The Power of Education
What is the point of education? Why do people teach? At the core, it is to shape the thoughts, views and beliefs of the pupils. When a man gets up and tells a group of students ’these things are so’ he does it that the pupils would believe him and act accordingly. Good pupils do.
The teacher wields immense power to shape his or her pupils; he controls the content, he chooses the emphasis, he throws the subtler cues of passion, apathy, love, or disgust along with the material.
This goes far beyond the classroom. The teacher student relationship exists when one person is interacting with information created by another. All media is a facility for this relationship.
Lee Iacocca once said, “In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have.”
Iacocca seemed to be under the impression that passing civilization to the next generation is what a government-run educational system does. He was wrong. The educational system we have in America is not there to pass civilization along, but to shape it.
John Dewey is often a target of critics of the modern American education system, criticisms vary, but seem to center around his system’s high cost, poor outcomes for students, denigration of individualism, and intentional weakening of the influence of religion and home. To call his influence disastrous is an understatement.
Dewey understood the power of education to shape and guide society, and in America he built a system that enables the shaping of pupils and also clamors for a monopoly on the enterprise. He lauded the communists because they fully monopolized education. [1]
There seems to be a lust for power and control at the heart of his ideas. He called for the core matters of a student’s ultimate aim and spirit to be centralized.
Who gets to set that ultimate aim and spirit and on what basis? If the basis is anything other than the infallible word of God, the society on the receiving end of this influence progresses to misery and destruction. When the teacher knowingly or unwittingly injects lies into the education process, the results are invariably disastrous. At one point in time, Satan taught Eve something false about God and about her, it took the death of the Son of God to redeem people from the effects of that lie.
OK so what? How do we apply this now to American society? First, we apply it to ourselves and our children. Stop listening to lies, stop putting our children under the influence of liars. God charged the fathers with educating their children. Start teaching them the truth ourselves.
Second, use the influence you do have to break down lies. A society that God gave over to its lusts, progresses to misery and destruction by His decree.
In times past he was gracious to send revival and to reset societies by means of granting the new birth to wide swaths of people. We can only pray that he would do so again, look to his word for what ought to be our ultimate aim and spirit, make it so, and as we have opportunity, teach the truth to others.