fight hunger, pollution, political deadlock, corruption, animal cruelty, poverty, crime, and urban blight because God’s wisdom compels us to, out of His love for all men. We are our brother’s keeper. In this, we are tested everyday.

Whether we learn this in our Sunday school classes or the second grade classroom or at our mother’s knee or as David did, out in the sheep pasture, it is of little consequence. The big picture is that we develop a passion for God’s wisdom and play it out to its logical end in the thousands of our daily choices, our places of service, our priorities, and our stewardship of time and treasure. God’s truth, taken to its logical conclusion, is the stuff of what great families, churches, cities, and nations are made of.